Commuting
Harvard Business Review suggests that a long commute to work is a problem for many people and a lot of employees are exhausted even before they reach the workplace. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has changed many things, a number of companies still require employees to be on site, despite the fact that modern technologies and remote access systems today allow for most office staff to work from home.
Solution: Introduce a system of at least partial work from home in your team. Do not allocate only a few days a year when an employee might take home office; establish firm and clearly defined rules for working from home.
Meetings
Unimportant meetings at a company consume an enormous amount of time. This applies not only to senior workers in management positions but also regular employees who have to attend meetings where 80% of the time the issues being discussed do not concern them at all.
Solution: Create a system of effective meetings in your team. Set up clear rules regarding the maximum length of a meeting (e.g. 30 mins) and always share the agenda prior to the meeting. Encourage your subordinates to do the same.
Handling e-mails
Handling e-mails, answering messages and constant checking of the inbox costs employees a lot of precious time and breaks their concentration. Thus it happens that a task which would take only a few minutes if they focused on it fully takes them an hour because e-mails keep coming to their inbox and they do not stick to their task.
Solution: Introduce a policy in your team whereby employees only look at e-mail, for instance, during the last 15 mins of each hour. Devote the rest of time to concentrated work. You should also make communication automatic, setting up notification and ticket systems so that for internal communication, employees do not need to send one another e-mails.
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