How to Master Time
Time Is Your Greatest Resource
Haven’t had time to take that course on time management? Can’t seem to work it into your schedule? Too bad you don’t have more time. Maybe you should take a time management course.
Hmm…
Let’s see if we can find another way around this conundrum.
What is Time?
We tend to visualize invisible time as ticks on a clock, usually counted off in blocks like minutes, hours or days. We know that each day holds exactly the same amount of ticks as the one before and the one to follow. So, we all have equal access to time– the same amount as Albert Einstein.
How did he do what he did when we can’t make it to work on time? I guess that the answer is in the individual not the available time. Well, I don’t expect to achieve the level of Einstein, but I am certain I can improve the way I use my time.
If you are a manager of a small business, big corporation, startup or a remote business, your primary job is time management, not just yours but your staff and your employees. That is a big responsibility. To put it in perspective, think about what clever use of time means to your business.
- Time is Money
- Time is an Asset
- Time is Progress
- Time is Competitive Advantage
- Time is Knowledge
It is common knowledge that time is money. What is not so clearly defined is how we carry out the transformation. Were our efforts worth the time? That is important since 60% of a company’s cost is time. Tracking the time spent and connecting it to a company’s output, achievements, proceedings and outcomes is not simple.
It may challenge a company’s mindset to think of time as a valuable asset. But that’s precisely what it is — an asset. It is essential that a manager understand how to use this asset to make predictions for future growth and progress. Wasting time can result in a standstill or backsliding business.
The ability to optimize time as a valuable asset provides a competitive advantage when you use time to build knowledge. Knowledge includes understanding how to manage money, resources and materials. This knowledge multiplies as it flows down to each employee, enabling them to manage their own time to become more successful and understand how they contribute to the overall business mission.
Thus, a manager has the difficult task of tracking the productive time spent, connecting work time to output, achievements, proceedings and outcomes, analyzing how time is used, understanding it and making predictions based on the use of time.
Achieving these lofty goals starts with happy employees who are motivated, skilled, involved and aware that personal success and growth depend upon their pledge to excellence.
Wow! That demands a new way to think about how to manage time.
Traditional Business Management
Employee Performance
Seasoned managers know that it’s not one thing that leads to success, but a series of choices, battles and relationships that get you where you want to be. One important skill in mastering time is the manager’s ability to address employee performance in a way that supports employee success and draws boundaries for appropriate behavior on the job. At times, a manager must step in and address problems when they happen.
Problems can arise in the quantity of work output, such as untimely completion and limited production. Work quality may be poor or may not meet quality standards. Managers should suggest a focus on the following issues to improve performance:
- Poor prioritizing, timing, scheduling
- Lost time
- Lateness, absenteeism, leaving without permission.
- Excessive visiting, phone use, break time, use of the Internet.
- Misuse of sick leave.
- Slow response to work demands and untimely completion of assignments.
- Avoidable accidents.
- Imprecision, inaccuracies, and errors.
- Failure to meet expectations for product quality, cost or service.
- Incorrect or poor work methods.
While understanding the cause of performance is important, managers can avoid poor performance by adopting preventive practices:
- Prevent problems before they start. The key to getting employees to meet your expectations is to establish expectations upfront.
- Provide regular feedback.
- Diagnose the problem.
- Create a performance improvement plan.
- Document everything.
Employee Engagement
Employees are engaged simply by sincere and frequent praise and recognition from their managers and leaders. Sincere recognition offers employees benefits such as:
- Increased productivity
- Increased engagement among colleagues
- Encouraged to stay at their company
- Receive higher satisfaction marks from customers
- Have better safety records and fewer on the job accidents
Other suggestions to engage employees include delivering opportunities on the job that provide the following:
- Satisfaction
- Company Alignment
- Employee Happiness
- Employee Wellness
- Personal Growth
- Ambassadorship
Remote Business
About 34% of business leaders expect that, by the year 2020, half of their full-time staff will be working virtually. Managing time and attendance for a team of people who work remotely is a unique challenge as remote leaders lack the usual face time and physical workspace as traditional businesses. This necessitates more proactive trust building, assuring accountability and, perhaps most importantly, keeping employees motivated.
Specifically, when teams are geographically dispersed the following hurdles can occur:
- Supervising employees in diverse locations and time zones
- Building trust and open lines of communication
- Instituting routines
- Helping remote workers feel like members of a team
Here are some of the most important leadership competencies virtual leaders must master to be equally effective as in-person managers.
