Some businesses feel that they need to squeeze every drop of productivity out of their employees to survive and remain competitive – particularly in this current economic climate. However, all too often, peak productivity is confused with time spent on the job. Though it is rarely openly expressed, employees are almost expected to put in long hours.

However, many studies have shown that encouraging a company’s employees to achieve a good work / life balance can pay dividends in the long term. Here’s an example of just a few business benefits that come out of an individual’s personal development outside of their employer’s premises:

• Employees are much more likely to produce better results due to maintained levels of motivation.

• Employees are less likely to take unauthorised or unwelcome time off.

• Employees are likely to demonstrate more commitment and loyalty to their job.

• Employees are more likely to stay with their company and avoid moving to another job.

• Employees are likely to be physically and psychologically healthier, and as such are likely to have better relationships with their co-workers

• Employees are likely to produce higher overall quality of work, with fewer mistakes. This is especially important if their job function carries a higher level of risk.

If your company is new, or trying to launch a new product or service, it might be worth investing in your personal development by embarking on some management training courses specifically designed to help you reach your target market.

There are professional companies out there that can help you identify the demographics of your customer; physical characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, education and occupation. Also its worth looking at the psychographics; values, attitudes, principles, buying habits, opinions etc.

In addition to the above you can segment your market by considering the following two categories:

Customer Location – people in different places and locations have differing needs and buying tendencies. If you can discover what these needs and tendencies are, your marketing and distribution strategy could therefore be tailored to best meet their purchasing requirements.

Product/Service Benefits – If you know well what your product or service benefits, you can use market research and data analysis to find out which people typically look for the benefits you offer. If you can match your key benefit to the type of customer that values it highly, you can focus your marketing strategy to reach that group.

It’s all about clearly knowing what you have to offer, how it differentiates itself from the competition (unique selling point) and then being able to undertake research, time and effort to get a much clearer a picture of exactly who you need to pitch to.

Tom Peters has an MBA and a PhD from Stanford Business School and is a leading author in the field of business management practice. He worked in management consultancy at the renowned McKinsey & Company before becoming an independent force in the field at the beginning of the 1980s.

The British Department of Trade and Industry honoured him as one of the world’s ‘Quality Gurus’ in 1990, and he received an honorary doctorate from Moscow’s State University of Management in 2004. Tom Peters is regarded as one of the best of the best management thinkers alive today.

His book, ‘In Search of Excellence’, was co-written with colleague Robert H Waterman Jnr and published in 1982. It is something of a bible for management thinkers and became the best selling management book of the last century, selling several million copies in its first four years on the shelf. The book devotes one chapter to each of eight themes that Peters and Waterman believed to be responsible for the success of leading organisations.

One of the core principles within ‘In Search for Excellence’ was the belief that empowering decision makers at different levels of an organisation is vital to solving business problems.

Empowerment is an absolute key topic in management training courses today, and has certainly been influenced by the work of Tom J Peters.

This is the final article in a series, in which we are exploring ideas, methods and principles that will assist the manager in becoming more effective with their time management.

Tip Six: Management Training Courses

You’d send your staff on training courses to build their skills and knowledge. You’d expect these new skills and knowledge to help them become both more effective and efficient in their job. Why wouldn’t you do the same for yourself? Because you don’t have time? If you learn how to become a much better manager by training, you are bound to save time and use it to better effect in the medium and long term

Tip Seven: Learn to prioritise

You can learn how to really use the time honoured time management matrix. This helps you consider which of your activities are Important but not Urgent, Urgent and Important, Urgent but not Important, and Neither Important nor Urgent.

Tip Eight: Use Technology

There’s a plethora of cheap technology available that may be able to streamline systems, procedures and processes that reduce the amount of man hours needed. Talk to a programmer or an IT company as to how you can speed up workflow and save time.

Tip Nine: Delegate

Do you really have to do all that yourself? Let go of the desire to control everything. Delegate tasks to your capable staff; it saves you time, and can improve their job satisfaction.

Tip Ten: Don’t just say Yes to everything

Managers feel that they must always say yes to everything asked of them by their superiors. Next time your boss passes something to you, accept that you could do it, but explain what else you are up to, and ask them to help you decide on the priority of their new task, in relation to the goals you have set for yourself.

This is the second in a series of articles designed to aid the manager in their personal development to improve their time management skills.

Tip Three: Be in control of communication

Do you answer every phone call as it comes in? Do you check and send emails as soon as they arrive? Chances are most of these things do not have to be dealt with the urgency you give them. Decide when you’re not going to take calls or read emails and concentrate on what you really want to be doing. You’d be amazed how much time you waste talking about unimportant things, and writing about unimportant matters. The world won’t stop if it doesn’t hear from you for a while.

Tip Four: Schedule Ahead

Don’t just try and plan a daily schedule. Think about what things you want to achieve in the next week, but don’t put things off until the last moment. Have a weekly plan will give your more flexibility, but also requires discipline to work on the issues you’ve identified as important.

Tip Five: Know your goals

A big failure which results in poor time management occurs when managers worry about urgent tasks in isolation from the bigger picture. When was the last time you considered your personal development and organisational goals? Do the tasks you set yourself help towards meeting those goals, or are they to do with ‘other urgent stuff’?

One complaint that modern day middle managers have, is that they never have enough time to do what they need to do. However, some take the plunge and invest in a management training course to improve their time management skills to improve their productivity.

Here are some pointers that may help you with your time management challenges:

Tip One: The Pareto Principle

Otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, this suggests that the best 80% of outcomes from your work come from 20% of your effort. Can you identify what that 20% consists of? If you can define which activities and efforts have the best knock on effects, you’re on to a winner! This principle also applies to your customers; eighty percent of your best business comes from twenty percent of your customers. Spend less time on these resource leeches and more time on the cash cows!

Tip Two: Track your Effort

Consider keeping an accurate diary for a few days, or a week or two, recording what you actually spend your time doing. Take the data, step back and analyse where your time is being spent, you may be surprised at the results. Try and categorise the work that you do, and consider which of it you can keep, which of it you can drop, and which of it you can delegate.

Renowned author of business and management books, Professor Henry Mintzberg is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of modern management today.

A prolific writer, with over a dozen books to his name, Mintzberg specialist management topic is business strategy. However, his first book ‘The Nature of Managerial Work’ was published in 1973, coming from his PhD work, and is regarded as rare in that it discusses the work managers actually do, not what its considered they should do.

Most people looking for the ultimate in management training courses consider the MBA as pinnacle. Not Mintzberg, he’s been an outspoken critic of the MBA for some time, and with his colleagues has developed an alternative – the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPM).

In an interview with Thinkers 50, he commented:

“Basically my objection is that MBA programs claim to be creating managers and they are not.
The MBA is really about business, which would be fine except that people leave these programs thinking they’ve been trained to do management. I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on their forehead and underneath should be written “Warning; not prepared to manage”.

And the issue is not just that they are not trained to manage, but that they are given a totally wrong impression of what managing is; namely decision-making by analysis. The impression they get from what they’ve studied is that people skills don’t really matter.

So they come out with this distorted view. I’ve seen it over and over again where people have MBAs and go into managerial positions and don’t know what they are doing. So basically they write reports and plans and do all sorts of information processing things and pretend that it’s management. It’s killing organisations, and I think it’s getting worse over time.”