Chapter 22
Coaching Others to Manage Time Effectively
In This Chapter
If you have employees who report to you, being a good time manager isn't enough. For maximum benefit, your staff members also need to improve their time-management skills. Coaching your employees is part of your job, and improved time management makes everyone's job, including yours, much easier.
Walking each of your staff members through this book may be the best solution, but most managers (even you, with your new and improved time-management skills) probably can't devote a block of time to a mini-seminar for each of your employees on the whole book. However, you may want to walk your people through Chapters 4 and 5 and through the appropriate chapters in Part V — or simply provide this book as a reference. May I say I'd be pleased and proud to see a copy of Successful Time Management For Dummies on the desk of each person in your department?
But you can do more. This chapter offers a helping hand in getting your staff on board as to the value of time management and in helping them embrace strategies and techniques for lassoing that most important of resources: their time. In this chapter, I show you how to take a hard look at your employees’ current time-management practices and how to develop a growth plan that you all buy into. I walk you through ways to ensure that the plan sticks and help you support your staff's efforts. Then I offer some strategies for handling situations in which an employee fails to improve.
Finding Out Who'd Benefit from Training
What you accomplish is a direct result of how you use your time. Pretty simple, right? So how are your employees using their time? Your first step in getting your employees on board with time management is to find out how efficient they are currently and to assess their strengths and weaknesses in terms of time management.
You may begin by reviewing their past performance evaluations and spending time observing your staff and their work habits. Then, most importantly, talk to each employee, getting input about the challenges and goals in time management.
Using the four probabilities of success as a gauge
As you gather information about an employee's time-management strengths and weakness, you may find it helpful to consider the four probabilities of success:
- Knowledge
- Skill
- Attitude
- Activities
When you improve employee performance in any one of these areas, your staff becomes more productive — and the individuals on your team become more successful.
Knowledge of time-management principles
A strong knowledge of proven time-management principles can increase the volume of work your staff can complete in an eight-hour day. Additionally, employees need to have a solid knowledge of their job and the responsibilities expected of them. When evaluating an individual's time-management potential based on knowledge, answer the following questions — based on your observations:
- Does the employee have the knowledge necessary to do his or her job in an efficient manner?
- How well-defined are this employee's life and business goals?
- Is the individual aware that time management is an important priority?
- Are the business goals yours or the employee's?
- Does the employee know how to work effectively to meet time goals?
- Do you talk about goals frequently and specifically enough?
- Does the employee understand the 80/20 rule: that 20 percent of effort brings about 80 percent of results? (See Chapter 5 for more on the 80/20 rule.)
Skill in time-management techniques
Skilled time managers usually acquire their expertise through practice, trial-and-error, and daily use of techniques (as well as a few failures). Your staff has to develop time-management expertise in the same way.
Employees who have time-related skills — such as the ability to organize themselves and their work area and use tools such as Evernote, Google Calendar, a CRM (customer relationship management) solution, time blocking, and organizers — are likely more efficient. Look at your staff and ask the following questions:
- Is the employee able to use organizational techniques and tools, including technology?
- Does the individual's work area seem organized and tidy?
- Do you notice that the person has difficulty diverting interruptions?
- Does the employee prioritize each day for the next before leaving for home?
- Have you noticed whether the employee regularly uses a planning system to track upcoming commitments or even the next day's work? Does he or she do this every evening or only once in a while?
- Is the staffer able to use a scheduling system to organize his or her day?
- Is the employee able to consistently keep commitments — including arriving at work and making it to meetings on time?
Attitude toward improving time management
Attitude is one of the most important factors in success. Maintaining a positive attitude is a choice, however, and it's one you have a right to expect your employees to make. A poor attitude leads to negative results and — you guessed it — more wasted time. Even if skills and knowledge are on the weaker side, a good attitude makes for faster and greater improvement in time management skills. As you study your employees, ask these questions to determine their attitude toward time management:
- Is the employee open to learning new techniques and skills to increase productivity?
- Has the individual proactively sought out advice or made efforts to improve time-management practices?
- Has the staffer exhibited a positive attitude in other situations in which improvement was needed?
- Does the employee convey confidence that he or she is able to develop more time-efficient habits?
Activities
In the business world, action is king. The biggest increase in productivity comes from selecting the right activities on which to spend your time. In Chapters 19, 20, and 21, I outline areas in which administrative employees, salespeople, and executives have to spend their time to produce better results more efficiently. As you evaluate your employees’ activities, you may include these questions:
- In which activities does the person spend his or her time?