- Include deadlines when assigning tasks
- View team activity regularly
- Track employee internet usage
- Monitor the amount of time employees are at their desk
- Consistent supervision of remote employees
- Request an end of the day report summary
The acronym ATC is a reminder of the steps virtual leaders should employ to manage accountability. ATC stands for action, timetable and checkpoints. Action requires managers to clarify expectations and identify who is accountable for various parts of the work. A timetable writes down an agreed upon due date. Remote managers establish key milestones as checkpoints to review progress and provide feedback to the manager.
ATC promotes accountability by allowing virtual managers to clarify what is expected on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. In this way, expectations of how team members should interact with managers to keep them informed are well understood.
Employee Motivation
Motivated employees are more likely to reach their full potential because they recognize the value of using their time wisely. Below are examples of actions managers can take to motivate remote employees.
- Create time for building relationships
- Use technology to stay connected
- Schedule training and development opportunities
- Agree on clear goals and measure performance
- Recognize and reward employees
- Discontinue useless meetings.
Startups
As tough as it is for managers in traditional and remote businesses to manage their staff and enhance the use of time, it can be a nightmare for startup managers. These entrepreneurs are struggling to establish their business, planning, securing financial backing, developing marketing and sales strategy, scaling and maturing their startup into a grownup business.
It is foreseeable that managing staff and business procedures will rapidly become a major part of the new startups. Here are ten keys to employ following the startup period that will support your journey to master the asset of time:
- Communication clarity is essential. Your growing team doesn’t automatically know what you are thinking so there is a need to communicate clearly about what needs doing and who is responsible
- Planning has priority over doing. Plan and analyze in advance and on paper to determine what is to be done rather than how it is to be done
- Organize your work to bring together the essential resources and staff before assigning work to specific people, setting specific times and specific standards of performance.
- Delegate effectively and often. It is tough to delegate when you are creating your startup, but it is necessary as you grow. Recognize the distinction between delegation and abdication by following-up, conducting disaster recovery and maintaining interplay between tasks and organizations.
- Staff suitably at every level. This requires hiring, training, measuring performance, mentoring less experienced team members and replacing ineffectual staff.
- Focus on high productivity. Promote growth and success by learning to increase output while lowering costs through reorganization, re-engineering and restructuring.
- Lead by example and set equally high standards for your staff, seeking feedback and ideas from customers and team members.
- Concentrate on the important tasks and stay with it until it is done. Don’t tackle too many things at once. You may end up doing nothing well.
- Identify constraints that slow goal achievement and identify their root causes. Know the difference between the eighty percent of constraints that come from the inside and twenty percent from the outside.
- Commit to strategic planning to promote continuous improvement.
Small Businesses
Small business owners require similar management skills to take charge of time and attendance management. They too must know how to accomplish the goals and objectives of their company such as orientation and coordination of multiple activities. The main difference is that small business managers and owners are responsible for all duties and aspects of their company.
A management tip for a small business is to automate as much time use as possible. This is key because small business owners have so much to do that their time is frequently spent in the day-to-day running of the business instead of actually growing it.
Time Management Issues
Wouldn’t it be nice to become more productive and get more results from less effort? You’d be able to check off to-do list items and hit colossal goals at a ridiculous pace. This is an idealistic portrayal of an average workday because in reality, we get bogged down in busy work, sidetracked by meetings and emails and rerouted by digressions such as tackling other peoples’ problems.
A good fix to garner more productive work time is to identify activities that can be dropped, delegated or outsourced. If you want to avoid being overwhelmed in the first place, don’t say yes to a host of jobs that consume chunks of time, yet don’t reflect the reason you were hired. This only pilfers the time to tackle what must be done.
All businesses must keep their teams on track to ensure productively. Consider this 3-step process for identifying and solving employee time management issues.
- How are employees using their time? Don’t peer over your employee’s shoulders, but pay attention to how they prioritize their work and how much meaningful time is expended within the overall time available.
- Are staff members accurately estimating how long a task or project will take? According to Murphy’s law, the best laid plans will go awry.
- To assure realistic milestones, encourage employees to check on the availability of resources that will come from other departments. Coax staff to remain accountable to the timelines they set and explain the need to review their proposals at least weekly.
