Guiding employees toward better time management in the New Year

With a New Year upon management staffs, many of you might be considering following through with some work-related resolutions. Getting your employees to do the same is no easy task and neither is the ability to stay on target with your resolutions.

Helene Segura, a time management strategist, explained at the beginning of every New Year, the majority of Americans choose time management as one of their New Year’s resolutions. Time management is often accompanied with resolutions such as losing weight, going to the gym, eating healthier and quitting smoking.

Helping workers achieve their goals
While you might have your own personal resolutions you want to attend to, numerous workers want to improve their work lives with better time management. As a business leader, it’s important to not only help your employees achieve improved time management strategies, but to give them as many options to get there as well.

In a recent Forbes interview with Dan Ariely, an author on human irrationality and professor of psychology and behavior economics at Duke University, the behavioral expert explained people usually choose time management for a resolution because they’re not any good at it and are obsessed with planning their time better with work and other personal things.

“[The] reality is it’s no wonder we are bad at [time management] because it’s a really, really hard thing to do,” Ariely said in the interview with Forbes. “Not only is it hard to manage multiple things, but you also have dynamic changes throughout the day in which you have some hours where you are more alert and have high cognitive capacity and some hours where you are more tired.”

Management taking action on time management
This is where management has to step up and provide employees with a time management strategy to get their New Year off on the right foot. Workplaces depend on time management strategies because in the end, having employees more effective at work will decrease downtime and money wasted due to inefficiency.

According to Self Growth, time management often fails within a business when everyone is not on the same page. As a manager or leader of a group of workers, it’s imperative to make sure every single person has the same agenda and knows the goals of their team.

When employees create their own agendas and lack serious direction from a business leader, a lot of time is wasted on trying to manage time in the first place. Instead, getting professional support for time management resolutions could get all of your workers on track and moving toward a common goal.

Time management has to be addressed immediately or problems could snowball.

Fixing time management problems immediately 
Another big issue with handling time management as a business leader is letting things get out of control to the point where it may not be fixable. According to the wellness blog Everyday Faith and Fitness, sometimes people’s biggest problem is not having enough time in the day to get things done. This can work on a personal level if for example you were trying to make it to the gym twice a week, but couldn’t find the time.

However, on a work-related level, your employees might not be succeeding because their management strategies have turned so sour that they don’t feel like they can get a full-day’s work completed in one day. To nip this in the bud, it’s your responsibility as a coach and leader of the team to get your workers feeling like they aren’t time constrained each day.

Biting off more than you can chew 
Several workers and managers often try to fix time management problems by taking on more than they can handle. To successfully manage your time, try to realize that taking on too much as a leader could put you even further behind.

“If you were a farmer and worked from sunrise to sunset, and farming includes very basic things to do with no real questions, life would be very simple,” Ariely added in the Forbes interview. “But we live in an incredibly wonderful age with lots of things vying for our time, more than we can handle, and on top of that we aren’t limited to sunrise to sunset.”

According to Pep Worldwide, one of the best ways to address time management is to act smarter and to not work harder to achieve better time management. When work is completed more efficiently and without additional work, employees will feel less stressed about how they manage each day. Time management is not an easy task, but with the right help, downtime could turn into a thing of the past.

– See more at: http://cohenbrown.com/guiding-employees-toward-better-time-management-in-the-new-year/#sthash.XC6hwoGd.dpuf