Time Management Of Employees During Change Management

It’s easy to warp the time management of employees when change is urgent and complex.

When it comes to change management, the time management of employees plays a key role. It tests change leadership. Even during normal times, it’s easy for managers to delegate to their people. It’s easy for them to take on requests from other areas. All this can subvert driving change.

When Delegating Becomes Dumping

Yes, delegating can empower. Many times though it’s dumping. Dumping occurs when managers feel the need to clean their plates. Sometimes it’s just to show they acted upon a task assigned by saying, “Yes, I’ve assigned it to Mike.” Other times those with an obsessive conscientious personality trait dump just to scratch something off their to-do lists.

Dumping undercuts and demoralizes employees in three main ways:

1. New tasks disrupt old priorities so balancing these wastes time and frustrates.
2. Even if the tasks are better ways of doing current work, too many at once overwhelms.
3. If current tasks already tax employees, more just injects a sense of helplessness.

The Time Management of Employees Needs Vigilance

Thus, the time management of employees needs vigilance. It does not happen on its own. That means guarding employees’ time.

No matter how urgent the tasks or how good the ideas, dumping too many on employees at once is one of the worst business management mistakes to make. It’s like watering plants too much. They drown. They die.

That means to avoid dumping, managers should give employees six things:

1. Help prioritizing the new tasks with the old, pushing old ones aside for the moment
2. Only a few new tasks at a time, planning others according to a schedule
3. Time to get work done, canceling auto-scheduled meetings and discussions
4. More one-on-one management support, targeting efforts rather than wasting everyone’s time in catch-all problem resolution team meetings
5. Better protection from the demands of other units, meaning managers either defer, delay or decline requests
6. Help more of the work, doing tasks that they would normally assign

Of course, an ebb and flow exists with these six tips. The form of time management of employees varies. Here, a step approach to assigning new tasks works well.

New tasks show up. Employees adapt. They show success. They gain comfort and confidence. Then, managers introduce more new ones. They repeat. This is how managers manage the time management of employees during change management.