Avoid Wasting Employees’ Time

Time – everyone wants more of it.

Whether you are at work or at play, everyone is searching for that never to be had extra hour in the day.

Since you can’t make more time, you can manage the time you do have. And as an employer, please don’t waste your employee’s time. You want them to be productive and functional; don’t fill up their hours with time wasters and fluff.

Here are some check points for you to see if you can change any of your methods and give your employees some valuable time back:

As the following article, “Give Me a Relevant Point of View – Or Please Don’t Waste My Time” shows, meetings are a huge time drain.

Of course, businesses need meetings, but be careful how you run them. Be efficient, respect who you’re inviting and why, and keep them short.

You can do this if you:

• Make sure you are inviting relevant people to meetings. Don’t just invite those who don’t need to be there to avoid hurting feelings or insulting someone.
• Do not have meetings to meet about the upcoming meeting; simply send out a brief agenda.
• Do invite the people that need to be there so there is no need for a meeting redux.
• Make sure people know why they are attending. Whether this is through the meeting invite, a short email, or another type of quick message.
• Watch the time of your meeting. After a certain length of time, productivity will go down and time will best be spent elsewhere.
• Avoid inviting too many different management levels.
• Streamline staff meetings. Are they really necessary? Can you change how often you have them? Maybe once a month can cover it all instead of once a week?
• Stick to the agenda. Don’t let the meeting stray from the agenda. If someone has a personal or off topic concern or issue, discuss it one on one after the meeting.

Keep My Inbox Manageable or I’ll Lose it All … or emails

So much time is spent on emails, checking, reading, sending, cc’ing, replying … be smart and time efficient and let your employees know some of these strategies:

• Only hit reply all when it pertains to everyone. Otherwise you’ll get a big time wasting email chain going, and it will only bog down everyone’s inbox.
• It’s not really necessary to respond to every email. Unless someone asks for a confirmation that you received an email, you’ll only waste your time and theirs by replying with a “Thanks” or “I’ve got it.”
• Avoid cc’ing too many people. Keep it relevant, just like a meeting.
• Keep emails short, relevant and concise. Your employees and other colleagues don’t want to read lengthy emails. Those can waste a lot of time. Just get the main points in there, and use another method to relay the long story.

If you can streamline your employees meetings and emails, you can save big time. Keep information, attendees and email recipients all relevant.

You don’t want your time wasted; try not to waste your employees’.

Feel free to comment with any great time saving ideas you’ve incorporated.

About the Author: Heather Legg is a writer who covers topics related to small business, cutting clutter from life and social media.