DiBona & Associates - The Top Ten Percent , Time Management

Boost Your Productivity: Effective Time Management Strategies for Construction Professionals

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 16:56:24 +0000

Engineers and project managers in the industrial heavy construction industry, are familiar with the challenges of managing your workload and time effectively.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed and lose sight of important tasks and goals. However, by implementing some simple strategies and utilizing the right tools, you can manage your time more efficiently and improve productivity.

There are several project management tools and time-tracking apps available that can help you stay on top of project timelines, track progress, and collaborate with your team. Some examples include Procore, PlanGrid, TSheets, and Clockify. The biggest issue we find with our clients is that they don’t take full advantage of what the tool has to offer. It’s important to shape the use of the tool to your specific operational requirements.
Take breaks and practicing self-care is essential for maintaining productivity and avoiding burnout. Regular breaks can help you recharge and increase your focus, while self-care practices such as meditation or exercise can help reduce stress levels. Taking care of yourself can also have a positive impact on your team by setting an example and promoting a healthy work-life balance.
Focus on one task at a time. Multitasking may seem efficient, but it can decrease productivity and increase stress levels. Instead, focus on one task at a time and avoid distractions, such as turning off notifications on your phone and avoiding email and social media while working on a task.
Delegating tasks to your team members based on their strengths and skillsets can help you manage your workload and empower your team to take on more responsibility. Giving your team members autonomy will free up your time and allow them to develop new skills.
Prioritize activities by focusing on urgent and important tasks first to manage your workload effectively and avoid getting overwhelmed. For example, if you have a project with a tight deadline, you may need to delegate less critical tasks to others or put them on hold until the project is completed.

Review and evaluate your time management strategies

This can help you improve your skills and increase productivity over time. Reflect on what worked well and what didn't and adjust your approach accordingly. Regularly reviewing your calendar and task list can help you stay on track and ensure that you're making progress towards your goals.

Apple Inc: Steve Jobs had an unwavering belief in his vision for Apple, which was to create user-friendly technology that would change the world. His belief inspired the company's employees and led to the development of innovative products such as the iPhone.
Amazon.com: Jeff Bezos had a strong belief in the potential of e-commerce, even when the concept was new and unproven. He persevered through difficult times and built a company that is now one of the largest retailers in the world.
Ford Motor Company: Henry Ford had a deep belief in the power of mass production and the ability to build affordable automobiles for the masses. His belief led to the development of the first assembly line, which revolutionized the manufacturing industry and made cars accessible to more people.
Walt Disney Company: Walt Disney had a strong belief in the power of storytelling and the ability to create immersive experiences for his audience. His belief led to the creation of Disneyland.

Eight steps to effectively set goals and priorities

Start by identifying your most important goals: When setting goals, start by identifying the most important ones. This can help you prioritize your work and ensure that you are focusing on the goals that are most critical to your project's success. Consider both short-term and long-term goals, as well as how each goal aligns with your overall business objectives.
Break down larger projects into smaller, more manageable tasks: Breaking down larger projects into smaller, more manageable tasks can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed and make it easier to prioritize your work. This strategy also allows you to track your progress and make adjustments as needed. Consider using a project management tool to help you break down tasks and manage your workload.
Use the SMART criteria to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals: Using the SMART criteria can help you set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This ensures that your goals are realistic and meaningful, and that you can track your progress and make adjustments as needed.
Prioritize your goals based on their importance and urgency: When prioritizing your goals, consider the impact of each goal on your project and your overall business objectives. Focus on goals that are both important and urgent, and be willing to adjust your priorities as needed.
Use a tool like a priority matrix to help you prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency: A priority matrix can help you prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency. This tool helps you focus on tasks that are both important and urgent, and can help you avoid getting bogged down by tasks that are neither.
Allocate your time and resources effectively: Allocate your time and resources effectively by setting aside time each day or week to work on your most important tasks. Avoid distractions that can derail your progress, and make sure that you are making the most of your available resources.
Monitor your progress regularly and adjust your goals and priorities as needed: Monitor your progress regularly and adjust your goals and priorities as needed. This allows you to track your progress, identify areas where you need to make adjustments, and ensure that you are making progress toward your goals.
Communicate your goals and priorities to your team: Communicating your goals and priorities to your team can help ensure that everyone is aligned and working toward the same objectives. Make sure that everyone on your team understands the importance of each goal, and how it relates to the overall success of the project.