- How does the employee's eight-hour day break down? What percentage of his or her time is spent on each of these activities?
- Does the staffer avoid or postpone activities he or she doesn't like?
- What activities is the individual most comfortable doing? Are those activities best for the department and the company?
- Does the employee accept direction in terms of prioritization of activities?
Tapping into an employee's motivation
One critical key to success in helping an employee manage time is to involve the individual, so be sure one of the first steps you take is to confirm employee buy-in. You want to put together a plan in which the employee has as much ownership as you do, and that means involving him or her at the outset.
You can't afford not to pass along time-management tips to your employees. I liken true coaching to exercise: It may seem inconvenient and time-consuming, and sometimes it is, but the benefits so far outweigh the effort that it's impossible to justify skipping it.
If you're like most managers, you may find that training your employees in time management helps you improve your own time-management skills further. Teaching others is the best way to reinforce your knowledge and discover even more about a topic.
Don't neglect the costs of employees who work excessively. Some people feel that how many hours they work in a week is a badge of honor. This warped thought process leads to excessive time at the job, which can lead to burnout, lower production, and lower levels of job satisfaction. If the employee isn't salaried, then overtime costs are significant to companies as well.
Discerning whether your employee is ready to change
My experience coaching thousands of people worldwide has taught me that most people don't change their time-management (or any other) strategy unless they're experiencing some type of pain: They've had enough, heard enough, or hurt enough:
- Had enough: They're frustrated and feel like they're always at work. They've missed enough dinners with family, T-ball games, swimming lessons, kindergarten graduations, and nights out to say, “I'm going to make a change.” This one is the best of the three options because it's created internally, so it has greater odds of sticking. The employee may come to you for guidance.
- Heard enough: When a staffer reaches the “had enough” level but still presses on, ignoring repeated warnings in various forms, it may be time for the manager (that's you) to step in and have some serious discussions with him or her. Using this book, as well as stories of your victories and failures in time management, can bring the situation to light.
I'm not suggesting nagging as a strategy to improve an employee's time management; I am suggesting that repetition and consistency of message have their place.
- Hurt enough: As a manager, friend, and colleague, “hurt enough” is the learning experience you want employees to avoid. An employee comes home one day and the kids and spouse are gone because he or she was never home. Or employee health issues border on catastrophic because he or she never “had time” to attend to his or her physical well-being.
Spend some time talking to the employee and you're bound to discover whether he or she has reached — or is close to — one of these crossroads. Then you want to try to connect with the person on an emotional level.
Helping your employee want to change
Most human beings make decisions — even big decisions — largely based on emotions. Then they justify those decisions with logic, data, or facts. Achieving buy-in from employees isn't solely about goals, benefits, and time management skills. It's also about employees’ emotions.
Tapping into your employees’ feelings can help you persuade them to try your new time-management strategies. Try these questions to explore their emotions regarding time management:
- “How do you feel when you miss your quota for the month?”
- “How do you feel when you're interrupted regularly by others?”
- “What are your feelings when I delegate a few projects in a row?”
Next, use follow-up questions to move from emotions to action:
- “How can I help you reduce those feelings? How can you reduce them?”
- “What can I do to help you feel more positive and energized rather than drained and frustrated? What can you do?”
The answers — or emotions — your questions elicit help prompt your employee to buy into a plan for improved time management. Tell your employees that based on their responses, you'd like to work with them to develop a time-management plan with concrete steps they can take to improve their skills.
Establishing Goals
As soon as you understand a staff member's problem areas, the next step is to develop a plan to overcome these challenges and turn the employee into a productive, efficient dynamo. One of the first items on your agenda when you want to overhaul employees’ time-management skills is to establish goals. As you craft the goals, you may want to turn back to Chapter 3 for more advice.
When establishing an employee's time-management goals, keep these pointers in mind:
- Cast the goals in a positive light. Instead of “stop coming in late,” try “work to consistently come in on time or earlier.”
- Make goals realistic. Goals should be challenging but not so difficult that the employee may become discouraged. If an employee is always late for work, insisting on 100-percent on-time arrival starting on day one may be setting the bar too high.
- Break goals into manageable steps when possible. What steps does your employee need to take to accomplish the goals? For instance, you may have your employee identify his most important tasks before trying to put them in order.
- Make goals measurable. First, determine how you can measure the progress:
- By projects completed?
- By an increase in responsibility?
- By adherence to new time-management strategies and systems?
- By a rating system you develop?
