Companies large and small engage in projects and tasks during the fiscal year that are outside the realm of their daily routine. Because these projects run concurrently with many other tasks, they require a tactical approach to ensure that your company has the time and resources to tackle these initiatives and keep all the balls in the air.

First and foremost, you have to reduce the odds that an initiative will fail due to internal time conflicts or personnel absences. An automated time and project tracking system like Journyx gives you the tools to study and plan the use of employee time so that team members don’t become double-booked or overworked.

Similarly, a system like this lets you determine if employees will be available for the duration of the project. Many an initiative has come to a grinding halt because of an unexpected vacation during a critical time period. Such insight will allow you and your employees to mitigate these circumstances without neglecting the needs of anyone.

Finally, you should look to your backlog of projects for any similar initiatives. That will help you determine the optimum time to begin an important project in your timeline. It will also allow you to accurately set expectations for key stakeholders both internally and externally. You can reduce the chances that a project gets put on hold due to delays in previous projects that overextend their time or budget requirements.

These techniques will allow you to avoid an unproductive piecemeal approach to projects that can quickly lead to angry stakeholders and burnt out employees. They will also allow you to take on more impressive initiatives, leading to an excited customer base and ultimately greater profits for you.

I think for many of us, our first projects involved small plastic bricks that could snap together to make grand visual representations of our wildest dreams come to life. Of those, I distinctly remember two ways that I progressed. In the first, I simply dumped out all of the bricks, then put them together in basic shapes until I ended up with a crude approximation of what I was going for. Those were great, but they were never particularly precise. The other way was when I sat down and really thought about what I was going to build. Sure, sometimes I would use those instructions that came with the more complex sets as a rough guide, but I would always diverge a little bit. I would envision exactly what parts I needed, sometimes writing them down, always with the idea that I had everything and that I knew where it was.

However, when the time came to actually build my project, I would always run into a specific problem. It didn’t occur at the beginning. That would be too easy. No, it always seemed to happen that, just as I got halfway through my awesome new creation, I would be missing that one piece that would let me progress. In my head, I knew that I put it somewhere, that at some point in time I had bought seemingly limitless numbers of the small square bricks that would act as the cornerstone or cudgel for this model, but yet it wasn’t there. I would be forced to disassemble and start anew, and by that time it would be time to go to bed, having nothing to show for all my planning and work.

I have found the lessons of childhood translate well into adulthood. When we assume that we have all the pieces in place without checking, or that they will be where we put them last, we are often startled to find that we cannot find them at all. Particularly when dealing with that most important and elusive block of all, the employee, we realize that it is not enough to know where they were, but where they are, and where they are going to be. Failure to do so means that we will not, cannot build the big models that showcase our talent and put us in the spotlight. It limits our business intelligence and places a strain on every other resource we have.

When we were kids, we could build again the next day if our project went awry. As adults, we don’t always have that luxury.

How many times have we heard the phrase, “don’t sweat the small stuff”? Some people really focus on minor, inconsequential things, allowing them to take over their minds and ruin productivity. While one or even a couple of these tasks might actually be small things, when combined, they can leech productivity and cause stress as employees must multitask and shift focus rapidly. This means that sometimes they will not be able to give proper focus to a specific problem.

Fortunately, properly configured time management systems can give insight into these small tasks that can cause big headaches. It does, however, require a little more attention than many managers give employee timesheets. When reviewing employee timesheets, managers typically look for major trends and might disregard one-off or minor tasks that employees complete. This can be a major oversight.

Instead, it pays to look at the number of minor tasks that employees complete and reference that against the workload of other employees. If one employee has too many minor tasks, it might be wise to consult with that employee and see if he or she feels too much pressure. Maybe it would help to spread those tasks over several employees. A good sign that this could be necessary is when an employee begins spending less time, or delivering less value, on their primary tasks with the most importance.

While some may say don’t sweat the small stuff, the sad reality is that many employees do not have an option. Instead, I would offer the following advice to supervisors looking to optimize their organization: keep watch only for giants, and you may be eaten by ants.

At Journyx, we speak to many professionals who deal with payroll on a day-to-day basis.  Our customers have an easy time submitting data to payroll, but other companies that don’t have a solution like Journyx can have a harder time.  Payroll can be a huge headache, especially for a CEO of a start-up.  Take, for example, the CEO of Tasting Table:

Being without a bookkeeper, Geoff Bartakovics needed to process payroll ASAP.  I find it interesting that Bartakovics felt such pressure to get payroll done on time because of his employees.  He believed that distributing his team’s paychecks late would make his employees doubt his new company.  The faith that his employees had in the business wasn’t something Bartakovics would sacrifice.

When I hear this story, I wonder if I take my on-time paycheck for granted sometimes.  As a young worker, I sometimes read horror stories on Facebook of friends who aren’t paid on time.  I can’t imagine the stress they’re going through with a late paycheck; how is that affecting their ability to support themselves?  I can remember a former job where I experienced something worse than a late paycheck—a bounced paycheck.  My trust for my employer was shaken during that time, and rightly so.  It was a clear sign that something was seriously wrong with the company and shortly after I left, the company folded.

In this stressful economic time, are you making sure that your employees are paid on time?  Is payroll a total nightmare for your company or a breeze?

It may seem a little counterintuitive, but tracking time can actually be used to strengthen employee morale at the office. When viewed through an automated system wherein employees track time to tasks, it can readily become apparent where employees are spending the majority of their time, but more importantly, it can also demonstrate where they are spending their time most efficiently. These two metrics can be referenced together to gain insight into what employees are assigned to do, and what they actually enjoy doing.

Let’s break this down a little further with an example. Say John is in charge of managing his company’s website. Viewing the hours he has tracked over a set period of time, it is obvious that he spends the majority of his time cleaning up bad code, refreshing links, and performing mundane site maintenance.  However, as an occasional side assignment, John also works on building code for his company’s software. His timesheet indicates that he spends far less time on this.

However, the savvy manager looks at the time spent on both of these tasks and compares completion rates to find that while John spends much more time on maintaining the website, he actually completes a greater percentage of work in less time when working on the software. The manager checks the software and finds the work is good, thus negating the possibility that John was simply speeding through the task to get it done. On these grounds, the manager decides he has enough information to speak with John about a shift in responsibility since it appears that John is better at programming software, and thus might enjoy that work more.

This example might seem simplistic, yet you would be surprised just how often circumstances like these appear in an organization, and how often they goes unnoticed. Employees working on tasks that they view as mundane will become dissatisfied in their job roles very quickly, increasing employee turnover unnecessarily. With a little insight it is possible to increase employee morale without necessarily spending more money or offering incentives. Simply giving workers responsibilities at which they excel creates the groundwork for increased satisfaction and productivity long term.

Many U.S.-based companies (including Journyx) didn’t have a company holiday for President’s day this past Monday.  Why is that?  It’s not a surprise that many Americans found themselves at work last Monday considering that we work more hours than almost any other industrialized country.  Watch what David Lazarus of The LA Times has to say about American work hours:

Maybe you are currently trying to implement a paid time off (PTO) policy in your company.  If so, read what our CEO has to say about starting a new PTO policy.  Even though the U.S. government doesn’t mandate it, vacation time is important to provide for your employees.  Not only does it boost morale and decrease stress, but some of our most creative ideas happen during times of rest.  Remember, you’ll need an easy way to approve and track time off in your company so that PTO will be a great benefit instead of a headache.

Do you like your company’s PTO policy?  Tell us with a comment.