Don't Let Colleagues Steal Your Time.

Many companies attach great importance to capital management, but they are indifferent to the waste of time.

Time is money. According to Bain's data, most companies have at least an opportunity to save 20% collective time by setting stricter time management rules.

Although there are not many, there are still some effective ways to deal with wasting time. Strict time budget allocation rules are drawn up to manage time like managing scarce resources.

They make clear demands on senior executives' time allocation, and urge employees to improve their meetings and other forms of cooperation.

。

We found 8 time management initiatives with remarkable results.

Good managers should have the ability to distinguish between "urgency" and "importance".

They understand that every member of the team needs to reach a consensus on what activities are critical to success.

We suggest that teams should also agree on priorities for time allocation.

Employees should not only identify how to allocate spare time in work, but also identify what needs to be delayed and which need not be done at all.

Increasing total staff productivity requires careful management of every company asset.

As a result, many companies turn their operations and capital budgets to zero each year instead of taking the remaining budget of the previous year as a starting point.

The most sensible company in management time is the same. This kind of "zero start" mentality can understand this: we will not put in any extra time at the meeting. If we compare the total time of the current meeting to the time bank, we should temporarily withdraw the meeting time from the bank when holding a new meeting time.

Each week the top management of the company takes 4 to 5 hours of meeting time, concentrates on strategies and examines performance.

The content of this week's meeting is uniform, avoiding the long preparation time before.

The implementation of the BPR week will help Ford save thousands of hours, especially when rival companies are seeking government help. Ford will save a lot of daily expenses by adjusting its own time management.

In addition, the quality and speed of the company's decision-making have also been greatly improved, and the turnover rate of the company has been quickened.

Companies often fall into the trap of "initiative creep", and a lot of seemingly reasonable projects continue to accumulate and increase, but most of them have a beginning and end.

When Gary Gutenberg Gary Goldberg became a Newmont mineral company CEO in March 2013, 87 initiatives were being carried out, each occupying the time and energy of one or more executives in the Newmont executive leadership team (ELT).

Before investing in any project, ELT must carefully examine all business argumentation and decide whether to approve it.

Business argumentation for each project must specify in detail how much economic benefits the project will produce, and the total cost of its needs, including the occupation of executives.

Each initiative must have a senior manager as a guarantor, who is responsible for full process management to ensure that the initiative will not overspend.

We find that if a company adds one manager, it will generate an average workload of 1.5 full-time employees, and every additional vice president will produce 2.6 full-time employees.

。

Hiring new managers or senior managers may also require further employment of assistant or office directors, bringing a series of resource consumption that will further increase workload and cost.

As work accumulates, time becomes more scarce.

There are many restrictions on the qualification of conference personnel.

But the details of meeting time, participants and who must attend are often left to the lower staff. The result is that the conference is arranged without costly scrutiny.

Any meeting with a meeting of more than 90 minutes or a meeting of more than 7 people shall be approved by the higher level leaders of the conference sponsors (leaders above two levels).

This measure saved the company's public time budget considerably, equivalent to 200 full-time employees working in 6 months.

Many companies have very vague decision-making power and decision-making process, so companies have to spend more time dealing with the external affairs rather than focusing directly on decision-making and execution.

In this case, the establishment of a decision-making mechanism based on the whole company can greatly improve efficiency and save time in other areas.

It is not realistic for companies to cancel all meetings, because cooperation and major decisions need to be studied.

By setting several simple rules, many companies can substantially improve the quality of meetings.

The agenda is clear.

All meetings held by Intel are purposeful, such as notifying A matters, discussing B matters and deciding C matters.

Conference proceedings and meetings

As concise and concise, participants focused on achieving specific goals.

Prepare ahead of schedule.

In Ford, all weekly business plan reviews must be sent ahead of schedule, so that participants can consult before the conference.

This move will greatly reduce the information sharing time at BRP.

? start on time.

If the hour is one hour, if the meeting starts 5 minutes later, it will waste 8% of the meeting time.

But many management teams will not allow 8% of waste in any other area of responsibility.

? end as soon as possible, especially when meetings fail to produce clear results.

When the Apple Corp conference began to decline in efficiency, or the participants were not well prepared, Jobs immediately "emergency stop."

Some people feel that he is rude in this way, but when the meeting is unlikely to achieve the desired result, this practice effectively stops the waste of time and money.

People all know that if there is no standard of measurement, management will be impossible.

But few companies can track key variables that affect employee productivity on time, such as meeting time, absence of meetings, e-mail capacity, and so on.

If these variables are not monitored, it will be difficult to manage them, or even to find out the seriousness of the problem of productivity.

Without a reference benchmark for productivity, it is impossible to set goals for improvement.