Time Is Your Scarcest Resource

culled from:ceo.com

Former CEO of Intel Andy Grove once wrote, “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”

Time is the most valuable asset in an organization and yet it consistently goes mismanaged by even the best of companies.

One of the major culprits behind time mismanagement is the number of meetings we attend. According to research in the Harvard Business Review, executives average more than two meetings a week and a staggering 15 percent of an organization’s total time is spent in meetings. In addition, executives often double-book meetings or decide last minute which meetings to attend. These kinds of behaviors waste time and detract from the company’s goals.

Studies have also shown that the overall number of interactions between a company’s different departments has risen. Although collaboration and spontaneous interactions fuel business growth, too often these interactions aren’t spent brainstorming or gathering input.

Here are eight suggestions for managing your organization’s time:
Make the agenda clear and selective.

Great leaders are experts at effective time management. Apple’s Steve Jobs was a prime example of a leader who was adept at organizing time in his organization. Each year at Apple’s annual planning retreat the company would make a list of ten priorities for the year. Jobs would immediately cross off the bottom seven and make it clear which goals Apple would choose to invest its time in.
Create a zero-based time budget.

When Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, he discovered that the company’s senior executives spent a lot of time in meetings. After assessing the efficiency of these meetings, Ford decided to eliminate unnecessary meetings and shortened the longer meetings, resulting in maximizing output per minute of meeting time. This was later known as the Business Plan Review (BPR) and allowed Ford to lower overhead costs and improve the pace of decision making.
Require business cases for all new projects.

As new projects are implemented, companies find themselves falling into “initiative creep.” When Gary Goldberg became CEO of Newmont Mining, 87 projects were underway that demanded the attention of the executive leadership team. Goldberg battled initiative creep by developing formal cases for the entire company’s ongoing and proposed initiatives. Before any time was spent on these projects, the executive leadership team had to review and approve the project, indicating the economic benefit-total cost and time of executive leaders. These results showed that many of the previous projects Newmont was working on weren’t valuable and were therefore discontinued. Now Newmont has time to improve safety and operational efficiency.
Simplify the organization.

Did you know that every additional supervisor adds costs beyond his or her salary? Adding a manager to an organization creates the equivalent of 1.5 full-time employees’ worth of new work—that is, his or her own plus 50 percent of another employee’s.

The University of Berkeley encountered this problem in 2010, when the state cut $150 million from Berkeley’s budget in response to a mounting deficit. In order to preserve the funds needed to run the university, the administration was forced to reorganize its cost structure. The university’s chancellor Robert Birgeneau developed a program to improve the university’s HR, finance, IT and general administrative support across Berkeley. By standardizing and simplifying work by function, the project helped remove hundreds of unnecessary supervisors, freed up organizational time and saved the university $120 million annually.
Clearly delegate authority for time investments.

Many companies don’t establish rules about who can and cannot organize a meeting. The result is that long, costly meetings are scheduled without scrutiny.

At a large manufacturing company, a 90-minute meeting with mid-level managers cost the company $15 million annually. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that a junior VP’s administrative assistant was scheduling all the meetings without anyone approving the decisions. This administrative assistant was effectively responsible for investing $15 million without supervisor approval.

At another manufacturing company, the leadership team took two steps to restrict unproductive meeting time. First, it reduced the default hour meeting time to 30 minutes. Second, it limited the number of participants who can attend a meeting. These two simple procedures cut the company’s organizational time budget dramatically.
Standardize the decision process.

Establishing a decision-making process can free up time needed for other company operations.

Woodside, an Australian oil and gas company, has running with a matrix structure for a number of years. Although the matrix was designed to improve collaboration throughout the company, decision-making remained murky. Woodside defined a set of operational principles that spelled out responsibilities for the various business units. A training program was put in place to help Woodside’s leaders understand the principles and a small network of navigators was established to remove roadblocks and accelerate decision-making across the company. With the new changes, the company was able to streamline how decisions were made.
Establish organization-wide time discipline.

To dramatically improve the quality of your company’s meetings, follow these simple guidelines:

Maintain a clear agenda with objectives. At Intel the meetings are clear and to the point. This allows the meeting’s attendees to maintain focus on specific goals.

Advance preparation. Ford makes sure that all materials for their weekly reviews are distributed in advance so participants can prepare for what is being discussed.

Start meetings on time. Each hour-long meeting that starts five minutes late costs companies eight percent of meeting time.

Early ending. Steve Jobs was a big advocate of ending a meeting early if it was going nowhere. When people were unprepared or the productivity started to decline. Jobs prevented wasting time and money by cutting the meeting short.
Provide feedback to manage organizational load.

Not many organizations track productivity, meeting time, meeting attendance and email volume. Without these metrics, it’s difficult to how productive your organization is and it is impossible to set goals for improvement. Seagate and Boeing, for instance, are experimenting with a program in which executives receive feedback on the “load” they are putting on the organization in terms of emails and meetings.

No amount of money can buy back lost time. To optimize the time your employees spend working, construct clear time budgets and goals that will boost your organization’s efficiency.