November 2016
Making the Minutes Count: How to Make Better Use of Your Team’s Time
As your biggest outgoing expense, every minute of your team’s time is extremely valuable – which is why it pays to regularly re-evaluate how to best make use of their time in the workplace! For some businesses, this can seem like an uphill struggle, but it doesn’t have to be. With our range of bespoke CRM solutions, we’ve helped our clients’ teams to save hundreds of hours – making huge cost savings in the process. Follow the advice below, taken from our work with clients, and you’ll find your team making the most of every second in no time at all!
1. Make Expectations Clear
As with most changes within a business, this is the crucial first step, because even the most capable team members need to know what you’re expecting of them. Using what you know about how your team currently uses their time (see no. 6 for some help with this), set out some guidelines and expectations against which your team can work. At the same time, be sure to take their individual skills and weaknesses into account in order to set realistic goals they can achieve and surpass.
2. Provide Continuous Improvement Opportunities
One of the most effective ways to ensure that your team are improving over time is to provide regular time management training. Offering short courses, or checking in on their progress in a one-to-one meeting, or simply relaying this article to them gives team members the opportunity to overcome hurdles standing between them and making the most of their time in the office.
3. Automate Smaller Tasks
Some of the challenges your team are facing in making the most of their time actually fall under your control – and perhaps the biggest challenge comes in the form of the smallest tasks. Done right, tiny, time-consuming jobs (such as sending reminders, sorting forms etc.) can actually be delegated to an automated system without affecting quality, freeing up huge swathes of your team’s time.
4. Favour Real-Time Collaboration
It’s hard not to notice the major shift away from static tools to more real-time solutions (such as Cloud-based CRMs) in recent years – and the results speak for themselves. Rather than restricting your team’s working capabilities, here is an opportunity to throw the door open to more productivity and collaboration, allowing for more to be done in less time – whether that’s in a jam-packed afternoon or en route to a meeting.
5. Reinvent Processes
Much in line with automating smaller tasks, tackling cumbersome processes should also be a priority in the quest to better manage your team’s time. Streamlining a process is likely to not only speed up specific tasks, but also simplifies what was once complicated – enabling new employees to pick up processes in less time. They’ll be making better use of every hour from day one!
6. Record & Feedback
Perhaps the least favoured technique in the eyes of some employees, due to its almost Orwellian nature, is the recording of how your team are spending their time. Despite its unpopularity, keeping abreast of how long they’re spending on specific tasks has a huge benefit to the business. Analysing time management across your organisation allows you to identify areas in which improvements could be made or tasks could be automated. This then puts you in a better position to feedback to employees about their time management, working with them collaboratively to improve how they spend their days (see point no. 2).
The Results of Better Time Management
Helping your team to take better control of their time doesn’t just mean you can automatically raise output across the business – of course, that’s still an advantage. It allows your team the opportunity to use some time to grow personally and professionally, and enables much better relationship-building with your customers. In addition, saving time and redistributing those hours opens up opportunities for creating new services, or can reduce the need for new staff – saving on even more costs in the long run. Time really is money!
Help your team to work collaboratively, report in real-time and open up a whole world of possibilities with their time by introducing a bespoke CRM solution. For a free demo of Lunar’s bespoke CRM, simply get in touch!