Then make sure you can measure the goals using numbers, whether percentages, totals, number of first-time responsibilities, or specific figures. With a measureable component, a goal such as “finish projects on time” becomes “strive to increase on-time completion of projects from 1 in 5 to 4 in 5” or “commit to completing all projects within 24 hours of the original deadline.”
- Give a target date for goals. Without establishing a “by” date, your employees are less likely to be as motivated to do the hard work of change. To make sure the time line you attach to the goal is realistic, ask these questions:
- When do you want to see improvement? Next week? Next month? Next quarter?
- When is the employee's next performance review? Is it reasonable to expect X amount of improvement by that time?
- Are there company deadlines that have an impact on how quickly improvements need to be made?
With a target date, “reduce the number of interruptions to four times per morning” becomes “reduce the number of interruptions to four times per morning by month's end.”
Have your employees develop skills time lines, which determine which skills, tools, or systems they must learn and implement and by what dates. Help your employees create their time lines, but let them do the bulk of the work themselves: It builds employees’ ownership of the goals, and it teaches them the skill so they can do it themselves the next time.
Incorporating Tools and Strategies
Chances are your employees could use some tools, technology, and resources to assist with the process of adopting new time-management skills. As you put together your plan, select the tools you believe are most pertinent and work them into your overall strategy. Of course, all the content in this book is of great value, but here are some helpful tools and strategies your employees can use to address common time-management challenges:
- Find where the time goes with time-tracking charts. Plenty of people have difficulty identifying where their time goes. Your employees who struggle with productivity probably believe they're getting a lot done, when in all likelihood their days are peppered with disruption, drained from wasteful meetings, and dissolved by unimportant but time-consuming tasks.
A time-tracking chart (see the appendix) commands users to look closely at their day, half-hour by half-hour. This tool is sure to unearth the worst time-stealing culprits, and the discovery of “where the time goes” is likely to liberate the employee into a more productive state of being.
- Identify what comes first with the prioritization tool. Some employees struggle with determining what's really important — which projects are most critical to address or which job to tackle first every day. What these folks need is a way to help them order their priorities. The prioritization tool spelled out in Chapter 5 helps individuals gather all their projects or tasks and go through a careful and deliberative process to put them in order. This is a process that you and the employee may want to work through together because work priorities are a combination of personal and business interests.
- Get a grip on the day/week/month with time-blocking. Who doesn't get so overwhelmed by a busy schedule that he or she misses an important meeting, forgets about a family event, or double-books appointments? The person who uses the time-blocking tool! By introducing your employees to time-blocking (see Chapter 5), you help them open the door to achieving so much more. Because time-blocking brings in all aspects of your life, from work to personal, those who use it often discover that they don't have to sacrifice family for work — or vice versa.
- Head off drag time with the 11 a.m. rule. As you direct your employees to block their time, arm them with the 11 a.m. rule, scheduling the most important tasks of the day before 11 a.m. For most people, the hours before 11 a.m. are most productive. Workers tend to have more energy at the beginning of the day and, typically, there are fewer interruptions, problems, and “fires” to serve as distractions. When your employees tackle the most important tasks during their peak performance period, they're investing their best hours in the most critical activities before the day wears them down.
- Combat interruptions with do-not-disturb policies. All employees struggle with interruptions, but administrative staff are especially vulnerable. You may want to institute a time during the day when administrative employees are relieved of phone duties and other potential distractions (if you have more than one administrative assistant, rotate schedules so they're not all using their quiet time at once).
If a staff member has his or her own office, suggest that he or she shut the door, essentially hanging up a do-not-disturb sign. You can also have employees hang actual do-not-disturb signs if they work in a bullpen environment or cubicle. Help communicate their off-limits time to other staff members so they can be more productive.
Encourage employees to make the most of these time periods — somewhere between 60 to 90 minutes at a time — saving that time for the projects and tasks that require concentrated effort or intense focus, such as writing a report or doing research.
As you and your employee develop the plan for more effective time management, start small and then build on that. By starting small, you encounter less resistance. Employees won't roll their eyes when they see you coming, knowing you're on this “new time-management kick.” And they won't secretly hope it all blows over so they can return to status quo in a few weeks. Instead of pressing the employee to commit to doubling productivity, begin by getting the individual to incorporate time-blocking or reducing daily interruptions into his or her daily routine. Focus on one small tool, strategy, or routine for a few weeks.
Fostering Partnership and Encouraging Success
I'm a big productivity and efficiency nut. I want the best possible value out of every second in life. When I was younger and attended conferences or read books, I came away with 101 new ideas on how my companies could operate with higher returns. I wanted to implement them all by yesterday.
