Industry experts have found that 89% of people waste time at work. How much time they waste varies, with the top 1% of time wasters admitting to doing very little for up to 3 hours per day while 31% of respondents wasted around 30 minutes. Time is money, as they say, and if your team is wasting your time, then this is going to be costing you money.
If you want to make things more productive and ensure that people aren’t taking extended breaks on your dime, these tips can help.
Keep It Simple
Create a plan, have clear steps, set SMART goals, and give timelines and deadlines for completing all of these needs. It doesn't need to be complicated; it needs to work, so start simple, give explicit directions, and see if this helps reduce wasted time.
Be Clear and Concise
A massive source of wasted time is people not completely understanding what you want them to do, or there is too much communication and not all of it being on the same page. Create clear lines of communication, be concise with what you want, and ensure that everyone fully understands what is going on, what needs to happen, and what you expect. This can reduce miscommunication and allow people to get on with the task at hand.
Determine Your Critical Success Factors
Your critical success factors are the points you need your team to be focusing on to deliver the results. You need to set these as standards and ensure that everyone is aware of them and their part in reaching these success factors.
If you don't have these in place, how will you move forward or implement any tasks to measure success? It doesn't matter how big or small the project is; implement critical success factors to hope you get things done.
Review Goals Regularly
You need to be on the ball with reviewing activities, goals, and progress. It should be on a daily or near-daily basis so you can keep track and quash any time-wasting activities or remove any waste from the project. The longer you leave it between checking in, the more opportunities there are for things not to get done or take longer than they need. Plus, Harvard Business Review found that team members work better when supervised closely, and their work is benignly appreciated. So, even if you're checking in to compliment the team on a job well done or simply for updates, ensure you do it regularly.
Limit Time Wasting Opportunities
This means no meetings if there isn't an explicit reason to hold one, reducing the emails sent that employees need to sift through, being more organized so people don't get confused, and setting strict deadlines and timescales for work to reduce procrastination.
It can be a good idea to assess your team individually, see where their strengths lie, or get a feel for how they work best so you can meet these requirements. It might be you have someone who works better with an impending deadline, and in the days or hours before said deadline, they are not as productive; how can you make this work for you? Or you might have a worker who is the more productive first thing and slacks off in the afternoon, so a change in work schedule might be beneficial to maximize early morning productivity.
Reducing time wasted in business will directly lead to improved productivity and give you a better outcome and more value for your money.