PERSONAL SPECIAL ..................Stop Wasting Your Co-Workers' Time With These 5 Habits

Stop Wasting Your Co-Workers' Time With These 5 Habits

Let's face it, how much of your nine-hour workday is actually spent productively, efficiently, and effectively? What was once countless work hours wasted on small tasks and superfluous conversations can now be tallied up using Big Data.

A number of companies have started tracking employees' emails and calendars to see how they are spending their workdays. According to The Wall Street Journal, companies like Seagate Technology are leveraging data-mining tools like VoloMetrix to quantify the biggest time-suckers in the workplace.

Some employees at Seagate discovered they were spending more than 20 hours a week in meetings. The company also discovered that one particular firm was producing nearly 3,700 emails and taking up 8,000 work hours a year from 228 Seagate employees.

Tools like VoloMetrix don't share names of employees, they simply aggregate email headers and calendars to determine where groups within the company or the company as a whole is spending its time. Through its analysis and studies, VoloMetrix, along with Bain & Co., discovered some interesting themes of where time was being wasted across the board. These are some of the big time suckers:

1. Unnecessarily large meetings.

Meetings have always been known as time suckers, but the key to making sure they are productive and not just a waste of your employees time is to avoid inviting too many people to meetings and make sure the people who are at the meeting really need to be there. Bain partner Michael Mankins suggests keeping meetings to a maximum of 7 attendees to be most effective and efficient. You also want to avoid inviting different levels of managers to the same meeting.

2. Emails from executives.

Any subordinate employee feels obliged to open an email from a higher-up, but this can end up taking up way too much of their time. Some managers take up more than 400 hours a week of their coworkers' time, meaning that a company could hire 10 full-time employees just to read one manager's email and attend his or her meetings.

3. Answering emails that don't require a response, and reading unnecessary email.

Oftentimes employees will worry that they're insulting a colleague by not reponding to an email, but the truth is they are probably just wasting everyone's time. An email saying, "Got it, thanks," isn't really helping anyone.

4. Too many people CC-ed and too many reply-alls.

Do you really need to be emailing half of the company? It's probably not necessary to copy tons of people on that email. And you definitely should avoid emailing mass group lists. These only lead to more reply-all emails, and even a quick "Okay" replied to a mass email forces everyone on that list to take the time to delete it.

5. Lengthy emails in general.

Going on and on about an idea you have for a project is not only taking up too much time from coworkers, but it's also not productive. Recipients won't be able to concentrate for the whole email and a lot will be lost. Instead, try using collaborative platforms that are built specifically for working in a group.

http://www.inc.com/rebecca-borison/these-are-the-five-biggest-time-wasters-at-work.html?cid=em01014week49b