4 Tips for Optimizing Your Employee’s Daily Workflow Routine

How much time do your employees waste at work? A whopping 3 out of 8 hours, not including lunch and other scheduled breaks. Lost productivity is costing companies big time: in money, resources, and potential growth.

Not all time wasting is due to distractions like Facebook or Fantasy Football. Some employees simply haven’t managed to get their daily workflow routine down to a science. Office life can actually be hurting, rather than helping your employees reach their goals. There’s a better way to get the most productivity out of the hours your employees do work. These four tips can help your employees work smarter, not harder. Here’s how to optimize your employees’ daily workflow routine.

1. Streamline or automate regular tasks.

Some of the biggest time sucks in an office are the routine tasks that come with being part of a growing organization. Timesheets, expense reports, payroll: there’s an automated solution for many of the most time-consuming tasks in an organization, from your time tracker to your accounting processes. These daily to-dos can not only take up much of the day’s productive hours, but also be morale-killers. No one likes to feel like a cog in a machine, and these kinds of quotidian tasks can often become mind-numbing – making it easy for your employees to procrastinate. What can you automate to free up your best minds for more important, strategic work?

In addition to automating, seek areas where you can streamline parts of the daily workflow routine. Tools and platforms are helpful until they aren’t, meaning if you have too many different tools and platforms, your processes can suffer the consequences. Are you overcomplicating the daily workflow by using too many solutions to achieve a simple outcome? Some organizations are guilty of using multiple communications platforms (think Slack, Skype for Business, and e-mail), making it hard for employees to stay focused on their priorities. Try to standardize and simplify your processes to cut down on distraction.

2. Cut down on meetings.

Meetings are almost universally loathed among managers and employees alike. In one study, US professionals reportedly attend over 60 meetings per month, in which more than 91% of respondents spent meeting time daydreaming (and 40% admitted to dozing off).

Most meetings are time suck that interrupt the daily workflow routine and prevents an employee from staying focused. At best, they might manage to clear up a few blockers that exist between departments or teams. At worst, they’re corporate-sponsored naptime. If you can, cut down on the number of meetings by using an open communication tool like Slack.

Alternately, look for ways to improve the meetings you absolutely must have. Instead of 60 minutes, make them 30 minutes. Go into every meeting with an agenda, and only invite the most essential participants. Ban laptops or other distractions from meetings where you must have a specific outcome — this will prevent people from wasting time in the meeting. If you are meeting with someone one-on-one, take into consideration what the rest of their day looks like. Clustering meetings together can leave larger chunks of time for workflow to continue uninterrupted. Shared calendars can give you visibility into your employees availability.

3. Use collaborative workflow tools.

An easy way to optimize workflow is to add transparency to your teams tasks and deadlines. Collaborative workflow tools like Asana and Trello can show how different priorities are being accomplished and moving from one team member to the next. Reduce email by posting comments directly on tasks. Clear blockers before they happen by anticipating where a task will need more resources or a when a team member is being overwhelmed. The insight that a collaborative workflow tool provides will allow your team members work at their own pace and discretion. Likewise, you can put standard processes into practice by automating anything outside the workflow and protecting the daily routine your team needs to succeed.

4. Delegate and empower decision-making.

One of the fastest ways to optimize your employee’s daily routine? Empower them to complete their tasks without roadblocks. Divide labor and assign projects to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Make sure it’s clear to the team who is responsible for what — especially if you have remote employees. Less is more, and the less micromanaging the better.

Create accountability and allow your employees to be in charge of their own routine. People work better at different times of the day; others need to collaborate, versus work independently. Allow your team to determine their own workflow routine, and ensure everyone stays on task and liable for their own success.

At the end of the day, the best way to optimize workflow is to create the environment that makes it possible for employees to stay on track and productive, and then let them thrive. Remove obstacles – like daily time sucks – from their routine, put the right tools in place, and reduce the amount of wasted minutes in the day with the optimal workflow routine.