Workplace efficiency is a hot topic for every manager and employee. The profits of the company directly depend on its employees and their efficiency.
When looking for ways to increase the efficiency of employees’ work, consider spending your time and effort to analyze what “eats” it first. A productivity tracker helps to make the analysis faster, more accurate, real and up-to-date.
Here is the list of common “productivity-eaters” and ways a productivity tracking software can help eliminate them:
1) Email
Surprisingly, email takes a lot of employee’s time.
Fearing to miss an important email, employees constantly distract to hit a “Refresh” button just for a second. But it’s not about for how long they distract, it is the fact of distraction.
Frequent switches between tasks are called multitasking, and as we all know, it does not have a good impact on productivity. Distracting even for a couple seconds takes some time to get back to what you were doing, i.e. you lose focus.
The second reason why email is a productivity-eater is because employees answer an email immediately, even if it’s not important.
Solution: With a productivity tracker, employees can see how much time they spend on email and change the way they use it. It will help to save time, eliminate distractions and increase focus.
2) Excessive amount of meetings
Can a company have unproductive meetings? Yes. If they are arranged for wrong people or when there is literally too many of them.
Solution: A productivity tracking software allows to monitor and categorize the time that employees spend away from their workplace, e.g. a meeting, a phone call, etc. This way you have a full insight of meetings that take place in your company and employees involved in them.
3) Internet distractions
Our primary work tools nowadays are PC’s, tablets, smartphones, and the greatest of all – the Internet. While being one of the greatest inventions in the history, at the same time it has become a major distraction at the workplace.
Recent researches say that in average employees waste one hour a day using social media at work.
Solution: the benefits of using productivity software, in this case, is the clear understanding of where the time goes and if the productivity decrease in the company has anything to do with employees wasting time online.
4) Inadequate planning
Planning is the foundation of any company’s performance. On it depends the proper distribution of employees’ time, workload, effective cooperation of employees and departments, short-term goals of the company.
But sometimes, even if the company is paying enough time and attention to planning, the real results differ from plans.
Solution: In this case, you can use productivity tracker. Such software will help you to see clearly how employees distribute their time, find out who’s overloaded or underutilized, which projects are “in progress”.
With this information, you can make proper adjustments in the work of employees, for example:
- redistribute the workload to have all employees utilized evenly, and, as a result productive;
- see which tasks are at work, monitor their progress and make timely corrections;
- assign additional workforce, if necessary, to reduce burnouts and missed deadlines.
5) Poor time management skills
Nowadays time management skills are crucial both for work and personal life. When there’s so much to do, you must be able to manage all the time and tasks that you have. Otherwise, they will manage you.
So, being able to manage time also means that you’re able to be in charge of your life.
The reason why people fail to manage time is because of lack of accurate data on how the work time is spent.
Solution: A productivity tracker helps to obtain that information quickly and effortlessly.
By seeing which activities take longer than they should or how much time each activity takes, employees can decide on what they could do to:
- reduce the time spent on a task;
- determine an inefficient activity and save time by stopping it;
- build realistic, achievable plans.
Conclusion
So, the most important thing that a productivity tracker gives you is knowledge of your company’s performance. Many companies now use Yaware.TimeTracker to measure and increase efficiency Being aware and understanding the problems that they faced is halfway to their solution.
