Most of us spend a lot of time at work, so it seemed sensible to make the most of that time. Here’s our list of time-saving tips that might be useful. If you have a to-do list that’s a mile long here’s what you can do:
1) Screen cold calls from agencies more effectively.
We cannot stress enough how important it is to screen cold calls. A person whose job is to make cold calls for business development makes an average of 75 cold calls in an 8-hour working day, according to a survey by Quora. But for the other person at the other end of the line (you!), it might be 75 unsolicited calls that might come your way.
TalentPuzzle created a survey to which 83 in-house recruiters responded. We asked what was the biggest drain on their time, and when we saw the results, we weren’t that surprised. Top of their list was the dreaded cold call that everyone in HR with an up-to-date LinkedIn profile has received. 45.8% said that as much as 25% of the working week can be lost to cold calling.
So how do you screen cold calls? Forums and websites about getting rid of these unwanted frustrations include obvious responses from the classic: “can you put that in an email, thank you very much!”, to simply hanging up, or telling them (or have them told) that you’re not interested for the moment, but you would keep them in mind if you did ever find the need to require their services.
But cold callers are trained to deal with these objections, and yes, we’ve come across them too. Let’s remember in all this that it is their job after all, and the only reason that they’re calling you is because that’s their way of making a living. Also, they are people, and there’s no need to be rude. To read our blog on how to deflect these, see “How to deal with cold calls from agencies”.
Really fed up? Have your company register with the TPS (Telephone Preference Service), and state your preferences to not receive unsolicited sales or marketing calls.
2) Use data – know which channels deliver the most relevant candidates by tracking all your stats and eliminating sources that deliver too many irrelevant applications.
As a HR professional, you cover a wide array of tasks in your daily routine.
In fact, HR practice doesn’t consist of a unique function or activity, but rather a huge network of them. Click here for a good overview on some of them. Recruiting involves part of your tasks, and can often seem to be one of the most tedious of them, the goal being to find a suitable person to represent the vacant role.
Indeed, scanning shortlists of candidates sent to you by more-often than not, a multitude of sources, takes up valuable time. Most of this time, whether you realise it or not, is wasted through fishing out unsuitable candidates and dealing with the unproductive agencies who deliver the unbefitting candidate lists.
The evident solution to this issue is for in-house recruiters to use data. You need to find a way to analyse the productivity of agencies you use, and find out who among them deliver the most relevant candidates, and those who should be eliminated altogether from the recruitment process.
3) Create templates.
HR professionals deal with an immense quantity of queries and requests, and responding to each question individually takes up time. Some of these queries are often answered more than once.
Formatting documents so they look professional and attractive can be tedious. Choosing the appropriate typefaces for headlines, body and other elements in the document is a time consuming task. You have all had to respond to the same kind of email, or write up a similar document to the one you wrote in the past, changing maybe a few details throughout. Fortunately though, if the document you are using is one that is commonly used in your business or something that you use frequently, there is the magic of templates.
Create a list of templates to use for responding to different types of queries. And in addition to saving you time, it will avoid you from making mistakes, and make your documentation reliable, manageable and effective.
4) Think “If this was the only email I could send this person, how can I make sure I only need one response?”
We don’t really realize how much time is stolen from our schedule because of small mistakes we tend to forget about so easily.
The key and solution to this problem, is to take one extra minute before clicking the ‘send’ button. Be straightforward, clear and concise. Make sure there is no room for any misunderstandings, and that the receiver of the email, has all the information he or she needs to avoid sending you an email back asking for clarification.
Think “if this person was unable to contact me again, will my email tell them everything they need to know”
5) Have a daily written plan
How people use their time is what separates the quality of life among different people. Those who use it well, find that they are overall more productive. Those who have trouble managing their time, tend to find themselves in a more unproductive situation.
To maximise the use of your time, you need to be organized. As a HR professional, you contribute your expertise to various parts of the company. Sometimes more hours are needed than are available in a 24 hour day, and managing your time and the tasks you take on is one of the most valuable things you can do.
Have a daily written plan or to-do list. Classic, we know, but effective. Some might argue that 5 minutes spent in the beginning of your day to plan, can save your day: Check out this article from Day Timer’s blog.
