Its great you hired the perfect team.
Its great you designed the perfect training plan.
Its great you have the best mentors around.
But, what if your employees are not managing the office time perfectly? What if they are not productive enough? You need to ask. You need to ask yourself the question – what are the time zones at your office. How do the employees spend their time during the working hours.
Few examples of Unproductive Time Zones:
Gossip Time
This is when your employees tend to talk about work, workers, the bosses and what not; Specially, prior to the arrival of the boss at the office. Various gossip zones are active for various departments specially the ones like business development, digital marketing and operations. Its like a morning warm-up for the team members.
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Though there would be few members who will not be involved in such gossips and continue to do their work but yes they have ears too, so they surely listen to what’s being talked about.
Lunch Time
This time zone is generally automatically extended. A 30 minutes lunch may extend to 1 hour – 1 hour to 1.5 hours and so on. Generally managers go late for lunches, and thus they may not be monitoring the exact lunch timing for most employees. Post lunch gossips and meetups are fun for most teams. Talking in terms of productivity, a 30 to 45 minute lunch break is more than enough for anyone and whatever goes beyond that is loss of efficiency. Few employee monitoring software tools have the work breaks feature which help the manager to track the lunch time for their team and this may help streamline the same as well in the longer run.
Feeling Sleepy Time
Here employees feel like taking a nap of sorts. This generally happens post lunch and is a general human tendency. But being habitual of sleeping during afternoon hours is not only hazardous to ones professional efficiency but also bad for health. The best way to avoid the sleepy feeling seems to be having some tea or coffee but the suggested best way is to go for a short walk round the office or probably finish off some phone call along with the walk so as to naturally kill the sleepy time slot and return back to work with the same freshness.
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Snacks Time
This is when employees tend to have snacks, biscuits, something light to fulfil the early evening crave. It could well be chocolates or pastries as well for some. Now many companies have frequent celebrations and parties in the office generally during the same time which is a good practice. Having snacks while work is not the problem, Diverting all your focus only towards snacks is. Employees are recommended to keep something light with them in their bags itself to satisfy this crave rather than walking down streets and wasting time with the tea and smoking hawkers below the office building.
Deadline Time
Once all the above time zones are over, employees finally realize they had some work to do. Its possibly the most productive time zone out of all and also the most stressful one as there is a lot to do and in so less time. Everyone has a daily task list at hand and if you waste your early hours in silly stuff, the deadline time is bound to take a toll on you. In all probability you may not be able to complete all your work and create a backlog for the next day. That’s the actual productivity killer.
If this is the timeline at your workplace, you need to rethink your strategy. You need to start tracking your employees carefully and gain detailed insights of their workplace behaviour.
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We360.ai is a smart employee productivity tool which can help you obtain the required statistics accurately along with time tracking. One can check details like the productive and unproductive time, the work break lengths, manage leave and attendance and tasks as well.
As a manager you need to create proper time zones in your office. Avoid gossip time and extended breaks at the earliest or else they could become the Biggest Productivity Stealers.
Its as simple as that. You must know what your employees are doing, which websites they are opening and when are they the most productive during the day. This would enable your decisions to be data driven and you shall be able to plan the daily schedule at office.
