Top 10 Time-Saving Tips for Businesses in 2022
Organizations worldwide have realized that time is their most strategic asset. If you can utilize your time wisely, that can directly help you improve your bottom line. On the other hand, even a minor flaw in your time utilization strategy can have a detrimental impact on all aspects of your business.
No matter how driven and focused your organization is, it’s quite easy to lose track of time, so you must make an effort to closely monitor how time is being used. Organizations need more efficient time management strategies and better time-saving tips that can help guarantee top-tier efficiency across decision-making, product development, project management, operations management, problem-solving, etc. Therefore, businesses worldwide are keen to explore innovative ways to save time.
Proven Time-Saving Tips
1. Embrace Automation
It’s no surprise that day-to-day business activities often consume more of your resources’ time than expected. For instance, managing employee attendance manually is not only cumbersome for managers but is also vulnerable to errors.
By automating this activity, you save managers’ and employees’ valuable time. Automated time and attendance software will allow your employees to log and track their attendance data automatically. Smart time and attendance management software can be configured as per your business-specific needs. The software can pave the way for more accuracy and efficiency in attendance monitoring. Employees can also track time spent on different activities, such as lunch breaks, by punching in and out via mobile timesheet apps.
Real-time push notifications available in automated time tracking systems also enable supervisors to review all in and out punches and leave requests. Supervisors can then perform necessary approvals or rejections of punches and leave requests from their team members. Time tracking apps often have intelligent technologies – including voice command, GPS tracking, chatbots, and geofencing – that can further rationalize costs and enhance performance. Similarly, you can embrace automation of other processes in your organization, such as payroll management and accounting.
2. Simplify Mundane Tasks
It is no surprise that your payroll team needs accurate time and absence data for accurate payroll processing. A minor flaw in time and absence data could lead to overpayment or underpayment, which exposes your organization to the risk of non-compliance.
Managing leave requests from multiple employees can become cumbersome for managers. Even more worrying is the fact that you also need to be careful about keeping variables – such as job type, pay rates, pay rules, and balances – correct to ensure accurate payroll processing.
Clearly, the time that your organization wastes on mundane tasks, such as submission and approval of leave requests, should be simplified to save employee time. By simplifying and revisiting your workflow strategies, you can make time for other critical activities and tasks.
An intelligent time tracking system will help you eliminate the challenges of managing your request submission/approval process manually. It also offers built-in labor compliance, including a library of rules that are updated whenever necessary to help you meet state and federal compliance requirements. These solutions can give you the flexibility of a complex set of union rules, pay rates, and other policies to meet the organization-wide requirements of a distributed workforce located in multiple jurisdictions. Further, your HR team can define and manage holiday calendars for different locations and manage payroll accordingly. An intelligent time tracking system will also help your HR teams reduce administrative overheads by offering such settings as accrual rules, including compensation appraisals, carryovers, and overdraw limits.
3. Leverage Analytics
Organizations worldwide manage multiple teams, projects, and customers across geographies. This often makes it a little complicated to create and maintain a single source of truth for all time data. A time intelligence platform can help you leverage the power of analytics to plan your time and promote productivity. Various time intelligence platforms can provide a holistic view of how employees are spending their time. Choosing the right time intelligence platform with built-in analytics capabilities is one of the most rewarding time-saving tips for 2022.
A time intelligence platform helps businesses gain complete control over all business metrics. By leveraging analytics, you can analyze real-time data and generate customized reports for a better understanding of your business. Customized graphical representation of your business metrics will help you improve collaboration among critical stakeholders and teams. It can help you expedite your planning and forecasting.
Built-in analytics capabilities will help you understand where your employees are spending their work hours. When you understand how much time your employees are spending on administrative tasks or mission-critical activities, you can take action to improve productivity. Such insight will help you accurately estimate your resource requirements. This will not only enhance your team’s efficiency but will also help you justify costs.
4. Track Project Time Smartly
Businesses across industries are aspiring to achieve excellence in project time management. They are keen to try new ideas that can help them manage all the tasks and activities of projects efficiently. This brings forth the importance of investing in intelligent project time tracking solutions. The right tool will offer configurable timesheets to capture the information about your resources and business needs.
Besides capturing all crucial information, a project time tracking solution also fosters better collaboration among teams. Your supervisors and project managers get better context about project time entries, remote workforce management, etc. The gained insight will help your organization create better work schedules and project plans to make sure each resource is being utilized to their full capacity. You will also be able to verify billable tasks and non-billable tasks to ensure full coverage across the board and improve resource utilization. Some project time tracking solutions are also empowered with smart work allocation capabilities to make the most of your available time and resources while helping you manage your projects with utmost competence.
5. Intelligent Workforce Management
These days, most organizations are working remotely. But, managing your employees in the age of remote working can be pretty daunting. As remote working often leads to fragmented communication, it can be challenging for managers to ensure perfect sync across teams. Managing all your exempt and non-exempt employees in the age of remote working leads to great confusion if you are not empowered with a smart workforce management solution.
Using intelligent workforce management solutions to manage exempt, non-exempt, part-time, remote, and contingent workforces is a great start. A workforce management solution will allow you to manage the time, schedules, and gross pay of your employees efficiently. These workforce management solutions track in-out times, breaks, and durations that your employees are devoting towards allocated tasks. Organizations can also leverage these solutions to analyze weekly or monthly aggregate hours to manage employees’ gross pay.
