How Valuable is your Employees’ Time ?
VALUE OF YOUR EMPLOYEE’S TIME - Do You Value the Time of Your Employee
“Employees are our Real Assets”, “People are the key”, “People First” and many other similar mottos that organisations have adopted overtime to motivate themselves and their employees. These value phrases are absolutely essential to keep reminding to oneself that the employees are, indeed the real assets for an organisation. A little sensitivity is required to realise this concept and feel it. It is easy to treat this as a cliché. But to the extent of my interaction with the Top management of various companies, I do find that, this value phrase is accepted in letter and spirit.
Ok. So what is the point? Here is the point. If employees are the true assets of the organisation, is the organisation getting the most out of them? Is the organisation able to motivate them to perform and give their best towards organisational goals? I would rather be cynical here and say that most organisations are not able to get the best out of their employees. There are various reasons for this. But the one that I want to focus in this post is about the “value of employee’s time.”
Do organisations really value employee’s time? Or in other words, do organisations facilitate an environment where employee’s time really gets the value it deserves? I guess not. Organisations tend to slip here. There are constraints – cost pressures, target achievements, promotions and increments at stake, employee’s often felt need to be on the good books of the supervisor and other seniors in the organisation who can impact their performance appraisal, pressures of office politics / perception management etc. The list can go on. Besides the core work related challenges of an employee, an employee in today’s competitive environment is required to wade through a rigmarole of socio-political balancing in his / her workplace. He / She often is under the pressure of being ‘politically-correct’ at the workplace to claim his / her promotion or increment or that appreciation letter. This drains employee’s productivity significantly and consequently organisational productivity.
Everyone today openly accepts this truth, but very little is done to change it. In fact, it is openly admitted that this cannot be changed.
Ok. So what’s the point? Here’s the point.
You can mitigate the drastic impact of this pressure upon an employee, by starting to ‘Value” your employees’ time. Yes. Convey it to all employees, through words and actions that the organisation values the ‘time’ that the employee gives to the organisation. And ways in which you can convey these are many…a few given below. Some of these may sound like experiments. Yes they are….and you are free to have your own take.
- Keep official meetings as minimal as possible. And call only those people for the meeting, that matter. More often, too much time is spent on meetings, without actually making any real headway on any topic.
- Work towards reducing the ‘noise-level’ in the office. Reduce talking and encourage exchange of emails / chats for discussions. Do not encourage ‘shouting’ or ‘yelling’ at the top of one’s voice to show sign of his / her superiority. One way of doing this is to remove all desk phones / intercom instruments. Less time spent on talking and more on work. Use mobile phones where it is absolutely necessary to immediately speak to someone. If one needs to talk to another employee, you either call on the mobile phone or walk upto him / her. Or you can send him an email and ask for a response.
- Encourage employees to avail the leave that is allocated to them. So if an employee has a PL of 20 days in a year, encourage the employee to take that leave. The supervisor must ensure that his / her subordinate takes the allocated leave.
- Appreciation / awards or compensation need not be always in the form of money or prizes or gift vouchers. Try this. As a token of appreciation for some good deed done by an employee, give him / her one extra day of leave.
- Increase the PL allowance in a year by a few days.
You can think of many other ways……..In a nutshell, find ways to encourage your employees to spend time with their families…..with the ones they truly love 
For most people, working for earning ones salary has become a necessity, rather than something that one enjoys doing.
As an organisation, acknowledge this and over a period of time, your employees may actually start enjoying his / her work in the company. Isn’t that your ultimate objective to realise the motto, “People are our real assets”.
Sitaraman is an experienced management consultant, having worked in senior positions with various corporates and having handled various functional and training projects with employees of large corporates. You can write to him at [email protected]. You can also connect with him through this website – www.sineedge.com.
Photo: Gfpeck/Creative Commons
