Stop wasting your team’s time! Top 5 time wasters at work

There is no stop or rewind button in real life. Therefore, proper management of your and your team’s time is the key to fulfilling your job responsibilities. But there’s a catch! In everyday work, you face some old paradigms that reduce the efficiency of your team members. Time wasters at work delay and sabotage your team while they are completing their KPIs. How can you prevent them?

Effective time management brings many benefits to both employees and the entire organization. It increases the team’s productivity, motivation to work, the chance to achieve the goal and reduces their level of stress.

There are many possibilities to increase productivity in the workplace. However, the first step on the road that leads to game-changing solutions is to know the weak points that cause a time waste in your team.

Below, I highlight the top 5 of them. Also, I will show you how to easily prevent them using the example of the Eventory platform. Let’s start the countdown, shall we?

Top 5 time wasters in the workplace

There are several basic time wasters in the workplace that devour the employees’ time and lead to numerous losses in the company. I won’t write about things like solitaire games or water cooler conversations. In most cases, they are more related to employee motivation and proper allocation of tasks. Instead, I will focus on time wasters at work, which results directly from the rules prevailing in the organization. Here are the most important ones.

No. 5: Organizational and communication chaos

One of the main time wasters at work is organizational and communication chaos. It leads to a situation where people associated with the company receive incomplete and unreliable information or do not receive them in a timely manner.

It can have disastrous consequences, especially in the case of large tasks, such as event organization or other event-related articles. Incorrect communication of a team can cause:

•    a cascade of overdue tasks
•    financial losses
•    business failures.

For example, imagine this situation: tickets are already bought, transport is settled. The day before departure, it turns out that no one has prepared updated leaflets, and the roll-up disappeared somewhere. The cause – lack of clear communication and task assignment.

There’s one more shade of this time waster. Lack of communication between the team and the rest of the company results also in misunderstandings and an increase in mutual dislike among employees.

How to enhance the task organization and communication

As I already said, I will use the example of Eventory platform to show you how you can easily prevent a time loss due to each time-waster.

Organizational and communication chaos can be eliminated if you deliver your team a tool that unifies the information flow and grants access to the real-time updates to all teammates engaged in the project. Keeping all vital contacts in one place can be crucial for the event success as well. HackYeah organizers learned it on the living organism – during Wi-Fi failure on a Hackathon.

No.4: Tools – the plague of plenty

A ridiculously large number of organizational solutions brings undesirable chaos to the team. It also requires that the employees master the set of skills necessary to use multiple tools. This often involves the necessity to send them to a series of trainings, or make them read countless manuals (and still grope in the dark while using some of the tools).

Of course, this is only happening in the perfect world. In practice, employees will only use selected tools – those which they know by heart or those who they must use. As an effect, they only get a part of the data which they usually obtain in a not-so-orthodox manner. And most of the times they get it from various sources. Continuous switching from tool to tool consumes their time and corrupts the results. It also applies to the situation in which they have to use software they not familiar with.

However, this is not all. Using too many tools results in the lack of integration between data from different sources. Finding where differences in data come from and sticking reports from several different sources together is an unnecessary waste of employees’ time. How much more convenient would it be if the reports were obtained with one click from one reliable source?

How to reduce the number of tools and increase productivity in the workplace

Aim at the complete martech ecosystems. They don’t require constant updates and costly additions. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to complete information from one platform with another one. It’s good to have separate tools for separate purposes (e.g. invoicing and sales). But it never ends well if you have too many of them in one area.

And now the example. Imagine you organize an event. You have a separate email marketing platform, push notification system, CMS, CRM, and marketing automation platform. No one knows what is the current progress in event organization, because some information has a delay. Some of the platforms are underused or misused because not all team members understand them the same way. The information flow is clogged. And at the end, no one would know which set of data is the most reliable.

If you used Eventory as an ecosystem you could have avoided described disaster. All information would be updated in real time, no data would be lost or changed, and all the reports would be generated with one or two clicks.

No.3: Not tracking the results combined with the lack of transparent KPI system

Transparent KPI system allows you to easily assess the quality of periodical activities. It also allows you to control their cost-effectiveness. In many departments, such a system has been functioning for years. And it gives people a goal-oriented mindset.

Unfortunately, experience (and research) shows that this does not apply to all marketing departments. The majority of marketing specialists who took part in the Demand Gen Report study indicate that every day they are facing a variety of challenges to measuring and demonstrating their impact.

A result is a group of frustrated employees struggling with tasks. They are wasting time on prioritization. Reporting takes them more time than it seems reasonable. And, at the end of a day, they hear that nobody knows what they spent the company’s money for, because no one can see any effects of their actions. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be like this.

