Why Should You Create A Non-Toxic Environment For Your Employees?

How to Improve the Attendance of Your Employees and Keep them Focused on Their Tasks?

Without good time management skills, no one can reach top performance.  In order to do that, a person must know how to optimize the time for tasks, be it personal or work related ones. Hence, for us to work efficiently we need to at first understand our assignments. When you lead a team of employees you need to make sure of certain things, to reach the proper performance levels. You need to :

1. Form the schedules minding the complexity and time needed for each task to complete.
2. Distribute those tasks to the employees according to their strengths and weaknesses.
3. Make sure each employee knows the assignment assigned to them, the deadlines and who is part of the same assignment group/project.
4. Keep an update on the ongoing process regularly, and be available in case of serious complications.
5. Have a record of the time the tasks took in reality and your estimations, in order to compare and improve for future projects.
6. Keep a functional work process with minimum distractions.

All these are primary when you look to organize a better and more productive work process. If any of these is not met as a need, they cause a downfall of the performance.

Without a good schedule and mindful task distribution you can overwork the employees, miss deadlines, spend too much of the budget. If the employees do not have a clear communication line and do not know who is working on what in their team, they will lose time and nerves, to clarify what is going on. When you as the lead do not keep track of the process, you cannot act simultaneously and timely to any anticipated or not complication.

Having an accurate record of the work process will allow you to improve and develop better strategy every time. Also, you will optimize the work process and upgrade the time management skills of your employees.

Without a functional work process with minimum distractions, you cannot keep the employees engaged. The well-organized work environment, however, is not that hard to achieve. With better time management, policies, and organization, the performance is no longer an issue. Also, there are ways you can improve these at almost no cost.

The time tracking software is ideal for the proper organization of one work process. With time and attendance tracking software you will also reduce to a minimum all the errors of time keeping and their effects. For all the benefits of the time and attendance tracking software check here:

What Do You Need To Know About Time Tracking?

Time management is essential for leading of any team. Improve your time management and that of your employees, and you will certainly increase both the performance and the productivity in the workplace.

The Lost Timesheet and the Dawn of The Unhappy Employees

There was this office, not a big one to be honest, where I had to run some stuff for a while. With the few people (11 to be precise) who worked there, they found it unnecessary to pay much attention to timekeeping. The schedule was basically a sheet with dates and on each day, employees wrote down the hours they’ve worked for. At the beginning of the next month, the manager will take that sheet, count the hours, pay the wages and voila.

However, unfortunately for everyone in the beginning of the next month… the paper timesheet was gone. Literally nowhere to be seen, no one having even the slightest idea where it is since it was not in any of the usual places or the unusual ones. The more troublesome fact – it was right after December, awfully busy month, swaps of shifts all the time, working extra hours and more similar stuff, which made the schedule totally unpredictable.

The result? No one could remember the hours they have worked for,  recreate even parts of the schedule, or had any idea where could it be. In addition, the company had no clue what they must pay to the employees, what were the taxes and etc. An absolute mess and nothing to be happy about. Not to mention the enormous amount of time lost in search of the time sheet, or debates for the work hours. Also, the sad loss of trust between employee and employer, the insults and accusations.

Nevertheless, there was something like an agreement for a fixed wage based on their regular hours and a day off for those who want (an unpaid one). Not that it was well accepted, everyone knew they worked the hell of a lot more. Yet their work cannot be paid, because someone was sloppy enough to lose the timesheet.

Conclusion?

Besides the fact that the lack of stable organization and accurately predetermined work hours for the busiest month of the year, made the schedule impossible, we can also conclude these stuff:

Trust no one if you want to build a good work relationship, where everyone trusts each other. Now, I know how this sounds, yet entrusting something this important and allowing it to lie around, at the beginning may seem like a wonderful idea to show your faith in the rest, but it will come back and bite everyone eventually. If they would’ve used a timesheet app, which stores this data safely, this would’ve been extremely unlikely to happen, not to say impossible.

Organize everything that can be organized. Misplacing, mishandling, miscalculating and lot more other missing/mistaken stuff can be avoided with a better organization and creating a particular place for everything. If you have  a solid organization, then accusations, disputes and such would be less likely to occur.

  Always make a schedule and edit it for the smallest change of events, a swap of shifts, the extra hours work and etc. This, however, sounds so troublesome that if your office is any bigger than 5-6 people, you will need to hire someone as schedule editor. Yet, if you want accurate timekeeping and pay your employees exactly what they’ve earned, no more or less, this is a must. Unless you prefer to save yourself and everyone else the trouble of human errors and start using a time and attendance tracking software.

  Verify everything. With everything that went on the days after the timesheet was lost, I can assume that fear is a strong motivator to keep silent even in front of people who you’ve worked with  for a long time. Also, how can you trust such employee/s they have written their true working hours in the past? Even how can such employees call themselves a team?

I must admit that after this whole story, it was the first time I started doubting everyone who rejects simple management needs because they “trust” each other. Moreover, the capable and awesome manager with a college degree for the position proved absolutely incapable of controlling the work place.

So what do you do to ensure the accuracy of your time sheet and its safety?

You use time tracking software, make actual real personalized schedules, organize and systematize everything. Trust in a team is not build only when everyone likes each other, a team needs a solid base. The team members need to know their work will be appreciated and paid for. Something that can be ruined by a simple thing like a lost time sheet, or underpaid labor.