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Work-life balance: the Holy Grail of employers. None more so than fast-growth companies, where there can be a culture of working long hours to meet demand. But what if you could complete the same workload in fewer working hours – simply by cutting out all the distractions in your day?
You might feel that it wouldn’t save that much time, but a study by Basex shows that workers can lose as much as three to five hours a day to interruptions.
Interruptions from meetings
Around 31 hours a month are spent in useless meetings. Regus research shows that an average of 23% of companies around the world wastes time travelling for meetings as no other space is available – a figure that rises to almost a third in Brazil and India. Video conferencing and easy-to-book meeting rooms are a step in the right direction.
Setting a policy where meetings can only last 15 or 20 minutes and have a fixed number of attendees can dramatically reduce time spent in meetings; when you get to a low monthly number, you can replace them with a weekly internal status report where everyone types a line on their progress.
Interruptions from emails
The average business person receives 122 emails per day – not surprising for fast-growth companies where one person is wearing several hats. Even one minute spent reading each means two hours lost.
Migrating in-house communication to real-time platforms like Slack and Asana saves you the need to forward chains around the office and allows anyone to search for information without asking their colleagues.
Interruptions from bosses
Following this approach – if you’re in a managerial position – the last thing to go could be you. Once you’ve eliminated meetings and internal emails, you’ll realise how interconnected your ‘real-time’ synchronised way of working is making your team. In other words, you don’t need to have a ‘boss’ to keep checking in on everyone – because everyone does it themselves.
By this point, you’ll have cut out up to two hours of your working day – meaning you can reward your employees with a shorter working day. And with happy employees being 12% more productive, it’s a win-win for your business.