KPIs – simple ways to increase productivity in the workplace

This one is easy. Eventory is, above all, an analytic platform, that helps you measure all aspects of offline events. You can check parameters like:

•    venue traffic, so you know which extras attracted the most attendees
•    the popularity of exhibitors, so you know who should be your platinum partner next year, and who you should never invite again
•    interactions between attendees during networking, so you can tell if it was a successful one
•    audience interactions during lectures, so you know which speaker engaged your guests the most
•    leads generated during an event, to evaluate your ROI
•    and so on.

If you can measure everything that matters, you can easily pick the KPIs that are crucial for the event. The team will know what is their goal and how they can evaluate if they succeeded.

No.2: High employee turnover, related to the lack of competencies

Lack of appropriate competence and know-how can cause a huge frustration for employees. This applies especially to positions that require an efficient combination of knowledge from various fields, such as an event manager, who must be a bit of a strategist, a bit of organizer, a bit of content manager, and a bit of specialist in content distribution.

Unfortunately, there is still a myth that working in certain positions, like the already mentioned event marketing manager or social media specialist, can be mastered in a few days. These positions are full of young and inexperienced people. They are on their own when it comes to the know-how and some substantial knowledge. It happens mostly because the predecessor frustrated by the onslaught of duties leaves the company long before they apply for this position. As a result, they are not sure how to achieve their goals. Needless to say, at the end of the day they still have to report their results. This creates great frustration and leads to even greater employee turnover.

When an employee quits it creates numerous problems for the company:

– an urgent need to find a competent successor

– the outflow of know-how from the company

– the need to train a new person.

It generates costs and is time-consuming. With the increase in employee turnover, costs related to the recruitment and adaptation of new employees increase. Staff fluctuation disturbs the company’s activity, the employee’s rhythm of work and leads to a decrease in productivity and revenues.

How to reduce employee turnover?

The first step would be in this case to determine a clear set of goals and KPIs. Use data from the analytic platform. For an event manager, it will be, naturally, Eventory. You can use it also for sales people that attend external events and generate leads and new business opportunities, or HR manager, who is responsible for the recruitment process.

Using this data and combining it with the overall marketing goals of the company, you will be able to set a realistic goal for the team and its members.

Next, you have to create space for your team to learn how to use the tools you provide them with and make the best of them. Set the standards of passing knowledge between specialists and managers. Reduce the number of tools, so anyone has a chance to master them.  

Events can also be an attractive way to gain valuable knowledge. Yes, it generates costs, but if you pick the right people for the right events, the return on this investment will be really satisfying. Through a tool like Eventory planning (a part of Eventory ecosystem) a manager can track team members’ event participation and evaluate if they were worth visiting, and thus pick the better ones in the future.

No.1: Lack of automation of repetitive time-consuming tasks

Nowadays, automation is a must. It allows you to transfer mundane, repetitive tasks to digital assistants. It also works great with the tasks that require in-depth big data analysis or a great precision. The easiest way to understand this through a specific example.

Look at your smartphone. You probably know how much it cost and how easily you can get it on the market. Now imagine that every element of it is handmade and put together by a human. Then think, how much the price of a single model will increase considering how such a change will affect the cost and availability of this model. Now imagine how much time would it take to make every phone. What’s more, think about how much more confident you feel knowing that delicate components are assembled by a precise machine, not a human?

Now, look at your team. How many daily activities, such as:

•       sending lead nurturing emails
•       informing event guests about changes to the agenda
•       setting up a Facebook campaign
•       generating data for the report

would be easier and faster if they were performed with the right tools? How much time would members of different teams save if they could stop doing them today? By the way, if you wanted to check how much time you spend on different tasks, you may want to check this article and learn how to do a time audit.

How to use the automation to increase the efficiency at work?

The wise use of software allows you to take off many repetitive duties with varying degrees of complexity from your team’s daily agenda. This simple act will not only save their time but also grant the same, repetitive quality of certain services. This, in turn, means that employees do not have to get involved in fixing the effects of human error. The return on the investment in the right software is quite fast. What’s more important is, those tools clearly improve the efficiency of the team members.

A real-life example? Here you go! HackYeah organizers wanted to bring the communication with the attendees to a new level. With Eventory they managed to, inform the participants about ongoing food distribution or agenda changes with one simple message, automatically send to all attendees.

This example shows how automation keeps all attendees updated and enhances their event experience. It also increases the work comfort and quality of all employees engaged in the event preparation.   

Time management – what to look for?

Appropriate time management is an extremely important factor that affects the entire company. Through the optimal methods of time management, setting clear goals, elimination of time wasters and providing employees with the right tools you can achieve balance in the enterprise. Put your money on the professional solutions that will change the style of work of employees, eliminate the activities and behaviors that delay regular work and help you skyrocket your company’s success.