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Organizations worldwide are always seeking ways to optimize their workplace productivity. In recent years, technological advancements like digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning have assumed tremendous importance as enablers for boosting organizational productivity by helping organizations streamline operations and automate tasks.
However, a closer examination of these trends suggests that these measures are intrinsically linked to helping businesses manage their time better.
Time management is not a new concept, for even Theophrastus, the ancient Greek Philosopher, believed that “Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” From the old adage to the poster boy for disruptive technologies – Elon Musk’s innovative Time Boxing technique – time management has remained an important consideration.
It has gained unparalleled traction among businesses chasing productivity and profitability amid changing workplace preferences and an ever-evolving labor market.
What Is Time Management?
In the organizational context, time management is the ability to manage workloads effectively and efficiently. It helps prioritize tasks that deliver the highest business value and are optimally productive. The process of time management involves planning, goal setting, constantly evaluating progress, and setting practical deadlines to achieve goals.
Efficient time management strategies are directly linked to higher workplace productivity, lower employee stress levels, improved work-life balance, and, consequently, lower employee churn.
Here’s a Brief Rundown of Why Time Management Is Important in the Workplace:
1. Helps Increase Resource Utilization Rates
Time management helps employees streamline their deliverables and manage their time efficiently. Such a process helps employees identify improvement areas, such as preventable loss of billable hours by engaging in administrative activities like meetings or repetitive tasks like filling data in spreadsheets. As employees are able to identify and plug in such loss of time by minimizing such activities, they’re able to deliver higher utilization rates.
Several organizations have also taken initiatives like putting a cap on the number of hours for meetings in a day to help employees improve their resource utilization levels.
2. Enables Better Work-life Balance
The lack of adequate work-life balance has been one of the leading reasons behind higher-than-usual attrition rates among organizations globally. Besides, the Gen Z workforce, which will comprise 25% of the global workforce by 2025, expects its employers to offer a flexible workplace ecosystem and adequate work-life balance.
As a result, a growing number of organizations are automating their business processes, such as their employee attendance tracking processes, by using automated time tracking software. Replicon is one such time tracking software that uses AI to capture employee’s work and time data across multiple apps. Apart from these companies also use AI-based software for content generation, customer support, predictive analytics, etc.
Such initiatives have a profound impact on helping employees manage their time better and experience improved work-life balance, impacting employee turnover positively.
3. Allows For More Efficient Internal and External Stakeholder Management
The challenge of managing diverse internal and external stakeholders for employees has only been exacerbated since organizations have taken to hybrid and remote workplaces. Plus, evolving client expectations and frequent changes in project scope are putting a premium on employees’ abilities to keep their stakeholders informed, and proactively address their concerns and doubts.
Time management plays a key role in helping employees manage stakeholder expectations by ensuring that they make reasonable time for such endeavors. Constantly high internal and external stakeholder satisfaction greatly shapes any organization’s profits and longer-term sustainability.
4. Boosts the Bottom Line
This may come as a surprise, but US businesses lose close to US$ 600 billion to workplace interruptions, and average employees spend half of their billable work day on tasks that deliver little to no value! Any organization that attains consistently high levels of resource utilization is highly likely to experience healthier bottom lines.
As employees are able to use most of their billable work hours for productive and fruitful activities, the amount of time wasted is reduced drastically. For enterprise-level organizations with hundreds and thousands of employees, this may mean many hundreds of work hours worth millions of dollars of employee time saved!
5. Enables Employees to Upskill and Reskill Better
The fast-evolving skills matrix requires employees to upskill and reskill consistently as the skills needed to deliver on work requirements continue to evolve at a breathtaking speed.
According to Lisa Lyons, a Workforce Transformation Partner at Mercer “nearly half of all employees will need to up their skills by 2025, while a good proportion will also need to totally retrain.”
However, employees need time to work on such longer-term commitments, and organizations cannot expect employees to undertake such initiatives beyond their work hours.
That’s why organizations must explore means such as onboarding a professional services automation solution to automate aspects of project management, thereby reducing employees’ workload and giving them the necessary time to pursue upskilling and reskilling activities. This way, time management also impacts employees’ ability to upskill and reskill effectively, impacting an organization’s longer-term competitive advantage and sustainability.
6. Frees the Leadership to Chart the Longer-term Course
Data suggests that an average business leader sits through 37 meetings every week and spends 72 percent of his or her weekly work hours conducting meetings!
These staggering numbers underline how much of the C-suite’s time goes into conducting meetings. While not all meetings are administrative affairs or a waste of work hours, business leaders must make more time to strategize and engage with their teams and clients. This requires deft time management.
When business leaders are able to manage their time better, they can focus more on the strategic side of the business, creating greater value for the organization as a whole. They are also able to lead by example and become change agents, instilling time management qualities in their employees across business functions and leadership levels.
Why Time Management Matters?
Organizations are likely to face greater pressure on their profit margins as clients rationalize their expenses and exercise financial restraint to tide over unforeseen business circumstances. More so when business models themselves are undergoing change. While businesses are rightfully taking a telescopic view, examining their processes to incorporate technologies and become more future-ready, they must also look at getting their basics right.
Time management holds the key to an agile and motivated workforce, which is a non-negotiable element to business success in a challenging marketplace undergoing repeated disruptions. Organizations must not miss the wood for the trees!
Author Bio:
Shashank Shekhar works as a Senior Marketing Communications Specialist at Deltek | Replicon. He has been a digital and content marketing professional for over 9 years. He specializes in writing about technology trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and their impact on shaping the project management landscape with tools like professional services automation solutions and time-tracking solutions. Outside of work, he loves reading about history, astrophysics, and geopolitics.
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