Article: You will never have enough time!

Life @ Work

You will never have enough time!

Employees are often vocal about not finding enough time, which affects their overall health. What role does HR needs to play?
You will never have enough time!

“My work just never ends”, said the Finance Manager. “Same with me too”, uttered the Project Head. As a Project Delivery Head, "it’s hard to figure out on how to set my own boundaries because the work would just never end. I understand that’s not good for the way I carry out my work deliverables and certainly not good for my health too. What do I need to do? I don’t find any answer.”

How many times in a day do you think and feel likewise? Well, we all know the answer.

I hardly find anyone who doesn’t struggle with managing his or her time. Some have found ways to lower the pressure by moving to a different career path. Some can, but not all!

There’s hardly any human species who does not fail to manage his or her time. It’s really hard to know how to set your own boundaries when it comes to managing time. Unfortunately, this is one thing which can never be managed. You need to effectively use your time to get the best out of it.

Employees at workplace are often found struggling hard to effectively utilize time to accomplish their target. This, in long run, affects their mental frame and health in many ways. In order to avoid such burnout and as the custodian of Health and Wellness, it is the responsibility of the human resource professionals to find out ways to help their employees overcome the time hazards.

1. Try somethig different

There are many books and articles written on Time management techniques. All of them are being tested by most of us and definitely yield results in some or other way. But every organization has a distinct culture with intricacies which only the internal members of the company can relate too. Hence, HR needs to think beyond and differently too. In order to aid this, they can create a forum to brainstorm solutions to such challenges in the workplace.

While doing this open exercise aimed at providing better ways and time to work, this can be a fodder to communal support in a usually solitary practice.

2. Help your employees to create barriers to distractions

As per a survey conducted by Pune based Sapience Analytics, “at workplaces it takes a good 25 minutes before you return to your work station.”

HR needs to come up with new innovative practices to bring in a culture that ruthlessly remove distractions and pit stops limiting one’s productivity. Too much of coffee meetings or long duration meetings does not allow employees to manage their time effectively. Social media usage should be limited, unless you use these tools to generate business. All these strategies need to be re-looked at from time to time.

3. Choose the less chaotic time

Do you have a specific daily routine that prepares you for work? Have you noticed that there’s a particular time of the day, which gives the maximum productivity?

Different individual have different “most active part of the day”. Some prefers to start early and for some, late nights are the most productive hours where they complete their work. Hence, HR will have to flexible enough to give employees the choice specifically for people who are at an individual contributor level with no big team to manage. 

4. DND Signage

There’s no harm to put up a signage when you absolutely have to get work done on an urgent basis. It may not be DND, but HR can come up with some creative ones like “Busy Work Zone” or “Genius minds at work”. In fact, people at work should be sensitive enough to not come and poke when you see someone engulfed in work and struggling to finish it to meet the deadline. 

5. Optimize time pockets to strike a balance

Every 11th minute you are disrupted by either a ping on your chat window or a beep on your Smartphone? This classic employee conundrum needs to be addressed before it arises. “Sometimes I sacrifice making the work that matters most to me”. Don’t let this culture creep in. This can make employees feel miserable and disconnected during the most productive hours of the day. Help them strike a balance.

It has become a prerogative for HR teams to help employees get a clear picture to help choose their projects more discriminatorily, and which results in handling their time and task effectively. HR must help them with tools and techniques to budget their time for a better and healthier work life. As a custodian of time sheets, HR of every organization can easily find out how these measures have started impacting their workforce. And such insights with the use of analytics can definitely help to boost overall productivity from time to time.

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Topics: Life @ Work, Employee Relations

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