All small business owners know that time is their greatest asset, as while money or even business can be lost and gained, time, once expended, is gone for good. Managing time then becomes one of the greatest challenges and responsibilities of a conscientious and profit minded business owner – both for themselves and their employees – and here are a few tips on how best to achieve it:
Log your time
Keeping an accurate record of how you spend a typical day is a highly useful way of identifying areas in which you, as a business owner, can make better use of your time, and can help show you just how much time you spend on certain activities.
Once your day has been logged, corrective measures can be put in place:
Identifying the areas in which you may be wasting time or expending too much of your valuable energy, is the easy part, figuring how to reduce that time is not quite so easy. However, better organizing how you spend you time will soon see your stress levels reduced, and your productiveness increased.
This method works equally as well for monitoring how your staff spend their time. Wasting your own time as a business owner is one thing, but paying employees to waste their time, is quite another. Monitor how each employee is fulfilling their tasks and check that they aren’t taking longer breaks than permitted etc. Clocking in and clocking out can really help with this, and offenders can be docked pay or reprimanded for time wasting, in whatever form it takes.
Set yourself time restrictions:
There are various techniques that business owners can employ when attempting to maximize productivity in the workplace, and one method is to set a time limit upon the amount of time you spend on each given task. With your employees, make it clear to them how much time you expect them to spend on each task or element of their role, and have them try to achieve these goals.
Ensure that your employees are punctual:
Punctuality is important in any business, not only as a common courtesy, but to ensure that the maximum production can be achieved during a working day. There are many professional company’s offering time management solutions for businesses, most of which can be integrated with payroll, making the whole process far easier to track and paying employees, far more accurate.
Don’t be afraid to delegate:
There is absolutely no shame in delegating any number of tasks to others; expecting to be able to run a business entirely on your own and taking care of all aspects singlehandedly, is simply not realistic. Ensure that whoever is being delegated to complete a task, has received the appropriate training and has the relevant skills, otherwise your workload will increase instead of being reduced.
For any business to function effectively, there has to be sound time management, and while part of that is your responsibility as a business owner, you must ensure that your employees are managing their time effectively too, particularly if you want to avoid paying people for not fulfilling their roles within the appropriate timeframe.