The percentage of people teleworking is increasing and this type of work, in its many combinations, has become common, and a favorite of many workers around the world.
Benefits of teleworking
Teleworking, when it is voluntary and moderate (teleworking 1 or 2 days in a 5-day work week), has a positive effect on worker performance, reducing their stress levels and intention to quit. This is because teleworking affects two key aspects of your well-being:
- increases worker autonomy; Namely, their ability to decide what to do, how to do it, or when to do it.
- This improves the chances of reconciliation, an aspect that activists today highly value.
We also know that if teleworking intensifies (more than 2 days of teleworking), the benefits of work-life balance increase, but at the cost of damaging relationships with co-workers. For this reason, a combination of 3-2 or 4-1 days of face-to-face work and teleworking is most common. organizations around us.
Organize Teleworking Day
Like face-to-face work, teleworking requires organization (in this case self-organization) in order to get the most out of it. If satisfactory results are sought from teleworking, everything already known about time management in organizations applies in the remote work context. And by satisfactory result, I mean both for the employee and the company. Employees are interested in their well-being and the company is interested in their effectiveness or productivity. Time management tools, implemented well, often serve both purposes.
With good time management, the worker makes better use of it, focusing on priority tasks. But, in addition to this apparently trivial result, time management also allows workers to have a greater perception of control over their work, affecting better well-being in terms of job satisfaction and satisfaction with life in general. – And, in addition, it allows us to reduce the level of stress.
From the organization’s point of view, time management improves employee work performance and reduces procrastination. The reason for all these effects is, fundamentally, the first of the mentioned elements: the perception of control. Knowing how to manage time makes us feel more in control of our work.
Time and work
Interest in time management programs is not new, having existed since at least the 1950s, when simpler techniques began to be proposed, such as creating to-do lists. Now time management techniques include:
- Establishing objectives.
- Plan tasks by to-do list, reserve time slots for their execution, mark completion dates and monitor their progress.
- Prioritize tasks according to criteria such as their importance or urgency.
- Consider the habitual and personal rhythm of work.
- Ability to handle unexpected tasks, be assertive and reject new tasks that impair the performance of those already committed.
Work biorhythm
Let me dwell briefly on the point of personal rhythm. Self-knowledge is very important for knowing what hours of the day we have the most energy and to accomplish tasks that require the most effort in that time slot. Or, if you prefer, you can look at it another way: doing routine tasks that require less effort when we know we have less energy.
It is known that, in general and for most frequent work hours, workers follow an inverted double V pattern in terms of energy. the day begins at half throttle To reach a peak of energy after about 2 hours and then decline around lunchtime due to the simple effects of fatigue. After the lunch break, a new recovery cycle appears, this time shorter, until fatigue reappears at the end of the day.
Personal and organizational impact
One must also consider the impact of one’s own personal characteristics and context. The main personal influencer for good time management is one personality trait: responsibility. The most responsible people organize their time better. Although this may seem obvious, it should not be forgotten that we are talking about personality traits, that is, individual differences that should be accepted as such.
With regard to contextual differences, attention should be paid to the norms of the work group and the organizational culture itself. Creating teams and organizations with cultures conducive to time management is something that can be significantly influenced, for example, through the example set by the leaders of the organization.
And when the worker doesn’t have autonomy in his work?
To try to achieve all the positive effects of time management programs in contexts in which the worker is not given autonomy is to expect miracles. Autonomy should always be an option: It’s the way the worker wishes, along with access to time management tools, while increasing the organization’s effectiveness. Two objectives which deserve to give it such autonomy.