- Assess if the time allocated relates to actual, available hands-on time. Counsel your employees against the naïve notion that 8 hours in a day means you have 8 hours available for productive work, given that 30% of the time is spent on administrative tasks and 40% expended on communication. It is often a shock to discover there are only 2.5 hours a day to do the actual work.
You and Your Boss
We have established the indispensable role of a good manager in mastering time, so the importance of manager-employee relationship should be apparent.
Seventy-five percent (75%) of people that quit their jobs, actually quit their bosses. It follows that your relationship with your manager or a boss can have a huge impact on your health and well-being. According to a study at the Stress Institute in Stockholm, employees with uncommunicative managers were 60% more likely to suffer a heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac condition.
Let’s look at some traits that make a great leader.
- They are good coaches
- They empower their team
- They don’t micromanage
- They express a genuine interest for team members’ success and personal well-being
- They are productive and results-orientated
- They are good communicators
- They invest in employee’s career development
- They advocate a clear vision for the team
- They have the necessary technical skills to counsel the team.
Tracking Employee Time
While managers may not have hands-on experience in every sector of a business, particularly a startup business, it is probable they have an appreciation of the significance of managing employee time. Whether by shrewd observation or trial and error, they discover that timely data is requisite for a successful, well-oiled business.
Clearly, capturing control of billable and non-billable activities helps to ensure the following:
- Timely payroll processing
- Labor regulation compliance
- Enforcement of attendance and time-off policies
- Calculation of savings
Time Sheets and Time Clocks
The conventional way to collect and track employee data has been the time sheet, a spreadsheet for recording how much time an employee spent working on different tasks and the time clock punched by employees to identify the exact time they checked in and out. A key quality of these devices was that neither is time-consuming or cumbersome for employees. These characteristics elude accumulation of unreliable data used for labor records, reporting and other tasks that depend on accuracy but manual clock in and clock out processes can lead to human and data entry errors.
The Next Step
Human Resources Departments (HR) compile employee tables that identify every employee by an employee number and list basic personnel information. HR further utilizes software to automate operational tasks, freeing the department to perform the overarching projects that make a difference. This shifts the focus from the paperwork to the people.
Here are some of the options to track employee hours that also assist Human Resources carry out their goals.
- Track remote employees with a mobile attendance system. Tracking employee work time when they work away from the office or facility is difficult without a mobile attendance system to integrate information with the payroll system for accurate time tracking. Global positioning satellites, commonly called GPS, that work on cell phone apps are an example.
- Employers confirm hours from data collected through a GPS-enabled company phone permitting movements for legal tracking.
- Use wall mount card swipes. Wall mounted card swipes are basically modernized versions of the punch card system using an employee’s ID to clock in and out. Data automatically transfers to a computer where hours worked are calculated for employee attendance.
- Ensure hours are complete, accurate and current. A best practice for tracking employee hours is to have a system that streamlines the time-capturing process, delivering precise information for faster payroll and reports. It is important that such systems are consistently followed.
- Have an automated system for regulatory compliance. In payroll, accuracy is all. Anything less can create problems with upset employees, ruined credibility with HR, and even wage-and-labor noncompliance penalties. An automated time and attendance tracking app can help reduce errors and prevent costly litigation arising from noncompliance.
- Utilize attendance software that employees can embrace. The least favorite task for most employees is tracking their time. A centralized, self-service system, enabling employees to review their hours worked, accrued time and available sick leave contribute to employees adopting automated attendance software while adding significant value to a company.
- Select a system that easily integrates with other applications. A necessary component of a complete tracking system is the ability to seamlessly integrate data with other applications critical for payroll, time off and compliance needs.
- Select a tracking system that intuitively works with daily processes such as reporting and administrative tasks.
- Consider software that is hosted in the Cloud.
- Keep online attendance records. Some advanced technologies use an online time clock that allows employees to maintain records of their hours worked through a web app that can also generate payroll reports.
Automating Time and Attendance Management
Mastering time is elemental to your business success. The conundrum is that becoming the master of time is time-consuming and error-prone. Fortunately, the availability of automation whether from devices, software, apps or comprehensive, complex systems, is out there and can be customized for each distinctive application.
Automating time and attendance operations remedies the worry of human and data entry errors with their attendant legal consequences. Their customizable nature addresses the somewhat exclusive needs for supporting end-to-end time and attendance workflows of managers.