My staff members started wincing when I brought my new ideas to the office, and they especially dreaded my return from conferences because I could point to XYZ Company, which was doing business this way and was hugely successful. I had validated results! But I can tell you, I didn't generate buy-in when I came back.
Time management is an evolving process. Acquiring new skills, making noticeable improvements, and completing complex projects are big steps. That means they take time, which means greater potential for an employee to veer off-course. You can't meet with the employee, set up the plan, and walk away, expecting everything to work. The employee is accountable for achieving these benchmarks, but you, as manager, have accountability, too. You have to nurture the process along the way. In this section, I explain how to approach the time-management plan as a partnership between you and the employee.
Setting up benchmarks and check-ins to instill accountability
As for accountability and performance change, two universal truths stand out:
- When performance is measured, performance improves.
- When performance is measured and reported, performance improves faster.
So as you put together the improvement plan, define benchmarks — progress stops along the way to the time-management goals (see the earlier “Establishing Goals” section) — and set check-in appointments in which you and the staffer meet to assess progress.
Check-ins with your employee may be frequent at first and become less frequent as time passes. You may schedule daily check-ins in the beginning, moving to weekly, biweekly, and monthly progress reports as the employee builds his or her time-management skills and achieves greater confidence. As you schedule the progress report points, determine the following:
- Whether employees need to hand in their measurement and tracking tools daily, weekly, or monthly; I have my employees hand in daily reports that track their activities by the half hour and show how they prioritize their tasks and projects
- Whether you'll meet face-to-face daily, weekly, or monthly to discuss employees’ progress
If you can, schedule weekly or at least regular sessions with an employee, each session lasting at least a half hour. In addition to checking the benchmark status and getting an update from the staffer, you can introduce a new time-management technique. These sessions can help you keep tabs on the individual's progress and inspire the employee to stick with the effort.
Employees want to see improvement fast, or they may begin to think this time-management stuff is a bunch of bunk. So come up with some measurable and reasonable benchmarks that are certain to motivate the staffer to progress.
Taking a team-based approach to time management
If you feel uncomfortable engaging so personally in the lives of your team members, consider a group goal-setting session limited to business topics. Take your team off-site for an afternoon or, even better, a full day. Discuss departmental objectives, quotas, and benchmarks. Ask for input on goals, strategies to attain them, and bottlenecks where time is wasted or service doesn't meet the standard.
Set goals as a group and make sure everyone commits to them as a team. Then determine a team reward that energizes employees. Make it clear the reward is available to everyone who works toward it. The reward needs to be their idea: their reward and their commitment to deliver with excellence.
You may establish weekly time-management classes to raise awareness as well as skill levels, but make sure employees green-light the idea before you begin, or your results may be less than stellar.
Being consistent
If you delve into successful time-management strategies, you find that consistency is the secret sauce of success. As a manager looking to groom your staff into better time managers, consistency is important both in terms of what you should expect from your employees and what they should expect from you.
Model the behaviors you'd like employees to exhibit. Establish routines and then help employees develop their own routines. As you keep tabs on an employee's progress toward better time management, be consistent with the following:
- Employees’ schedules
- Strategies for minimizing interruptions
- Meetings and appointments
- Memos
- Time-block schedules
- Priorities
- Expectations
When your staff members are confident that the priorities you set for them yesterday won't turn on end today, and when they can look to you as a manager who consistently makes appointments and meetings on time and responds promptly, they're more likely to embrace their time-management goals and improve their performance.
Fulfilling your role as a mirror
As your employees’ manager and coach, you're in the mirror business. Ask employees to articulate their goals and then serve as a mirror to show them how what they do daily reflects what they claim they want. When you mirror an employee's vision — rather than your own expectations — you're more likely to motivate positively. Consider these two statements:
“You're not going to do a good job on this project if you're getting distracted by other things.”
“You shared with me that this project was extremely important to you. How do you see yourself completing it while directing most of your energy to these other tasks?”
The first casts the goal as yours — not the employee's — and your feedback comes off as a reprimand. But when mirroring the employee's interests, as the second statement does, you come across as an ally in your employee's success.
Here are some effective mirroring phrases:
- “You said you wanted to invest x hours a week in this activity. How are you doing so far? What do you need to do to improve that? What can I do to help you?”
- “What changes are in order to allow you to achieve those goals you told me about?”
- “Can I hold you accountable for meeting your goal?”
The more clearly you see employees’ goals, the more effectively you can remind them of their goals and reinforce that how they manage their time helps them achieve their goals.
