Work Habits That Waste Time
SNAPS DAY 315
11/11/20222 min read
I used to fill up my calendar with endless back-to-back meetings with my direct reports, skips levels, heads from other departments and clients. Later on, I realized while they love to connect, they also need to perform the work we agreed they must do. This means they need more time working instead of so many times meeting with me. What I did was I made my touch points with my direct reports for 30 minutes once a week, I greatly reduced meetings with everyone else to 30-minutes once a quarter. This change helped me have more time for myself to strategize, accept requests for mentorship & coaching sessions from leaders outside my organization, learn new things for myself, and spend more quality time with loved ones.
I used to write a ton of emails daily. Later on, I decided to pick-up the phone or walk-over to my Associates' workstation and discuss only critical topics. What has been creeping up as an alternative to emails in the last decade are messaging apps. I have decided to reduce group chats and just connect with the person directly. These changes helped increase empowerment and trust with my leaders, swift resolution of critical topics that truly matters, and strengthen overall professional relationships.
*About the photo
Office Politics and Gossips are the worst time wasting activity. While I am not a fan of this, I realized as a leader, I need to be in-the-know of what is going on in my Teams to ensure everyone is engaged, satisfied, happy and there is high trust in my organization. This is one of the reasons why I implemented Open MIC (My Insights Count) Survey. This is a “safe space” for all Associates to express their sentiments, emotions, insights, problems, complaints, escalations and suggestions about anything and everything under the sun or moon if you work in the Philippine IT-BPM industry. I have a dedicated Focus on Associate Work Stream (FAWS) who professionally analyze 100% of the feedback, trends and provide solutions to these comments. They present the finding to me and the Senior Leadership Team. Then, we communicate these back to the entire organization through a fun Newsletter and video on “What They Said and What We Did” including an update for topics wherein we need more time to resolve, and those that we honestly cannot resolve.
Here is a screenshot of one of the newsletter videos we published to the entire Site.
