Company executives are occupied by telephone calls, emails, instant messages, on-site meetings and conference calls every day, but the company has never had any rules to control these communications, and almost no company can clearly explain how executives and employees should allocate and use collective time. Therefore, it is easy to understand why most companies waste their time on long and frequent emails, instant messages and countless inefficient conference calls and on-site meetings.
The loss caused by wasting time is great: internal meetings occupy the time that should have been communicated with customers, and the company becomes complacent, full of bureaucracy, inefficient, and the cost increases, which ultimately affects the income; In addition, employees spend less and less time with their relatives and friends, and more importantly, they don't get any value by doing so.
We don't lack time management advice, but most of them are aimed at personal behavior. The time management instructor told us to regain the right to control email, carefully choose which meetings to attend and so on. This kind of advice is useful, but executives will soon find that their good intentions for time management will always give way to the requirements and practices of the company. E-mails, instant messages and meeting notifications arrived as scheduled. If you ignore most of them, you are in danger of alienating your colleagues or boss. If your company's communication methods are always complicated, you have no choice but to do as the Romans do: you can only be reluctant.
First of all, reveal the status quo of wasting time with figures.
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, once wrote: "Just as you don't allow employees to steal office supplies, you shouldn't let anyone in the company steal colleagues' time. "Of course, unconsciously," time theft "often happens. Meetings without clear plans or priorities quietly enter the agenda, not to mention those complex issues that require the manager to spend extra time dealing with.
Bain employees are very creative. They used the analysis tools provided by VoloMetrix to study the time allocation of 17 large companies, and got the following conclusions:
Companies often use electronic communication.
With the development of technology, the marginal cost of one-to-one to one-to-many communication has obviously decreased, and the number of people's communication has increased dramatically. Many executives receive about 200 emails every day, which is more than 30 thousand a year. If this trend is not controlled, executives will soon find that they need to spend at least one whole day a week processing all electronic communication information.
The meeting time increased rapidly.
Executives are attending more and more meetings, partly because the cost of organizing meetings is reduced, and partly because meetings are easier than in the past and can be attended by telephone, video and screen. Executives spend an average of two days a week attending meetings of three or more people, while organizations spend 65,438+05% of their official time at meetings.
Real cooperation is limited.
Although the number of one-to-one and one-to-many exchanges has increased rapidly in the past 20 years, it is found that 80% of such exchanges occur within departments, not between different businesses, different functions or between corporate headquarters and branches. They enjoy information for * * *, not for collecting valuable opinions or brainstorming. In short, more and more time is spent on communication, but it fails to promote more effective cooperation between independent units of the company.
There was an increase in unruly behavior at the meeting.
We found that executives habitually send emails during meetings. In addition, it is common to encounter a "crash". These unruly behaviors lead to a vicious circle. Multitasking and dating conflicts make meetings inefficient, and companies have to arrange more meetings to complete their work. More meetings lead to more irregular behaviors, and so on.
There are few formal rules governing meetings.
In most companies, it doesn't cost too much to occupy colleagues' time. If you want to have a meeting, your assistant can send a meeting notice or reserve some time on the team calendar. If you find a problem that needs to be solved, directly launch a solution team to study the problem, and even probably directly launch an action to solve the problem. This kind of request that takes up the company's time usually does not go through any review and does not need formal approval.
Lack of punishment mechanism
In Bain's recent survey, executives rated more than half of the meetings as "inefficient" or "very inefficient". However, few companies have established an independent department meeting efficiency evaluation mechanism, let alone a clear meeting efficiency punishment mechanism.
It is difficult to quantify how much wasted time can be saved, but our data shows that most companies have the opportunity to save at least 20% of collective time by formulating stricter time management regulations.
Second, eight methods of time management
Managing time like a scarce resource, we found the following eight effective time management methods:
1. Make a clear and concise agenda.
A good manager should have the judgment to distinguish between "emergency" and "important". They understand that every member of the team needs to master the knowledge of * * * and know which activities are critical to success. We suggest that the team should also reach a consensus on the priority of time allocation. Employees should not only know how to allocate possible free time at work, but also know what needs to be postponed and what needs not to be done at all.
When it comes to time management, no one can match Steve Jobs. Focus is the key to Apple's success. Every year, Jobs leads 100 executives of the company to go out for training, encouraging them to brainstorm and work out the most important 10 things for the company in the coming year. Executives will show their abilities and try their best to make their proposals on the list. Then Jobs would take out his signature pen, cross out the last seven places on the list and announce, "We can only do the first three." He clearly told everyone present what the company's choice was. Jobs put the past aside to save the future, so that the company can allocate its high-level time efficiently and reasonably and avoid inefficiency and waste. This has greatly accelerated the pace of innovation of the company, making it the company with the highest market value in the world.
2. Managing time with zero-based budgeting method
The smartest companies don't spend any extra time at meetings. If the total meeting time is compared to a time bank, then every time a new meeting time is held, the meeting time will be temporarily "withdrawn" from the bank.
