The problem is simple: your colleagues are interrupting you and blocking you from finishing off what you set yourself out to accomplish. In other words, you are being hijacked! Sometimes it’s tough to turn down people from interrupting you, especially if it’s your boss or a co-worker from a different department that urgently needs your help.
One of our clients, Toby, recently shared an effective way on how to get rid of a big portion of his daily interruptions. Toby works as an AP Manager and was experiencing one employee from their Sales Department, who required a lot of help with expense reconciliation. His organisation had written a manual to guide employees through this process. Regardless, this particular employee would sometimes send Toby’s team up to 2 emails a day requesting help to complete tasks in the system. After 3 weeks of email requests, Toby decided to find a proactive solution.
He asked his team to document time spent on any requests from this employee. After a week of documenting the hours spent on these requests, it was evident that Toby’s department was wasting time and money helping this one employee out. It was calculated that the employee was absorbing a whopping 2,5 hours of the AP departments recourses per week.
Toby added it all up and wrote an invoice to this employees’ boss, and passing the following message on:
“If your employee does not start to read the written manual, this will be a monthly recurring invoice!”
From one day to the next, Toby and his AP department no longer received any requests from this employee.
We’re always curious to hear about any great stories that you have about time management in your organisation.
Join the conversation and share some of your stories in the comment field below. Or click HERE to request an Expense8 product demo!
