Effective executives know that time is the limiting factor. . . .Of the other major resources:
- Money is actually quite plentiful
- People, the third limiting resource: one can hire, though one can rarely hire enough good people
- But one cannot rent, hire, buy, or otherwise obtain more time
- Peter Drucker
- Do you ever fell rushed, hurried, with not enough time in the day to get everything done?
- Do you ever feel like you spend too much time on the same issues or problems every day?
- If you feel this way, your organization does too
The experts agree the quickest way to create more time is to stop doing something that is counter or non-productive. When I was the Chief HR person for four companies - we cut our employee turnover dramatically. One of the major benefits was a significant reduction in time the field operations spent on scheduling employees. A peripheral benefit was the reduction in frustration felt by the operations personnel.
When our turnover was high it took dramatically more time to determine which employees were available and could complete the work in each of the different service lines. Many times we lost work because we did not have the necessary skills to do all the work offered to us. It was also more difficult and took more time to schedule work in the future and respond to work sold by the sales people.
All of this put more pressure on the employees who were still with us. This exacerbated the employee turnover problem as the issues the employees were already dealing with are made worse by the increased demands on their time.
When we cut our turnover, all of this time was transferred to selling, quality control, service line cross training and customer service. We were also able to reduce the amount of time spent on redundant training – training of new employees. The increased time spent in these areas led to higher revenues and profits.
You choose how you are going to spend your time. Do you want to spend it on fighting the same old problems or increasing revenues and profits?
