At CaptureLeave we’ve developed a simple but powerful tool to help companies more effectively track and manage employee leave time, but there’s more to “time” at any workplace than just tracking employee time away from work. Every company also wants the time employees spend at work to be as productive as possible. If one of the goals at your company is to improve workplace time management, it will be worth your while to look at some of the ways you can help employees optimize the workflows of their daily routines.

Reducing Wasted Time is the Way to Improve Workplace Time Management

In 2014 the number of workers who admitted to wasting time at work reached an all-time high of 89% whereas in 2013 that figure was only 69% (as reported in Forbes)! Yes, lots of time gets wasted in the workplace, and not all of it can be blamed on the distractions of the Internet, mobile devices and social media, although those are the most frequently cited sources of distractions. Employees don’t tend to report “lack of optimized workflow” as a reason for wasted time, but you can bet it applies to lots of workers – it’s just that many of them don’t even realize it. And yes, to use a well-worn phrase, the goal is to help your employees work smarter, not necessarily harder.

Improve Workplace Time Management by Automating or Streamlining Regular Tasks

Those routine tasks that have to happen every day as part of the job can actually take up a surprising amount of valuable time. Things like expense reports, payroll, timesheets and time tracking can all be streamlined or automated with technologies available today, often through simple cloud-based solutions. These are the tasks that also make workers feel like just another cog in the machine, so reducing the amount of time spent on such things has an immediate morale-boosting effect – and they’ll have more time to devote to more substantive work you need them to do.

Cutting back on Meetings will Greatly Improve Workplace Time Management

Despite how much just about everyone hates too many meetings, companies still seem to have more and more of them. Here’s the shocking reality – not only do professionals have on average more than 60 meetings every month, nearly everyone attending those meetings admit they daydream or even doze off during some of them. Meetings break the flow of work many people need if they’re going to stay focused and get important things done. Yes, there will always be a need for some meetings, but anything you can do to reduce the overall number of meetings taking place will greatly aid in the battle to improve workplace time management. And if you do need to have a meeting, the least you can do keep it as short and focused on a concrete task as possible – that means establishing a clear agenda that you stick to, and reducing potential sources of distractions that might draw focus away from the task at hand. Make use of shared calendars so meetings can be grouped in a way that still preserves large chunks of uninterrupted work time.

Improve Workplace Time Management with Collaborative Workflow Tools

Tools like Asana or Trello are a great way to add transparency to teams in terms of deadlines and tasks that need to be accomplished. Making good use of collaborative workflow tools can help reduce the amount of time spent emailing back and forth to a team, which can often result in a confusing loop of communication that does more harm than good. The platform acts as a central clearinghouse for task-oriented communication.

Delegating Decision-Making to Improve Workplace Time Management

This might seem like another no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often it simply doesn’t happen. Your employees need to be able to complete their work without a bunch of obstacles standing in their way. Too many employees are still micromanaged to an unhelpful degree, so it pays to find ways to free them up to get work done. They need the flexibility to focus during whatever part of the day they know they’re more productive. And they need the freedom to establish their own workflow that makes the most sense to them.

Any company that adopts these ideas for optimizing workflows will undoubtedly improve workplace time management. Since tracking and managing leave time is one of those routine tasks that can suck up valuable time, sign up for a free 30-day trial to discover how it solve that problem for your company!