Humans are the greatest asset of any business. If employees are overworked and exhausted, they may find it very hard to complete all of their duties in time and at the best quality level. Here are eight tips you can use to help your teams cope with their workload in an effective and efficient manner.
Forget About Multitasking
Unless your employees are extremely focused and organized, you shouldn’t encourage them to adopt multitasking as the best way of juggling their tasks. Even though multitasking has been promoted as one of the best ways of working, it can actually be rather counterproductive and exhausting.
If you take a closer look into multitasking, you’ll see that people who try to handle multiple tasks at the same time aren’t doing themselves any favor. The brain requires time to switch from a certain activity to a different one, so completing all of these tasks simultaneously may actually take longer than handling them one at a time. For best results, you should encourage your employees to tackle their most important assignments one by one.
Prioritize The Tasks
Ask your employees to take a moment in the beginning of the workday to review everything they will need to do. Tell them to rank their tasks in accordance with the level of importance. There are always going to be important and urgent matters that will need attention in the first part of the day, as well as less important tasks that can wait until late afternoon.
Prioritizing tasks will allow your employees to increase their level of efficiency.
Flexibility And Adaptability Are Powerful Allies
Active listening is one of the most useful and valuable skills of an effective manager. As you step into a management role in your organization, your responsibilities will change, so you’ll have to know how to wear your new leadership hat the best way you can.
Your own way to manage the work may not have been the best for everyone in your organization. Always seek for input from your employees and allow them the freedom to self-manage, but also work with them to identify and correct their areas of ineffectiveness. Let your employees get the work done without permanent supervision, but monitor them and offer them guidance whenever needed.
Electronic Project Planning
Consider acquiring a reliable online people planner software to help everyone on your team to stay on track – find out more. Such planning tools allow everybody in a team to see all details of a project at any given time. This makes it very easy for the group to collaborate and communicate, share ideas, brainstorm and ask for help if needed. Also, such planning tools allow the setting of alerts to encourage team members to hold each other accountable for their actions and deadlines.
Communication And Clarity
The way you communicate with your staff will influence the results of the team. Always keep in mind that not all communication is effective.
When working on a large project with tight deadlines, clear and concise communication can make all the difference between success and failure. When telling others what to do, make sure you clearly state what you need them to accomplish and how they should do it. In addition, share your expectations in terms of deadlines and workflow.
Be Reasonable
Even when working under the pressure of tight deadlines, there will be things outside of your control. One thing you can control, though, and this is the workload you put on your employees.
Don’t set unrealistic expectations, as they will only lead your team to failure. Assign each employees only tasks that match their skill level and their available time, in order to make sure they will be able to complete the work within the given timeline without having to work extra hours.
Keep Your Door Open
Try to establish a working relationship that would invite your employees to discuss with you any detail of their day to day work. If they feel they are overworked and they can’t ask you for advice when they need it, they won’t be as productive as you want them to be. Keep your door open for your team members.
Assign The Most Difficult Tasks First
As the manager, it is your duty to decide which tasks should be tackled the first and by when. One of the best ways to ensure your team members keep their motivation throughout the entire workday is to assign the most difficult and cumbersome tasks at the first half of the day. Asking your employees to perform such stuff by the end of the workday may not be a good idea, as they won’t be by far as productive as early in the morning.
