How many times has your team missed a deadline? Are there any bottlenecks hampering efficiency? Do you think your remote employees have the potential to be more productive? Then it could be time for some performance coaching to improve their time management.
Time is a precious resource for most teams and organizations. Mastering it can be a game-changer in productivity, work quality, and employee satisfaction.
In fact, 83% of people agree that good time management skills improve their decision-making abilities. Plus, businesses that encourage good time management practices can see significant improvements.
So, if you want to enhance your team’s time management, performance coaching is a great solution. Here’s what you need to know to increase efficiency and implement techniques to boost your team.
Key Takeaways
- Identifying time wasters and helping your team improve their time management skills can increase efficiency and productivity.
- Integrating performance coaching requires a strategic approach, from running time audits to establishing efficiency goals.
- Using a time management system across the entire organization makes efficiency easier to manage.
Understanding Performance Management
Performance management refers to strategies that help employees work more efficiently so they can be more productive. Good time management is one of the most important habits to get right for any professional or organization.
If your team has a lot on their plate, proper performance coaching will help them to implement techniques, manage priorities, and ensure everyone gets what they need done, done—all without sacrificing the quality of work.
Depending on each person’s focus, this could include advanced efficiency tactics, like enterprise architecture management strategies. Or it could be as simple as writing a list each morning.
Whatever the case, effective performance coaching is key to success.
The Importance of Effective Performance Management
Proper performance management saves time and money and helps teams work smarter. It also reduces stress and delivers work at a higher standard. This is because it eliminates any rushed work, helping teams deliver quality on time.
Let’s say your team is working on a project where you have to comply with stringent technical requirements, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Without proper performance management, there’s a good chance they’ll rush through these and miss something vital, potentially leading to serious regulatory compliance issues.
The importance of performance coaching becomes even more clear when teams work remotely, as leaders must equip employees with the skills to manage their time independently.
Better time management for remote employees can vastly improve their performance, productivity, and overall well-being. So, better performance management doesn’t only benefit the company, but employees will feel the benefits, too.
Performance Management Coaching Techniques
Ready to master performance management? Here are a few key strategies when integrating performance coaching into your organization.
Identify Time Wasters
The first step in optimizing performance and team efficiency is finding what’s wasting time. You need to know what’s slowing your team down before you can fix it.
Identify any distractions or common time wasters affecting productivity. This could be things like excessive meetings, unnecessary layers of approval, too much multitasking, or not having a clear agenda for the day.
These are all common factors that can muddle teams up and lead them to waste precious time.
One of the best ways to narrow these time wasters down is to get your team to log their activities over a week, blocking out their periods of productivity. You’ll identify common issues that negatively impact time efficiency.
One-on-one coaching is a great way to help employees identify their own time wasters so they can pinpoint what they think is slowing them down. Then, you can support them in working collectively with the team to identify wider bottlenecks. This could include things like a lack of communication or access to resources, which is slowing them down.
Implement Time Management Frameworks
Once you’ve cleared the time wasters and established a more productive calendar, the next step is to equip your team with impactful time management strategies.
This can include techniques like introducing the Kanban scheduling system to optimize workflows. Kanban is one of the most effective lean methods to enhance human workflows.
You might also focus on time-blocking methods to prioritize certain times for specific tasks. This can be a great way to keep teams focused on what matters each day.
Other prioritization frameworks that help teams work more strategically include the Eisenhower Matrix, which ranks tasks based on four levels – a simple way to optimize efficiency.
In doing this, remember that every employee is different. Performance coaching is all about taking an individual approach, so allow each person to implement a system that works best for them.
Use Performance Management Tools
Performance coaching strategies and best practices are important to know. But, they’re only effective when combined with the right tools.
This starts with something as simple as a daily to-do list or a calendar shared among team members. This can be further enhanced with things like Kanban workflow templates, task managers, and time-tracking apps.
Ensuring all of your productive time is accounted for makes it significantly easier to put efficiency methods in place.
Prioritize High-value Tasks
One thing that many performance coaches will say about performance optimization is not to spend too much time on a task unnecessarily.
That’s not to say your team shouldn’t give 100% to their tasks. Instead, they could use lean methodology to complete tasks efficiently.
For example, teams could create a one-pager case study instead of putting together a long and unnecessarily complex document. This still achieves the same purpose but takes a fraction of the time to complete.
The idea here is to focus on efficiency and understand how your team can get things done without putting in extra effort into tasks that don’t add extra value.
Enhance Delegation and Collaboration
An essential aspect of performance is teamwork. As a manager, you need to know when you should spend time on tasks yourself and when you should delegate them.
The same goes for your team leaders and supervisors, who should understand how to make the most of a team’s skills and knowledge to work smarter. This means you can use everyone’s time better and improve your entire team’s productivity.
Performance coaching should cover the principles of effective delegation and when team members should delegate tasks for maximum productivity across the board.
Establishing a collaborative environment within teams is also essential, as this helps teams feel comfortable sharing work and resources to make the most of everyone’s time and schedules.
Collaborative tools and frameworks support this and can help teams share the load and maximize their overall times.
Best Practices for Integrating Performance Coaching Into Your Organization
As you implement the above techniques, keep these best practices in mind to ensure your strategy is effective.
Make the Value of Time Management Clear
Everyone must be on board from the start. So make sure the entire team and company understands the value of time management and how it will help them.
Emphasize the fact that efficiency doesn’t only benefit the organization – smarter working systems help everyone get more joy out of their roles and achieve more in their own professional and personal goals.
Set Measurable Goals
As with anything, you won’t know how well your coaching is working if you can’t measure it. Start by running a time audit.
With Kanban Zone, you can keep track of how much time is spent for each task in your team board. Find out how Kanban metrics can help you improve your team’s time management strategies.
Over the course of a week, ask employees to log time spent on each task or activity. This eliminates guesswork, giving you a clear picture of what blockers hamper productivity and which techniques will be most effective at removing them.
Document the results and work together with employees to set relevant, realistic, and measurable goals. For example, if they spend 3 hours a day looking at emails, work with them to implement a framework to help cut in half the time they spend daily on this task. That could mean blocking out three 30-minute intervals to read and reply to emails throughout the day.
After implementing new techniques, run another audit to see where improvements have been made and where employees need additional coaching or support.
Keep the Team Motivated
It’s important that your team is excited to work towards their goals, otherwise time wasters will naturally creep back in.
Show employees what impact any changes to their time management has had to keep them motivated. And make sure there’s a balance between working hard and finding time for well-earned breaks. Being more productive isn’t about constantly working between the hours of 9-5.
Continue to Optimize
Whether you decide to implement Kanban workflows or shift your team’s focus to higher-value tasks, performance coaching doesn’t stop there. It should include a clear action plan so you can continue to make improvements.
Regularly assess your team’s time management and implement coaching where needed. Adjust your goals if you feel they’re no longer relevant, and use them to set clear KPIs and targets for both individual employees and wider teams or departments.
Conclusion
Performance coaching is not a one-and-done; it’s a constant process of optimization and improvement. Continuously monitor how your organization uses time and where you can make small but smart changes that will have a big impact.
With frameworks like Kanban and the right tools in place, you can coach your way to better time management, increasing your remote team’s productivity, improving collaboration, and boosting employee performance.
This was a guest blog. Please review our guest blog disclaimer.
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About the Author: Diana Nechita
