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If you run a company for any length of time, you know that there are certain activities that really drain the hours that you have available on any given day. You’d love to be getting on with things, but you’re constantly wasting time.
But what are these time wasters at the brand? Let’s take a look.
Unnecessary meetings
One of the biggest time wasters at any company is unnecessary meetings. The idea is to synchronize everybody’s work, but usually meetings end in delays and confusion, and people aren’t moving forward. You’re not building models or systems; you’re simply discussing the weather or circling back issues which should have been dealt with already. What’s more, many people in these meetings are often surplus to requirements.
The way to get rid of these unnecessary meetings is to make sure that every meeting has a compelling reason behind it. There should be an objective and an outcome plus a time limit, for example 30 minutes.
Social media doom scrolling
Another big time waster in your business that you’re probably not aware of is the amount of social media doom scrolling that goes on. Many staff aren’t focused on their work instead they’re scrolling through viral TikTok videos and Instagram reels. In the most challenging cases, workers will say that this is just research time but of course after a few minutes of scrolling it’s easy to scroll for a few minutes more and then suddenly half an hour has disappeared.
The best way to do this is to have a policy on scrolling at work. People aren’t allowed to use social media during the first 7 hours of the day, and then after that, they’re free to check their feeds. This can be a difficult rule to implement when you first do it, but over time, staff appreciate it and they get used to it.
Answering phones
Answering phones is another big time waster in a lot of businesses. Many companies dedicate large quantities of human resources to simply waiting for customer and client calls. You can deal with this with ringless voicemail. These systems make use of AI and sophisticated software to route calls to the people who should be taking them. This means that you can create flow charts to different departments and provide callers with the exact person they need to talk to, to resolve their issue.
Email overload
Would it be fair to say your business suffers from a problem with email overload? If so, you are not alone. This is something that can affect a lot of companies at different times.
The most common reason for email overload is cc’ing too many people into the same threads. That’s why many companies have moved over to Slack. It provides instant messaging between relevant parties instead of including everyone in long email chains. Plus, it makes it much simpler to keep track of who said what and in what order.
So there you have it, some of the big time wasters in your business.
