DAILY CALENDARS OF EMPLOYEES & MANAGERS
Due to my profession and expertise, time management is one of the subjects I focus on the most.
I have read a lot of resources on planning, acting according to the plan, investigating the causes of deviations and then better planning methods, and I have had the chance to make many applications in projects.
I can write dozens of reasons for the deviation of a plan, but in this article, I aim to focus on one of the root causes of deviations from the plan. Therefore, I determined the title of the article as “Daily Calendars for Employees and Managers”.
As the title suggests, we’re going to look at the daily calendars of managers and employees who actually do the work.
If we consider the calendar of a senior manager, we see that it is divided into one-hour or half-hour periods. The calendar is divided into meeting people from different levels of the company at certain time intervals. E.g; 9:00–9:30 meeting with the team. The 10:00–11:00 meeting with the assistant general manager, the 11:00–12:00 meeting with the XYZ supplier and the afternoon are similar. We can think that the purpose of these meetings is to learn the status of current affairs, to inform the upper levels about the progress of the works, to exchange ideas with different stakeholders for the decisions to be taken.
In contrast, when we examine the daily calendar of the employees, the jobs are spread over longer time periods compared to the calendar of a manager. E.g; 9:00–12:00 ABC model design, 13:00–18:00 preparation of the technical drawing of the part received from the customer, etc. Employees have wider time slots in their calendars than managers.
When we try to examine the details of the works, we see that the job has preliminary activities such as the activities of bringing together some materials. We understand that the person who will do the job must prepare in mind and equipment before actually starting that job.
To summarize the above definitions, while a manager’s calendar includes activities mainly to hold meetings at short intervals, the duration of the jobs in an employee’s calendar seem relatively long.
Please note at this point! When a department manager calls his team for a meeting (even for a short time) at any time of the day, team members will have to leave their focused unfinished work. This will cause the staff to lose their concentration.
Studies show that if employees break up unplanned, they spend an average of 15 to 25 minutes to regain their concentration.
However, as the complexity and difficulty level of the job increases, so does the focus time. This will lead to a decrease in productivity in the business environment. It is useful to share the following example to show that inefficiency is not limited to the time spent focusing on work.
Let’s imagine an engineer returns from dinner at 13:30. Let’s say that he did a 1-hour pre-work for the design job given to him and formed the alternative options in his mind. The level of complexity of the work is high and it is possible to encounter high costs in case of mistakes. Assuming that; At 14:30, the Department Manager calls his team for a meeting. Our engineer will focus on different issues at the meeting, and the preliminary part of his work will be suspended for a while. If the meeting starts at 14:30 and one hour passes, the exit from the meeting will be at 15:30. If our engineer takes a 15–20 minute break to clear his mind, he will be able to return to work at 16:00. He needs to spend at least 15–20 minutes refocus on work. Because the complexity of the job is high, our engineer can leave it to the next day to do it with a rested mind. Instead of doing the hard work, he may spend time doing a relatively simple task or have to spend the rest of his time unproductively.
As can be seen in this example, although our engineer seemed to be allocated only 1 hour for the meeting, half a day’s work was lost.
As a result; Especially, senior managers should consider the impact they will have on the performance of their team members while making their daily plans. Managers should schedule activities that might distract the team, such as meetings, at the beginning or end of the shift.
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