5 Ways to Effectively Schedule Your Team's Time
Guest Post by Ciara Byrnes
Time management is a key component to retaining high levels of productivity at the workplace.
Without proper time management, organizing meetings, scheduling events, and setting deadlines becomes much more difficult.
Here are four methods for improving your team’s schedule and organizing their time accordingly.
Create a Shared Calendar
When it comes to scheduling, one of the easiest ways to get everyone on the same page is to literally put everyone on the same calendar page.
Everyone must have access to this calendar so that they can see what’s planned for the week.
This way, the efforts of the team will be coordinated in a way that allows everyone to clearly see what others are working on.
This will help with overall sense of teamwork and goal achievement.
To improve productivity and save time for your team, you can develop a blended learning training program that will allow your employees to easily access the latest insights and develop their skills.
Scheduling individual meetings one by one could take quite a bit of time — and getting everyone together for a joint training session can also be inconvenient.
A shared calendar app will allow your team to show when they are available for learning activities.
Furthermore, team leads can also use shared calendars to schedule meetings and important calls without having to send emails or individually ask each member of the team.
Consult Everyone
When it comes to scheduling time for any activity, as a team lead, you must consult every one of your subordinates about their schedules.
Each person on your team could have wildly different schedules and will be free at different times, which means that you must find a way to schedule important meetings and events to suit everyone.
This is why it’s so important to ask every member of the team about their current priority tasks, deadlines, availability, and so on.
The last thing you need is to schedule an important meeting only to have it overlap with an employee’s important customer calls or vacation days.
Be Flexible
More and more workplaces are embracing flexible schedules.
Rigid working hours have their benefits, but recently, with the rise in remote employment, flexible work schedules have become very common.
This is great for many companies who hire remotely since they can accommodate the time differences.
However, each workplace is vastly unique and while flexibility may work to the benefit of one company, for others it may not.
This is why some companies maintain a strict workday schedule and stick to a very specific routine.
In fact, industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and retail are rarely imaginable without a set schedule.
Therefore, using a commercial keyless entry system to monitor employee access and provide security makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, there are plenty of industries like marketing where companies can provide a higher level of flexibility.
For example, if you know that an employee lives in an area of the city that has a lot of traffic, it’s perfectly acceptable for them to come a little late.
If they can still manage to complete all of their tasks on time, then this shouldn’t be a problem.
Keeping flexible schedules can also provide some much-needed versatility during unforeseen circumstances.
For example, say there’s a last-minute, emergency company-wide all-hands meeting.
If your team's entire day is planned right down to the hour, then all that planning goes down the drain when the meeting is announced.
On the other hand, by keeping the daily schedule more relaxed and flexible, you can be ready to accommodate unforeseen circumstances.
Be very strict with time when something is of utmost importance, but for general responsibilities and the daily grind, keep schedules flexible.
Encourage Time Management
Do you know how during certain exams and one-way video interviews, candidates are sometimes asked to answer oral questions within a certain amount of time?
This is not only to test their knowledge and communication skills but also their time management abilities.
Some people are naturally very good at scheduling their entire day and following it to a tee.
On the other hand, some people may not like scheduling, may be very bad at it, or simply can’t remember to do it.
In this case, it’s essential to encourage good time management and instill a culture of scheduling at the workplace.
This can be done in a variety of ways.
For example, the shared calendar application is a great way for people with bad time management and scheduling skills to learn from their peers.
It’s also a great way to remind them about setting their own schedules and following them accordingly.
Another method of improving time management is to have mandatory scheduling sessions.
Sit down with the entire team and ask them what their top priorities are, what deadlines they have, and how they are going to allot their tasks throughout the day, week, or month.
There are also plenty of insightful online courses and on-demand webinars that hone in on employees’ scheduling and time management skills.
Leverage all three of these methods in unison to ensure that your team is on top of their game when it comes to effective scheduling.
Concluding with Scheduling for a Team
Keep these methods in mind when scheduling tasks, meetings, and events for your team.
At the heart of good scheduling is solid communication (which tends to be the case with most things team-related).
So make sure that everyone on your team can voice their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the work schedules and has input on how to further improve it.
Communication is the secret ingredient to effective scheduling and is the basis of how huge teams can function seamlessly, without losing sight of their tasks and priorities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ciara Byrnes spends most of her time reporting on digital marketing for an over-stressed audience of marketers and business owners trying to keep up with the fast pace of change. To center herself, she has become a wellness enthusiast, reaching "highs" like morning yoga on the porch of her family's summer lake cabin to "lows" like failing to convince herself that wheatgrass is actually yummy.