Time Management: ALIGNING VALUES TO PRACTICES

To help your organization and employees make the best choices with how to use time, you have to determine values as a guide for what’s most important. The process of creating organizational values looks something like this:

1. Examine your purpose as an organization.
2. Develop a vision for what you want to accomplish.
3. Set concrete goals to make that vision a reality.
4. Evaluate the actions and attributes that led to goals being successful and create values from those.

Many executives understand this process. But there are real human limits to each of these steps and failing to recognize these limits can lead to an overall strategy that expects more from its employees than they have time to give. When leadership teams overreach on their mission, vision and goals, they often do so because they don’t want to limit the organization’s potential. They focus on getting ahead and don’t stop to ask, “Should we do this?” Then, at the same time, the employees don’t want to disappoint the leadership team by missing their expectations, so they hesitate to give honest feedback about their time constraints for fear that it will come across as complaining.

It’s a trap that can leave employees burned out and disengaged, all while the organization only achieves a portion of the results it listed in its vision statement. Without values that actively address overwork, it can be all too easy to create a stressful cycle of expectation and peer pressure that sweeps up everyone in your organization. That’s why your organization’s values need to be the most important part of your leadership decision-making process. The most effective values define how you’re going to accomplish your goal by outlining your aspirations for your company, describing the reality of your organization’s culture, and setting important limits. When your values align with your employees’ real experience, they become more than just pretty posters on the wall. As you make decisions that are consistent with these values, your employees know what they can expect. So, if we’re going to align our organizations with our employees’ reality, we need to recognize the challenges that they face in managing their time to meet our expectations. Then we need to do what it takes to train our employees on time management at the individual level while facilitating time management at the organizational level.

SOURCE:  Bamboo HR

Tags: mission, orgainzation, organizational structure, purpose, time management, values