Waiting for the “Aha!”
I once had a salesperson who struggled with a number of key issues but especially with investing too much time in unqualified prospects. He wanted to save these people, but he couldn't help them because his prospects hadn't arrived at a point where they wanted to change — and not changing didn't hurt them enough.
The salesperson called me and asked what to do with a prospect he hadn't closed. After listening to his story, I knew the prospect wouldn't be converted to a customer because he didn't meet the criteria for Sales Champions’ prospects. I asked the salesperson a few questions, and suddenly, the conversation changed. My salesperson took the lead, telling me why he should abandon this prospect and move on, even though he'd invested hours in moving the prospect toward a sale.
I asked myself, “Has he finally gotten it? Did he just put the puzzle together?” Before he hung up, he said, “Dirk, I get it!” That was the moment I'd been waiting for: the got-it moment. All the sweat, worry, and frustration had been worth it.
Dealing with a Lack of Progress: Can This Employee Be Saved?
When you make a commitment to help an employee improve, you invest time of your own and you understandably don't want to give up, even if things don't appear to be progressing. Unfortunately, not everybody can be saved. Sometimes, even though you follow all the steps I outline to help your staff members attain time-management enlightenment, you can't get through. In these circumstances, you may have to take a good, hard look at the situation and make some tough decisions.
If you're committed to healing your problem employee no matter what, be careful. Early in my sales management career, I was determined to make a particular salesperson better. I vowed that I'd make him into a good salesperson, even if it killed me. It almost did! I worried more about this salesperson and lost more sleep over him than any other I've had in my career. It was a big waste of time and energy because I was really more determined to make him a success than he was.
Before you invest the time in trying to save an employee, determine whether this is a problem that can't be fixed. Look for these signs:
- The employee has consistently failed to meet time-management benchmarks and goals established in your plan.
- The employee has failed to use the time-management tools you identified in the plan.
- The employee is neglecting opportunities to acquire knowledge or skills that could help him or her attain time-management goals.
- The employee has displayed a negative attitude despite your efforts to connect time-management improvement to his or her goals.
- The employee's time-management failures are having a measurable impact on your department or company goals. (Consider measurements such as revenue shortfall or missed deadlines.)
- The employee's limitations are having a detrimental effect on other staff.
If your employee meets even one of these criteria, you, as a manager, need to take action. Here are your options.
Accepting them, warts and all
If you're like most managers, you probably have at least one employee whose use of time makes you bite your lip (and your tongue). Despite your efforts and encouragement, you haven't seen any improvement. But because of other merits or strengths that the employee brings to the company, you may choose to let it go. Say, for example, the staffer is a prolific producer of business and meets all responsibilities, but simply can't manage her own time and often spends evenings and weekends in the office. Because her challenges don't affect her performance or disrupt anyone else in your department, you may be comfortable resigning yourself to this failing.
When evaluating this employee, address and document this shortcoming during the annual review. Your staff members need to be held accountable for their ability — or inability — to meet the goals you've set for them.
Giving it one more try
The original time-management improvement plan you mapped out with the employee should have had some give built into it. For example, the benchmarks you set may have allowed for extra time if the employee struggled a bit achieving that point. But if you want to give the employee one more chance, have at it: Be prepared to go through the discussion, review, and perhaps revision of the improvement plan, identifying tools and setting up a time line.
Maybe your problem employee only needs fine tuning. Answer these questions:
- What adjustment in the employee's time-management process would improve his or her performance?
- What skill, if he or she mastered it, would make this employee more productive?
- How can you help this employee increase his or her earnings?
- What would have to happen to allow this employee to leave work at 5 p.m. rather than 6:30 p.m. each night?
I suggest, at this juncture, that you tighten up the time frame for improvement. Suppose you originally had an overall time line of six months, with interim benchmarks every two weeks. This go-round, establish the expectation that the goals must be met within two or three months. After all, with all the time you've already invested in this employee, it's reasonable to expect results a lot earlier. In addition, be sure to clarify the consequences should the employee fail to improve at the end of this time.
Saying sayonara
One of my mentors, Dave Doeleman, taught me, “If you can't change people, you have to change people.” Time-management skills are critical to the success of an individual and to the team. If you have an employee whose failure to meet time-management goals is affecting the success of your area, and if you've done everything you can (as outlined in this chapter) to help the employee attain time-management skills, then you may find yourself obliged to let the individual go and replace him or her with someone who has his or her time under control — or who shows promise of developing the skills.