How to Tell if Your Teams are Wasting Time
Posted February 9th, 2015
The whole reason that you delegate responsibility is so you don’t have to provide constant supervision and oversight. But how do you know that your teams are being productive, efficient, and on-task if you don’t spend all day looking over their shoulder?
Luckily, there are some indicators that reliably suggest whether your teams are wasting their time or not. That spares you the burden of micromanaging, while giving you tools to keep your teams making constant progress.
Ways to Tell that Time is Being Wasted
- You set clear deadlines with explicit expectations, but your team struggles to deliver the expected results on time. Setbacks happen for lots of reasons, but lack of urgency and laziness are a major factor.
- You struggle to find candidates for promotions. If you are scouring your workforce trying to find exceptional candidates to move up the ladder, and are coming up empty, it suggests your team members aren’t putting in the time and effort to stand out and impress.
- You are overdue for innovation. New ideas are often the product of intense focus, fruitful cooperation, and constant brainstorming. If your teams have been stuck in a rut for too long, it could suggest they have their minds on other things.
Ways to Prevent Time from Being Wasted
Install monitoring and blocking software on the internet.
This can raise thorny legal issues, and denying access to Facebook is never a popular decision, but the internet is the single biggest cause of wasted time in the workplace.
Make your expectations clear.
Your team might be meandering simply because they don’t feel directed, guided, and supported. Make sure you team knows what you want and when you want it, and provide them with the necessary resources to meet those goals.
Recruit more driven employees.
Some people are lazier and less focused than others. If you weed these people out during the recruitment process, you will spend less time worrying about what your workforce is up to.
Track performance and productivity with clear metrics.
Looks can be deceiving. Your team might appear to be hard at work when they are actually spinning their wheels. As much as possible, track their actual output by the day, week, or month.
Create consequences for time wasters.
If you have an employee or team that is notoriously bad at time management, it may be time to threaten them with penalties and follow through if things don’t change.
No one spends every minute of their eight-hour workday focused on a task. But there is a clear difference between taking a break or socializing with co-workers, and simply wasting everyone’s time. Eliminate the waste, and you’ll be amazed at how much more your teams accomplish. Find more resources to help you optimize your workforce by contacting Bayside Solutions.