Additionally, time and attendance tracker apps reduce labor cost and maximize the efficiency of the workforce. Important to employee morale, motivation and engagement, managers and administrators enjoy interactive tools and technology that safeguard accurate and timely payrolls and deliver a window into workforce management with real-time data that enables the front line to make informed decisions for the business.
Summary
In our world, time is fixed; there are as many minutes in today as there were yesterday or will be tomorrow. The challenge in all types of businesses is understanding ways to use the valuable asset of time to ensure productivity, enhance your business, manage and engage your staff to derive success and satisfaction from their daily and long-term job performance.
Tracking the time spent and connecting it to a company’s output, achievements, proceedings, and outcomes start with happy employees who are motivated, skilled, involved and aware that personal success and growth depend upon their pledge to excellence.
There are many important skills needed to master time in ways that enhance productivity and overall business success. Handling employee performance such that it supports employee success and draws boundaries for appropriate behavior on the job is one. Prioritizing, scheduling, controlling lost time, work quality and quantity are tactics that can help. Managers can use strategies such as designing realistic expectations upfront, giving regular feedback and creating a performance improvement plan to prevent problems.
Managers’ ability to mentor and engage staff pays off in more industrious, satisfied, healthy and involved employees with better safety records and fewer on the job accidents. Employees are engaged simply by sincere and frequent praise and recognition from their managers and leaders.
There are several levels of businesses from startups, to small, large, remote and conglomerates. Though each has distinctive needs, they all must manage time and attendance for their team by promoting accountability and communicating expectations of how team members should interact with managers to keep them informed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Managers must acknowledge that an average workday can get bogged down in busy work, sidetracked by meetings and emails and rerouted by digressions such as tackling other peoples’ problems. Consequently, to capture more productive work time, managers should identify activities that can be dropped, delegated or outsourced and say no to jobs that consume chunks of time but do not reflect the reason for hiring.
Another valued ability used by managers to identify and solve employee time management issues that threaten to derail their teams, is sustaining productively. Advantageous application of this process includes attention to how staff prioritize their work and how much of the available time is expended as meaningful, productive time. It is beneficial to assure that employees are aware of resource availability prior to setting milestones and to review their proposal at least weekly. Of utmost importance is to allocate workloads to actual available hands-on-time which may be as minimal as 2.5 hours a day.
Given the indispensable role of a good manager in mastering time, the importance of manager-employee relationship is apparent. Some traits reflective of a great leader include being a good coach, a knack to empower their team without micromanaging and genuinely advocating for team members’ success and personal well-being. Productive, results-orientated, good communicator with a clear vision for the team that possesses necessary technical skills to counsel the team describes an effective manager.
Whether by shrewd observation or trial and error, managers discover that timely data is requisite for a successful, well-oiled business that captures billable and non-billable activities and can ensure timely payroll processing, labor regulation compliance, enforcement of attendance, time-off policies and ability to calculate savings
The conventional use of timesheets and time clocks is to collect and track employee time and attendance data. Unfortunately, such processes lead to human and data entry errors.
There are several options for tracking employee hours that also benefit Human Resources, such as mobile attendance system, global positioning satellite technology, wall mount card swipes, time and attendance software that easily integrate with other applications.
Automation whether from devices, software, apps or comprehensive, complex systems is available and customizable for each manager’s distinctive need for end-to-end time and attendance workflows.
Conclusion
There is just so much time. Not even Albert Einstein gets more than twenty-four hours a day. Yet, you can make extra time in two ways; doing the same task in less time or making use of wasted time. Theoretically, you are extending the time by discovering ways to do things faster and better.
The cardinal rule of time management is to always carry pocket work that you can do while waiting. Study for a test, read a book, write a poem. Those potentially wasted minutes add up.
In the same way, one needs to be focused and creative to master effective time management in business. Efficient time management enables an individual to do the right thing at the right time, a noble goal at any time. Shifting from a practical, applied view, time management makes an individual punctual, disciplined and more organized. All of this boost a person’s morale and imparts confidence to quickly reach the pinnacle of success and remain there for a longer duration.
Not bad just for being on time.
It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about? ~ Henry David Thoreau
Download Timesheet X for iPhone — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/timesheet-x-track-work-hours/id1466196878
