How to Improve Time Management Skills

There are restrictions on how much time an employee can be asked to stay behind after hours, which means that the amount of time a worker has to complete their tasks is somewhat fixed. Luckily time management skills can be learned to ensure that the work is submitted on time. Furthermore, the best part is that good management skills are relatively easy to learn, which means that any employee can benefit from these pieces of advice.

1. Motivation

Your employee may not struggle equally with all tasks. If it’s clear that there’s a pattern in how they fail to meet deadlines, zero in on the specific issues to maximize your impact on employee behavior.

Just observing the employee as they work may not give you all the information you need. You can consider confidentially asking the employee’s colleagues to see if the employee has complained about the task in the past, or simply ask the employee outright to find out what their difficulty with the task is.

2. Scheduling and Timing

Your employee may not be lazy or deliberately delaying doing their job; they may be a busy bee who’s not even particularly slow at completing their responsibilities. The problem may lie in how they prioritize their tasks and fill their schedules, or worse, their responsibilities may exceed how much one employee can realistically do.

If that’s the case, consider delegating some of the work to others to make sure the employee can successfully complete their important and essential task.

3. Procrastination and Distractions

The Internet offers many productive ways to spend the company’s time, like video training programs and online management systems. It also unfortunately supplies countless distractions like shopping, games, gossip, sports, and other forms of entertainment available 24/7.

You may have to ban websites like Facebook if you’ve noticed that its distracting too many of your employees. Distractions can come from many different places in the office, such as interesting visitors, gossip around the water cooler or other group activities. Putting your foot down will be hard for your employees at first, but the work has to be completed at some point.

4. Help them manage themselves

Micro-managing can be hard on workers and time consuming for management, taking the focus away from other important responsibilities like contracting vendors and liaising with upper management. Instead, allow the employee to document their own times and output so that they can compare with others and see how they’re measuring up to their colleagues. That way, they will be able to appreciate their own hard work and police their stray activities.

Above all else, consider advancing your online management and training tactics to cut down time and costs and increase employee productivity. For more information on how, contact our team today.