Not everyone sees time the same way. If you're not thinking about these differences, you could waste your company's time.
Performance issues often arise when employees and managers realize they have differences in their understanding of time. This quick strategy guide offers five ways for you to examine your own attitude toward time. It also offers tips for planning meetings and improving your team's workflow.
Five Things to Know About Time:
Set Norms. People come from different cultural perspectives about timeliness. Set a norm as a team-- or for the team. It's very common for the Euro-American notions of on-time to be the default setting, without thinking about it. If that is the norm for your team, make sure you establish it as early as possible.
Reinforce. Run your meetings of the team according to the norm you've set. That means, if you agreed on the norm of being on time, start your meetings at the agreed time, no matter who is in the room. You also need to be consistent: don't stop the meeting to catch them up if they're late.
Model behavior. If you've set an on-time norm for the group, you need to be especially conscious of how your behavior reflects that. Be on time yourself and you'll see results.
Be informative. Obviously if there's a new member of the team, you need to tell them right away what you're doing and what your expectations are. But go beyond the new folks, let other teams and departments that you interact with know what your team is doing. This way you'll communicate to other parts of the organization the goals you've set and how you're operating, so they aren't surprised.
Review. Check in and see how your productivity stacks up to the time-sense you've agreed to follow and to other departments in the company. If you're not meeting deadlines or your productivity is dropping, you may come to realize the norm you set doesn't work for this team.