How Top Teams Manage Their Time

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 22:37:18 +0000

Do you invest your team’s time as carefully as you invest money?

An evaluation of how your team spends the precious commodity of time may surprise you. More than likely, you will find the ineffective use of email and meetings are killing your organization’s effectiveness.

The return on the investment of this time is exceedingly poor.

Electronic communications have become distorted in many organizations and prevent key team members from doing more important work. For example, consider an email sent to a group of 12 people, most of them copied on the email for information purposes. According to Metcalfe’s Law on the network effects of communication technologies, this one email holds the potential to create 66 interactions. That will clutter lots of inboxes. Some good interactions, for sure. But how many interactions are unnecessary?

Not to say that all email is bad, but most team members are being overrun by the sheer volume of email. 150 emails per day, equates to more than 35,000 emails per year. At 100 words per email, on average, you are looking at the equivalent of 7,000 pages of 12-point font. That’s fourteen, 500-page books! And this doesn’t count any attachments that you have to spend time sifting through. Obviously, no one is reading each word, but it still takes time to sift through all the emails and prioritize your follow up.

In addition to email, when you consider the amount of time spent on instant messaging, crowdsourcing applications, text messaging, and other electronic networking platforms, there is a lot of wasted time, and these disruptions exponentially grow.

And here is the kicker, with all of the communication technology available to us, a study by Bain & Company revealed that approximately 80% of the communications are within departments. Most of this large time consumption on e-communications has not produced more collaboration outside organizational silos!

How much time do you spend on e-communications?

Another alarming shift is the rise of dysfunctional meeting behavior. How many times have you seen meeting participants get on their laptop or phone to send an email or text message? How many times have you seen meeting participants step out of the room for that important telephone call? The point is, is that meetings can be very costly when you add up the amount of time spent by leaders at all levels in a given organization. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars for larger organizations.

Let’s consider an average junior manager that is going to 20 hours of meetings per week, and taking 8 hours of time to answer emails. That leaves only 12 hours left for tasks other than meetings and communications. There is no wonder why this time burden drags down productivity in most companies.

Here are some helpful tips to combat these problems:

Establish crystal clear priorities and don’t kill the team with a long list of special projects.
Establish a fixed time budget for meetings. What if every meeting conducted in your organization didn’t exceed 30 minutes? That could save 10 hours per week for each of your teammates. You would in effect be creating a time bank for meetings and you would see that the team would become more judicious about calling a meeting.
Establish clear levels of authority to call meetings. Highly performing teams establish rules for who gets to call a meeting. In some organizations, lower-level managers are calling meetings that are ringing-up big costs. High-performing teams understand the cost of time and have established clear guidelines.
Create guidelines for e-communications. Leading companies have found that it is important to be more disciplined in how we electronically communicate. They have rules and protocols for emails. How about reducing the number of one-to-many emails and reducing the number of people being copied on the email. As a leader, if you model this behavior, it will catch on to your team.
Measure the organizational load your team experiences and provide feedback to your team. Why not measure critical variables that impact productivity, like email volume, meeting time, and meeting attendance?
Hold meetings that work.

Ask yourself, is a meeting the best way to get the job done or can we do something different that is more effective?

Many meetings are held without having a specific agenda. Meeting agendas should be clear and focused.

Reduce meeting time. Particularly, for virtual meetings because participants stop paying attention after 25 to 30 minutes. Even for in-person meetings, most people lose focus after 45 minutes. We strongly suggest you invoke the 30-minute rule!

Create a decision log to capture decisions. Why have a meeting if no decisions are made?

Start on time. Idle time just increases the investment of people waiting to begin a meeting.

Manage the invite list. There should be a clear purpose of why certain individuals are invited. Everyone attending the meeting has a reason to be there

Once your team has more discipline in e-communications and meetings, they will enjoy higher levels of productivity.

The company enjoys a better return on their human capital while each team member will have better work-life balance, and more job satisfaction by getting their job done. These team members are happy to discover they aren’t working late into the evening and on the weekends to get their work done.

Now that you are armed with this information are you willing to bring more discipline to e-communications and meetings for your team?

If so, you are on your way to becoming a Top 10% leader.

Increase Productivity Using the AC/2C Framwork

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered why some teams produce great results while others don’t?

The successful team may not have A players, but they still get the job done better than most. They’re tenacious, unrelenting, and enthusiastic about their work. There’s a buzz of energy around them – lots of conversations in the physical presence of one another. They walk between offices with a spring in their step. Their inquisitive nature leads them to explore new ways of doing their jobs - better and faster. The team’s productive output soars and they’re having fun being in the “zone.” These are the people you want on your team.

