Why You Need to Offer Your Employees Time Management Training
The pace of life is frenetic for today’s workers. In modern-day open-plan offices, employees are regularly distracted and often overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks they must complete and the amount of information they must internalize.
Email, WhatsApp messages, teleconference sessions, and endless meetings draw employees into cycles of reaction, rather than proactivity. Employees’ thinking, focus, and productivity are affected. Unable to make the most of their time, they end up tired and stressed. They become slower at making decisions and rarely see their tasks through.
How can your organization address this challenge? It’s simple: time management training.
The Importance of Time Management Training
The ultimate goal in a healthy work environment is to achieve strong financial results while fostering employee satisfaction. How can employees be happy when they don’t have the skills they need to compartmentalize tasks and allocate the proper amount of time to completing each one?
Employees who lack time management skills often fall behind on their work. Deadlines whoosh past. They become demotivated, unproductive, and even unhealthy.
While the individual employee’s performance suffers, so does the company’s culture. When an employee falls behind, somebody else must pick up the slack to keep the team on schedule. This puts additional stress on the employee’s coworkers and managers.
Consequently, the business is affected. Unhappy, unhealthy, burnt out employees have high rates of absenteeism and are less likely to perform at a high level. They lose their drive to innovate, and they often make poor decisions. The company eventually pays the cost in terms of squandered resources, lowered return on investment, and lost clients.
Efficient time management benefits both employees and businesses. To foster productive and happy working environments, organizations need to provide their people with time management training.
Skills Essential to Efficient Time Management
Time is not the boss of you. You are the boss of it. That’s time management training in a nutshell. It focuses on a specific set of core skills which, when combined, make time management easy.
To manager their time effectively, employees must learn the following skills:
1. Goal Setting
Before prioritizing tasks, employees must set short- and long-term goals. Then, they must make sure every task on their to-do list contributes to these goals. Those tasks that don’t contribute can be assigned to someone else or scrapped altogether.
2. Prioritizing Tasks
3. Self-Motivation
To be productive every single day, employees need to stay motivated at all times. They cannot rely on others to motivate them. Instead, employees must be able to push themselves to deliver their best work around the clock.
4. Focus
From social media and cellphones to meetings and instant messaging, distractions abound at work. The more tired, frustrated, or unmotivated a person feels, the more likely they are to succumb to these distractions. Employees should be able to keep their focus on completing daily tasks and getting closer to their goals.
5. Stress Management
How employees manage their stress affects how they handle their time. When an unforeseen event causes an employee to miss a goal, they should stay calm and start over by resetting goals and priorities. A healthy attitude toward the pressures of the workplace, combined with efficient coping skills, helps an employee stay productive and efficient.
Those are the fundamental skills that time management training must help employees develop and sharpen. Now, we’ll look at how a time management training program might work:
Building Effective Time Management Training
When implemented correctly, time management training improves the way people operate on a daily basis. Consistent training gradually helps employees get better at managing their workloads. They become proactive and efficient, and they complete their tasks on time. Eventually, they learn how to stay in control of their schedules and meet their deadlines.
Time management training cannot be rolled out in a one-size-fits-all manner. Businesses vary in size and structure, and employees work in a variety of environments. Before choosing a time management training strategy, employers should look into the options available. Examples include:
Time Management Group Activities
On-the-Job Training Opportunities
Time management training can take place in the workplace during work hours. On-the-job training can teach employees how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and allocate their time in direct response to their existing daily responsibilities. This training approach often involves a coach or mentor, a role usually taken up by an employee’s supervisor.
Online Time Management Courses
Given that an employee’s time is quite limited, a self-paced eLearning course in time management can be an efficient way to help employees improve their time management skills without imposing on their already packed schedules.
The Time Is Now
When your employees are proficient in time management, your culture will be strong and your business will see greater success overall. Implementing time management training is a necessary step for all businesses seeking to achieve their goals. Evaluate your company’s needs, and choose the training approach right for your employees and their environment.
Nikos Andriotis shares tips and insights about online training and other business-related topics for TalentLMS.