When you are in business, you are paying for the time that your employees spend at work, which makes just how they spend that time pretty important. That’s why it is essential to get your workforce to focus on the things that are the most crucial first and reduce distractions and trivial tasks that are sapping their time. To find out how to do this read the post below.

Printing

Printing seems to be the bane of many work environments. It wastes expensive resources such as paper, ink and energy. More often than not, printing wastes time as well. This is because employees have to go and get what they have printed out from the printer , often returning for a second or third time if the print wasn’t completely successful.  The funny thing is that most of the things that are printed don’t actually need to be as they could just be read from a computer screen instead. This task is practically a worthless exercise.

To deal with this issue, it’s best to limit the number of printers in the work environment. Ask your IT department to unlink each computer from the printer. Then if a member of staff does desperately need something printed off, he or she can go to a nominated person to get this done. This strategy will dissuade overuse of the printer and minimize waste of resources and time.

clock on desk

What trivial tasks are sapping your employees time? Image

Workflow

Next, a huge area in which time is wasted is within the actual workflow processes that are set out for your employees to follow. These need to be as time- and labor-efficient as possible, but unfortunately many aren’t.

There are several ways of dealing with this, though. One is to complete an internal audit, taking note of unnecessary tasks that have crept into the workflow routine and are sapping time. Using software that helps to streamline the workflow for everyone involved can be useful.

Just remember that you will get the best results by picking software that is designed especially for the business you are in, such as the Medical Director software for doctors and health centers. After all, you want the folks that design such software to be aware of the challenges and problems your team is likely to face during the day, as well as how to deal with them while staying within the workflow plan. Getting an industry-specialized program is the best way to do this.

Emails

Emails –  they are a wonderful way of communicating instantly and bringing the whole team up to date. However, they can also be a major time sap if people are using them incorrectly. There are two main offenders for this sort of thing.

The first is the person that clicks reply to all. Dealing with this is easy. Just remind them not to. The second is the employee who checks their email every 10 minutes and has their automatic notification on. This is a bad idea as it constantly distracts them away from the task they should be doing. Instead, advise a 10-20 minute email checking and responding session twice a day and limit it to that. This is something that is seriously effective in reducing time wastage and increasing productivity in your business.