Compare the above team to a group of superstars that aren't good collaborators. They get totally absorbed in their own work. They're not interested in sharing ideas with each other. The individuals on this team are content to work on their own “stuff.” They will only interact with others when they have to and that’s usually by email, let alone a phone call. Impromptu face-to-face discussions only happen when there is a big problem. The atmosphere is subdued, work piles up, and emails go unanswered. They are working in a self-imposed vacuum.

Introduce, Dr. Sandy Pentland, a member of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory. Dr. Pentland developed an electronic badge system that measures verbal interactions between co-workers. The sensors could predict team performance by measuring the nature of the conversations. It wasn’t the content of the conversations, but it was more the manner in which they were communicating.

This research was cited in an HBR 2012 article, “The badges measure how people interact—such as what tone of voice they use; whether they face one another; how much they gesture; how much they talk, listen, and interrupt; and even their levels of extroversion and empathy.”

This research listed five defining characteristics of high performing teams:

Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions brief but impactful.
Teammates meet in person; their conversations and gestures are energetic.
Teammates interact directly with one another —not just with the team leader.
Teammates engage in back-channel or side conversations within the team.
Teammates periodically go exploring outside the team and bring information back.

DiBona & Associates has used this research in combination with other bodies of work to develop a three-step process to field highly performing teams. Whether it is an important client project, a strategic corporate change initiative, or a new business venture, this process works.

The AC/2C framework

Activate - Accept challenges and swing into action quickly.
Commit – A psychological commitment to the success of the team.
Communicate – Effective communication between peers, managers, and people outside of the immediate team.
Create – the ability to experiment, question, design, or otherwise identify ways to create additional value.

The entire solution

Step #1 – The talent selection process. There are many teams working on extremely important transformations that are doomed to failure from the start. The leader usually finds out the hard way. The failed leader would have been much better served to select his team members based on our Briefcase, Heart, and Head Selection Process.

Often, hiring managers to focus on the contents of the briefcase, the candidate’s portfolio, resume, and work history.
During the traditional selection process, they typically will find out what’s in their hearts. These are their values.
However, most selection processes completely overlook the importance of the head. The head component of this process is to uncover intrinsic drives that allow the teammate to fulfill the mission of the team better than most, given the work environment, the nature of the work to be done, and the overall team dynamic.
When we select the right behavioral traits, we identify new hires or existing employees that are going to activate and commit to the success of the team more easily.

Step #2 – Define the necessary team dynamic. Now that we have assessed our candidates, we want to see whether or not they will further improve the overall team dynamic. We want the team to be diverse with a concentration on one of the following areas based on the work to be done.

A project management team will predominately be goal oriented to deliver projects on time and within budget.
A quality control team will be heavily biased toward using process and be very precise.
Whereas, a product development team will be more agile, less process dependent and willing to take on calculated risk to try new things.
In contrast, a human resources team needs to have an affinity for developing relationships through collaboration and being able to improve the employee experience.

In addition, the team dynamic must take into consideration other aspects of getting the work done. For example, there are other groups and other kinds of individuals that the team needs to work with. I once worked with a continuous improvement team for a large, hi-tech producer of power generation equipment. They had excellent engineers except they couldn’t change the hearts and minds of the workers on the plant floor because they lacked the ability to collaborate. We helped this client pair up a tech person with a more relationship-oriented engineer and the team made great strides in implementing their improvements. Had this not been realized the team leader would have been fired.

Step #3 – Equip the team with the right skills. The final step in the process is to facilitate peer-to-peer training in the following three areas:

The four components of effective communication training:

1. Techniques to capture the attention

2. Effective listening skills
3. Asking the right open-ended questions
4. Exploring solutions and possibilities

Resolving conflict. This allows teammates to redefine what conflict means to them. The training also helps to remove personal barriers to healthy conflicts, such as fear and other negative self-beliefs.

Allow teammates to expand their sphere of influence by getting them to produce “micro wins.” This allows teammates to build positive momentum and further develop.

Some ideas to consider

You may be thinking that this all sounds good, but how can I do this?

Using the power of people analytics and today’s machine learning technology, any team can implement this for less that it costs to take your ten best clients out for a weekend of golf or hunting. The return on investment is staggering.

Guaranteed results in 30 days!