6 Things to Improve Your Team Time Management Skills

Time management is very important to any organization and mastering this skill ensures that you can accomplish all the to-dos and daily responsibilities efficiently.

It can be a real struggle as there is so much to get done in your personal life and at work but there are not enough hours in the day to get them done. As a manager, this becomes even more difficult as you not only have to manage your time, but also the time of everyone else on your team. Before you dive into time management techniques, you first need to understand what time management for a group is all about. 

What Is Team Time Management?

Team time management is a bit different from individual time management. It speaks to the organizational flow which is centered around the groups of persons working together instead of the individuals.

Flexibility and adaptability are essential factors in team time management as you must be able to change course based on the team’s commitments and unexpected events that can arise as you sit in your office ergonomic chair around your office standing desk. 

Teamwork entails grouping a certain set of people with various skills, talents, and abilities to achieve a common goal. For a team to truly be effective in time management, a good leader or manager is required. This one can communicate and coordinate actions while being dependable and skillful. 

Why Is Team Time Management Important?

Poor time management often leaves individuals stressed far beyond missing the deadlines and working overtime can. Team time management is important as it can:

Reduce Stress

When you are bad at managing your time, you are unable to prioritize your tasks, which can lead you to feel overwhelmed. That feeling can translate into nervousness, fear, and misreading situations. Eventually, you start panicking and making mistakes under the pressure.

Being part of a team where each person reacts differently under stress and pressure can create inter-team problems such as blaming. Good team time management tool can ease all that work-related stress and frustration encountered daily. 

Improve Collaboration

Persons are more likely to extend a helping hand to someone they are on the same team with. When a team can track and learn how to manage their time together, more tips and tricks are shared among the group that can help when mistakes are made.

Keep Each Person on the Team Up to date

Even with all the time management apps and service options that were created to track what persons are doing, it can still be hard to consistently keep track. Communication related to task progress is crucial to maintain the healthy dynamic of the team and project. Transparency must be present to keep persons out of the dark. 

Team time management habits can increase the said transparency. When everyone is keeping track of what is being worked on, prioritizing becomes easier. This necessitates less chatter in the group channels for progress reports and fewer group meetings. 

Everyone Is Informed

As soon as the group kicks off the project while tracking their time collectively, the bigger picture becomes as clear as time goes by. Having meetings and creating reports or agendas becomes much easier the progress can be evaluated against a benchmark. Time management in teamwork gives members the idea of how each element affects the group and the overall project. Team members can also easily identify and address any problem in record time.

Things to Improve Your Team Management Skills

Block out Interruptions

As a manager, a time management idea for the team to work faster is to limit the number of interruptions. Additionally, ensure the team is kept focused on the top priority assignments and tasks. While it is true that after a distraction one can work faster and compensate for the lost time, it is also true that frequent interruptions can cause you to lose track, become fatigued, stressed, frustrated, and even forget what you were doing. Happy, healthy, and focused employees with supportive organizational culture are essential in the organization’s long-term productivity. 

Create a Schedule or Agenda and Stick to It

Another team time management tip to improve your skills is to organize and prioritize your days and weeks in advance. Anything can pop up, but knowing what the day entails and the kinds of tasks and assignments you have can make surprises a little easier to handle and fit in.

Never Procrastinate

A time management mistake you do not want to make is procrastination. If you can get it done today, do it. As a team, you always want to maximize your time completing all your tasks. You can do it with team time management tools. Doing so can help build your time management skills and give some breathing room to regroup at the end of the day or week.

Start Your Meetings on Time and End Your Meetings on Time

As simple as it may sound, commencing your meeting on time is an easy way to remain efficient. If you have a team meeting that started late, you have lost precious time that could have been spent addressing a burning issue.

Having back-to-back meetings is also a problem that can be a gateway to many delays. Allocating the time, using it wisely, and respecting other people’s time by ending meetings at the time indicated can improve your time management skills and the team’s productivity and performance. 

Abstain from Tedious Tasks

Avoid assigning tedious tasks to team members, such as taking notes or jottings, filing, surveying, and writing reports, and moving ergonomic office furniture when they are not necessary. If you cannot eliminate or abstain from these tasks, then try simplifying or limiting them as much as possible. The more time an employee spends on these things, the less is available for pressing matters. 

Remind the Team of the Deadlines

While nobody likes deadlines, they are always present. As a manager, you can help team members by exercising proper management of priorities. You can try reminding them of the deadlines in a way that is not frightening or imposing and is instead just a friendly reminder. A simple milestone tracker can work on a whiteboard to make team members more cognizant of their timeframe and limitations.