While most organisations are very keen on how they spend their finances,
few take the time to focus on how they spend the hours. Many people
view time as an endless resource. However, wasted time is a cost to the
organisation. It is only evident when deadlines are not met or important
contracts are missed because of someone’s delay in taking action.
ILLUSTRATION/NATION
An organisation is a system made up of parts.
Your
department is part of the organisation. It is therefore true that
whatever you do at work affects everyone else. Your actions have an
impact on others, whether you know it or not.
For
instance, if someone in your department is rude to a customer or fails
to deliver quality services to a client, the person who has been
unpleasantly treated will not separate the department from the rest of
the organisation.
He or she will judge the entire
organisation based on the interaction with that department. This is
because we are all part of a system which we call an organisation.
For an organisation to function well, it is important that all the sections are on the same wavelength.
One of the most important areas for improvement in an organisation is the management of time.
You may all be working in the same organisation but you spend time in different ways.
While
most organisations are very keen on how they spend their finances, few
take the time to focus on how they spend the hours.
Many
people view time as an endless resource. However, wasted time is a cost
to the organisation. It is only evident when deadlines are not met or
important contracts are missed because of someone’s delay in taking
action.
TIME WASTAGE
You
may be familiar with financial audits. Time audits simply seek to find
out what an employee does from the time they report to work to the time
they leave.
Addressing the underlying causes of time wastage goes a long way in boosting productivity.
Many
employees are unaware of the amount of time they waste daily. Some of
the biggest time wasters include browsing the Internet and getting busy
on social media.
Taking or making personal calls and
entertaining visitors are also major time wasters. Generally, employees
complain that they find too many meetings a waste of time.
Did
you know that men waste more time than women in the workplace, and that
younger people waste more time than the older workers? Single people
tend to spend more time on social sites than married ones.
Although it is important to know who wastes time, it is even more important to know why they do it.
According
to research, 11 per cent of those interviewed said that they lacked the
motivation to work, while 10 per cent said they were dissatisfied with
their jobs.
Of the time wasting group, nine per cent
said they were bored, while three per cent blamed it on low pay. A total
of 43 per cent blamed their co-workers for distracting them with juicy
stories.
Whatever the reason, employers and employees
need to focus on what they are doing from the time they report to work
to the time they leave.
Steven Covey’s time management
matrix proposes that in order to gain control of your time, you need to
classify your activities based on their urgency and importance.
Accordingly, the focus should be on activities that are important and not urgent because they help us to plan better.
Most
people, however, deal with crises arising from important and urgent
activities or time wasters, which are in actual sense neither important
nor urgent.
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