We suggest limiting yourself to accomplish six tasks each day. Long lists are never accomplished or completed, and there is a negative psychological impact to not finishing your list, whereas there is an enormous psychological boost to ticking off the last item on your list, and completing your objectives for the day.
6) Chunk up tasks
Multitasking is a great way to accomplish numerous tasks within a short space of time. But what we don’t recognize is the fact that we’re not really ‘taking on multiple tasks’.
What is actually happening is that we are undertaking one task, before switching over our mindset and trying to accomplish another task, and then going back to our first task again. By “multi-tasking”, we are technically doing things in sequence, all in all spending more time doing each task, than if we had just finished one task and then started up the other one separately.
The solution to this would be to use a concept we call chunking.
Chunking consists of breaking up your tasks into small, but manageable activities. It is a way to avoid an all-or-nothing approach, and a great way to simplify a complex or overwhelming task. Taking a single task, and setting aside a quantity of time to work on the task, without distractions actually saves a lot of time.
We suggest to start small, in order for you to get the hang of it. Dedicate a time frame in which you decide to work on a report you have to do. Ignore any other activity, task or distraction while doing it. Make all phone calls into one batch, do all your errands at once. You’ll be able to focus better on the important tasks.
As always, understand though, that you will always, as any professional, come across urgent matters that will inevitably distract you. For that, we can only suggest posting a sign outside your office marked: “Working genius is busy”. If you’re interested in finding more about chunking, click here for a great article on the subject.
7) Limit access to email
You’re probably glued to your email account, and check your emails religiously. Do you tend to stop what you’re doing, read your email, and re-start what you were doing, every time you get a new email?
There are some who would call it a curse, as the habit of going back and forth between emails and tasks takes up valuable time.
In fact, an average business user responds to over 100 emails daily. A study by Atos estimates that many employees spend 15-20 hours every week checking email, of which only 15% are useful. As the goal of our blog post is to help you save time, we would suggest probably the most simple and obvious time-saving tip of all. Simply limit access to your emails.
Reading emails in the beginning of each hour, and then ignoring them until the beginning of the next hour would be a great example, which even the most addicted email-checkers could easily undertake. On the more extreme level, some would suggest giving up a timeframe once or twice during the day, in which to check the inbox folder. All emails coming in after that timeframe, will be dealt with the next day.
8 ) Make sure meetings are necessary and can’t be done over email/phone/without you.
Part of working life involves having to attend discussions, and taking part in meetings with colleagues and peers. Setting aside time to attend the meeting, and time spent on travelling to the meeting, is time we could all do less with.
According to a Microsoft survey, employees globally spend an average of 5.6 hours a week in meetings. 69 percent of participants feel that these meetings are unproductive and unnecessary.
Not all meetings are a waste of time, but many are. If you spend a lot of time in meetings, but would rather be doing your actual work instead of listening to other people talk about issues they could have sent over in an email, see if you can get out of those meetings.
How do you dodge (or if being politically correct -avoid) meetings? The answer is twofold.
First, determine if the meeting you are booked in for is absolutely necessary.
Second, if point one fails, whether it can be done without you being physically present.
The key to both of these is insisting on a proper agenda prior to the meeting. If you can’t add anything, or if you can respond in writing, you can save huge amounts of time. Sometimes just asking for the agenda makes the person realise it is not worth attending the meeting, and canceling it. Sending a few emails back and forth, speaking over the phone for a couple minutes can sometimes do wonders with saving your time.
9) 80/20.
The Pareto principle, known to some as the 80/20 rule, is a concept where the main idea lies in the fact that 80% of the effects are a direct result from 20% of the cause. Put in another way, 80% of the results or typical person’s success comes from 20% of the effort made by the person’s activities.
With little time on hand and a mountain of work to complete, HR professionals should use the 80/20 rule as a guiding principle, getting 80% of their candidates from 20% of the tools and processes of recruiting.
The lesson to be learnt here is that it is vital to understand and be aware of how much time is spent on productive tasks that contribute directly to the results you want, in order to cut out the time spent on unproductive activities. Cutting out the people who deliver unproductive results in your recruitment process, and keeping those that deliver the productive results, is key to success.
10) When writing top ten lists, only write 9 points – a simple way of saving 10% of your time.