Take Ford Motor Company as an example. When alan mulally became the CEO of Ford in 2006, he found that most of the company's executives spent too long in meetings. At the end of 2006, Mulally asked his team to strictly evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the company's regular meetings, and quickly canceled all unnecessary meetings. The excessively lengthy meeting was greatly shortened, and Ford employees had to make full use of every minute of the meeting time.
The essence of Ford's time management is called "business plan review (BPR)" weekly meeting, which replaces the previous "meeting week". Every week, the company's top management will set aside four to five hours of meeting time to focus on formulating strategies and checking performance. The content of the weekly meeting has a unified standard, which avoids the long preparation time before. The implementation of the weekly BPR meeting saved Ford thousands of hours, especially when rival companies sought government assistance. Ford saved a lot of daily expenses by adjusting time management. In addition, the quality and speed of the company's decision-making have also been greatly improved, and the company's turnover speed has also accelerated.
3. Make a business case for each plan.
Companies often fall into the trap of "active creep", and a large number of seemingly reasonable projects continue to accumulate and increase, but most of them are anticlimactic and endless.
20 13 March, when Gary Goldberg became the CEO of Newmont Mining Company, the company had 87 initiatives in progress, each of which occupied the time and energy of one or more senior executives in Newmont Executive Leadership Team (ELT).
It's time to deal with these delayed initiatives. Gutenberg insists that executives should make business arguments for all the projects that the company is implementing and planning. Before investing in any project, ELT must carefully review all business arguments and then decide whether to approve it or not.
These requirements put forward by Gutenberg have achieved ideal results. Since he took over the company, many projects without business argument support have been terminated, while others have not been approved. In less than three months, Newmont reduced the number of plans on hand by 1/3.
4. Streamline institutions
The more levels between CEO and front-line employees, the slower the information flow and decision-making speed.
We find that if a company adds a manager, it will generate a new workload equivalent to 1.5 full-time employees on average, which means that besides the work undertaken by the manager himself, it will occupy 50% of the work of another employee; Every time a vice president is added, the workload of 2.6 full-time employees is derived. Hiring a new manager or senior manager, and possibly an assistant or office director, will lead to a series of resource consumption, thus further increasing the workload and cost. With the accumulation of work, time becomes more and more scarce.
5. Time investment needs authorization
Many companies set many restrictions on the qualifications of conference organizers. However, the specific details such as meeting time, participants and those who must attend are often left to employees with lower positions to decide. Therefore, expensive meetings are arranged without strict review. Such a problem can't happen in the capital budget management department.
The management of another manufacturing company we cooperated with effectively controlled the inefficient meeting time in only two simple steps. First, they reduced the meeting time from 1 hour to half an hour. Secondly, the management stipulated that the number of participants should be reduced to 7 or less. Any meeting with more than 90 minutes or more than 7 participants must be approved by the organizer's superior (two or more leaders). This greatly saves the company's time budget, which is equivalent to the working time of 200 full-time employees within 6 months.
6. Unified standards in decision-making
Establishing a company-wide decision-making mechanism can greatly improve efficiency and save time in other aspects.
Woodside, Australia's largest independent oil and gas company, is an example. The company has been operating in a matrix structure for many years, but the decision-making power and accountability system are vague. As a result, the time to coordinate various functional departments and business departments has increased dramatically, and the cost has also increased accordingly. In 20 12, the management of woodside formulated a series of operating rules, which clearly explained the responsibility, right and responsibility system of business units, functions and enterprise centers.
This series of changes has brought far-reaching influence. Woodside made clear the person responsible for major decisions, simplified the decision-making process and saved a lot of time. Most of the time is spent on improving execution and discovering new growth opportunities.
7. Companies make time-consuming specifications from top to bottom.
It is unrealistic for the company to cancel all meetings, because it is necessary to hold meetings to study and promote cooperation and make major decisions. By making some simple rules, many companies can greatly improve the quality of meetings.
The agenda is clear. All meetings held by Intel have a clear purpose, such as informing A, discussing B and deciding C. The meeting process is as concise as the meeting goal, and the participants focus on achieving specific goals.
Prepare in advance. At Ford, all weekly business plan reviews must be sent out in advance so that participants can check them before the meeting. This move greatly reduced the time to share information at the BRP meeting.
Start on time. If an hour-long meeting starts five minutes late, it will waste 8% of the meeting time, but many management teams will not allow 8% to be wasted in any other area of responsibility.
End the meeting as soon as possible, especially if the meeting can't produce clear results. When the company's internal meeting efficiency drops, or the participants are not fully prepared, Jobs will immediately "emergency stop". Some people think this is rude, but when the meeting is impossible to achieve the ideal result, it effectively prevents the waste of time and money.
8. Manage the company's "burden" through feedback
As we all know, if there is no measurement standard, management is out of the question.
Many supervisors have begun to check the time they spend on different aspects and different problems. Seagate, Boeing and other companies are trying to give feedback to executives to measure the "burden" they bring to the company in terms of meetings, emails and instant messages. These comparative information, coupled with the guidance of superiors, prompted them to improve their words and deeds.
Time is the company's scarcest resource, but most of it is not used efficiently and reasonably. If you want your employees to achieve the highest work efficiency, you must cherish their time, formulate rules and regulations for reasonable allocation of time, and strive to create the greatest value for the company as much as possible.