It would seem that having employees plan their work is simply part of their job, so what's the problem?

Staff planning their work, the time they take to make decisions when priorities conflict, the disruption associated with their management of urgent "drop-ins" – it's a big burden for your employees. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take it off their shoulders and have a perfect machine do it for them?

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Michał Stangret
Evangelist, Harmodesk & Positive Productivity

On the one hand, the planning of their work by employees is, it may be concluded, simply part of their job. After all, they have to complete tasks.

There's an urgent "drop in" to do? They should react quickly. Seemingly everything is done according to the rules of the game they have agreed to. However, there is a "but". 

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took the burden of planning off your employees' shoulders? But it is not about adding to the workload for you, the manager – that is the wrong way to go. If you took the burden of planning off your employees' shoulders, they would have much more time to spend on their tasks, which is what they bring most value to the organisation. 

Let's see how you could try to relieve them. Let us first try to do it with common methods

Managers commonly do it this way:

  1. Strengthening staff competences related to self-organisation, discipline, planning through additional training, courses, coaching.
  2. Establishing rules to help employees plan their work and prioritise tasks. 
  3. Introducing procedures for urgent "drop-ins", e.g:
  • Establish clear and understandable rules to enable prioritisation and reminders to inform about urgent items and only those items that are urgent e.g. agree that if something is urgent then there is an SMS/ messenger notification and other items follow the "standard order".
  • Consistently stick to this method of communicating about urgent things and avoid other channels of communicating urgent things e.g. phone calls or emails. so that there are not several separate messages about a particular issue.

These are just examples of common methods to solve a problem, but we can also apply a systemic solution.

How to solve the problem using the system method?

Note that the issue of employees scheduling their work may be absolutely unnecessary under certain conditions, and the key here is to automate the proper allocation of tasks in the system.

As a result of priority-based harmonious allocation of work, tasks are distributed to employees as efficiently as possible. This ensures that every employee does the task that is a priority at any given time

What about urgent "drop-ins"?

Urgent "drop-ins" are automatically prioritised in the system. It is enough for them to be labelled urgent and the employee who has been identified by the system as the most appropriate person for this task receives it for urgent execution in such a way as not to miss it.

In this way, tasks are completed efficiently and effectively. And the employee does not have to waste his valuable working time on planning. Instead, he can focus on getting things done, which is what he delivers the most value to the organisation.

Above mechanism eliminates your employees' time and energy eater: planning and arranging staff’s own work, a time devoted by them to decision-making in case of conflicting priorities, the disruptions due the management of urgent "drop-ins".

This is only 1 of 14 time and energy eaters of employees and managers that we have identified in the course of our long-term experience in over 500 Business Services, Back Office and Middle Office teams in dozens of countries on 5 continents. The presented system solution eliminates these eaters as well.

If you want to discover:

✅ what is the disruptive nature of the other 13 eaters?

✅ what is their impact on your team and organisation?

✅ how much money can be saved by eliminating them?

✅ how do managers usually try to handle them unsuccessfully and how to do it once and for all using the proven system method?

Get your ebook, titled: Top eaters of time and energy in Business Services & Back/Middle Office. How much money they absorb and how to eliminate them?

➡️ by clicking here: I want to receive the ebook for free