An intelligent mobile timesheet app allows you to set productivity goals and provide real-time input to drive the productivity of employees. Your team can set targets and stay accountable for their tasks, while your managers can oversee the progress in real-time. Furthermore, your managers can also suggest or recommend actions to team members so they can accomplish their objectives in a timely manner. Such a collaborative environment not only ensures timely guidance to your remote workforce but also plays a major role in improving corporate morale.
6. Intelligent Resource Allocation
No matter how productive and proactive your work environment is, a project can encounter several challenges during execution. One of the most common challenges is the inability of managers to align projects with the most appropriate, competent, and skilled team. Plus, your employees can become worn out if they are overburdened with multiple tasks and activities. Overwork hampers their efficiency and impacts overall team performance. On the flip side, an underutilized resource means you are spending more than needed. If you have not aligned the right resources to a project, you risk suffering loss.
Resource allocation goes wrong, your business will struggle with high operating costs, and projects will become more time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, efficient management based on team competencies can help you save a significant duration of your resources’ time.
Resource allocation is finding the right balance within a complex system. An intelligent resource allocation system can help you manage your resource pool by keeping a close eye on resources’ current and future allocations. Project managers can also use these insights to raise resource requests, set resource criteria, and locate resources based on availability, skills, departments, etc. Managers can also identify overworked and underworked resources to align them with business goals and reduce their stress.
An intelligent resource allocation system will allow your managers to assign projects, tasks, and programs to resources who possess the required skills and competencies. More importantly, efficient team skill management will also help you identify how to upskill your workforce in a timely manner.
7. Plan Meticulously
Business leaders and managers often encounter emerging challenges in projects, operations, marketing campaigns, etc. Sometimes, you just cannot anticipate or foresee these challenges. However, better planning may enable you to respond more effectively to emerging requirements. It’s sensible to keep extra time in reserve to meet all emerging obstacles in projects and functions efficiently, and successful leaders use tools and charts to plan meticulously.
The use of tools and charts makes planning faster and more accurate. You can create different requirement scenarios and plan how to allocate your resources to accomplish goals. Additionally, these tools also help you keep a close eye on all aspects of daily operations, projects, and business functions. Through careful planning and forecasting, you will be well-prepared to identify and eliminate all the emerging challenges and obstacles. That’s why meticulous planning is among the most success-driven time-saving tips for 2022.
8. Communicate Proactively and Transparently
In a Deloitte survey, 32% of respondents said that ineffective communication is a major barrier to successful technology implementation. Organizations experience many challenges while managing multiple projects and customers simultaneously. Timely communication among all the stakeholders is quite important to meet all objectives within the stipulated deadlines. Even if some tasks can be automated, you must still inform your team about the technology adoption plan.
Managers must therefore communicate with every stakeholder proactively and transparently. They should educate stakeholders about all aspects of projects as they progress through different channels. Managers must also choose the most effective medium to communicate, like email, web conferences, press releases, etc. In some critical cases, you should also create custom-designed templates tailored to meet the requirements of all parties involved. These communications will help all the stakeholders to gain a clear perspective, make more informed decisions, and plan accordingly.
9. Empower Your Employees
Employees are often burdened with numerous responsibilities and tasks. They may find organizing their tasks and setting accurate schedules difficult and, as a result, may fail to meet deadlines. Plus, they may take their managers’ valuable time to discuss and schedule their workload. Therefore, employees often need task schedulers that can help them organize multiple tasks and complete all allocated tasks.
A comprehensive task scheduler allows employees to maintain a central repository of their projects, tasks, and activities. Such schedulers also help them understand how much time is required for any task, so they can set the deadlines accordingly. These schedulers also provide a detailed view of how much time a particular resource has spent on any specific task. Using these task schedulers, you can easily identify where your employees’ time can be saved and utilized. Project managers and leaders can further use this data to forecast timelines and evaluate the efficiency of employees. Thus, empowering your employees with schedulers is one of the most promising time-saving tips that forward-looking organizations must consider.
10. Put a Cap on Meetings
Meetings are a critical part of every business project, but you need to identify how to save time spent on meetings. Some people think that employees spend too much of their time in meetings which hampers their productivity. Although collaboration and discussion are important to accomplish a team’s objectives, organizations need to devise more effective team meeting strategies. Surveys have confirmed that too many low-impact meetings hamper the productivity of employees. That’s why putting a cap on meetings has emerged as one of the most effective time-saving tips for 2022.
Limiting the duration of huddles and meetings can also help organizations save precious time. By reducing the number of hours spent on Zoom calls or meetings, you allow your employees to focus more on mission-critical tasks. This not only paves the way for improved productivity but also promotes better efficiency. Therefore, organizations must chalk out effective strategies that can help them reduce the duration of low-impact meetings. Additionally, it also makes sense to merge two or more meetings into one call whenever possible.
Save Your Valuable Time
There are numerous ways organizations can save their valuable time and utilize it on more critical tasks. Therefore, companies must take great care when planning and implementing new time-saving strategies to ensure they align with the organization’s business-specific needs and priorities.
