It’s no secret that agency life is incredibly fast-paced, therefore good organisation and office time management are essential. Without these, time can be wasted on inefficient processes, the wrong tasks can be prioritised and deadlines missed – all of which will negatively affect your agency.
Effective time management is one of the hardest challenges faced by an agency and it can seem like a daunting, impossible task.
However, there are a few time management tips which are simple but easily overlooked.Read on to discover the techniques which will help improve productivity and positively impact your profitability:
Create to-do lists
While some of your staff will remember the day’s tasks, things can quickly become quite hectic and unplanned things often pop up.When your employees’workloads are piling up, and some objectives are prioritised over others, it’s easy for them to lose track of what needs to be done.A to-do list is one of the easiest time management techniques in the book, yet also one of the most effective.
Ensuring that your staff are keeping a log of what they need to each day, ordered by priority, will allow them to plan ahead and stay aware of their own schedule. Ticking off tasks they have completed prevents time being wasted on checking what still needs to be done, thereby increasing productivity.
This is an incredibly simple, yet useful technique for agencies, as employees may have multiple tasks for different clients and this will help them to complete work in priority order.
Ask co-workers for help
In order to cut down on time spent pondering what to do or trying to figure out a way to work around a problem, make it clear to your staff that they shouldn’t be afraid to ask either you, or their co-workers for help.
As you are all part of the same team, your staff should be more than happy to offer advice or assistance to each otherin anysituationthat they might be having trouble with.
It is a well-known fact that two heads are better than one, so everyone will feel much more at ease if they share the load, rather than working alone.
Leave enough time for tasks
While you may think that getting as much done as quickly as possible is the best way to manageyour employees’time, this is not necessarily true.
Rushing through a task is the easiest way to make mistakes. Not only is this unprofessional, it will also mean that peoplehave to spend more time later correcting things. It may not seem like it, but allowing your employeesmore time on a task from the outset, will save both of you time further down the line, as it will be completed to a good standard.
Planning enough time for your employees to complete each of your tasks efficiently throughout the day is a crucial skill to perfecting time management.
Use Organised Systems
Although we would like to believe that we can do everything ourselves, sometimes it is a good idea to employ extra measures to help organise your business.
Project Management Software, can help to assemble and manage your agency’s workload. It can put systems in place so that each of your employees know who’s working on what, as well as the deadlines that need to be met. It can even send reminders to staff to alert them of upcoming deadlines, so there is no excuse to miss them!
Software such as this is an incredibly useful element to improve time management in your agency. With the ability to schedule your team’s workload and discover at a glance the progress of your jobs, it can noticeability improve productivity levels.
As you can see, mastering time management doesn’t have to be complicated. By implementing these simple techniques, your agency’s processes can become much more streamlined which helps set you up for success.