When time and efficiency are combined, you have a thriving business that grows without requiring more of you.
“I sat down and did the math and realized we had been saving our clients at least a month of wasted time for every employee per year.” - Alane Boyd, Workday Ninja
Hi Workday Ninjas!
Alane here for another hack that makes such an impact that you get a FREE month of work from every employee every year. I’m going to show you how right now ⬇️
Part 1, which is the part you are reading right now, covers how to save this much time in your org, and Part 2 covers the other efficiency benefits for your org, like employees staying at your company longer, clients consistently being managed, and the ability to take a sigh of relief at the end of each day. When you have time + efficiency benefits, you have a healthy, scaling company that doesn’t take more from you. It flips it to get more out of the team you already have in place.
Implementing a Project Management System
I am a math nerd, and I started calculating how much time we saved our clients by training and implementing a project management system in their organization. I looked at the time saved per employee per day and analyzed that over a year's time after they were maximizing the value of their project management system with training, consistent use, and repeatable systems. We work with clients who want to implement Asana, ClickUp, or Monday project management systems. The results… gaining a month of time back per year per employee!
P.S. If you aren’t sure what a work management system (WMS) or project management system is, we have a full write-up about them here.
I’ll break down the math for you or skip ahead if you think this part is boring.
💡 Each employee gets interrupted 40 minutes per day saved on average. This is because of several reasons:
- Most Zooms, Teams, Meets, Huddles, Slacks, Emails, etc., are no longer needed to get the job done. It is already documented in the project management system.
- Since workflows and processes are outlined and documented, teams can consistently move projects along, take care of client needs, and execute on internal needs without asking, “What’s next?” or “How do I do this?”.
- They know what needs to get done on a daily basis, what is coming up next, and what is outlined for the future – and most importantly, they aren’t spending hours every day searching for the information they need to complete their tasks. They only need to focus on that day’s needs, and the project management system bubbles it up to the top.
- Those “oh shit” moments of “I forgot to do this, this, and this” diminish because the process is already clearly defined in the project management system. If something wasn’t done, it isn’t because the next step wasn’t outlined, it was because someone wasn’t doing their job, and you have the work history in the project management system to show you.
The employee is saving their own time by being able to focus on getting their job done without having to stop and search, stop and ask, or stop and panic to find the answers. This, in turn, saves other team members’ time from having to jump on calls or answer Slack, Teams, text messages, etc., questions. All of those then compound by disrupting the other person’s day.
Let’s take that 40 minutes and start distributing that over a year for that single employee:
40 minutes per day x 5 days per week = 3.33 hours per week
3.33 hours per week x 50 weeks (we will assume that the employee takes off 2 weeks per year) = 167 hours per year
167 hours per year / 160 hours per month = 1.04 months per year saved!
For every employee you have at your company, you save 1 month per year.
If you have 12 employees, you get 12 additional months of work in one year. What would have taken you two years to do took you 1 year. That is substantial!
These numbers continue to grow exponentially. If you have 24 employees, you get an additional 24 months of work in one year! Wow!
How to get started saving a month for every employee every year
ℹ️ A project management system has to be in place. If you aren’t using one now or you aren’t sure if you picked the right one for you, we have a free picker tool you can use to help you pick the right one for your company. We specialize in Asana, ClickUp, and Monday and have custom-built this tool after working with thousands of customers worldwide.
🔝 Accountability starts from the top. If your exec or management team is not on board, using a project management system will crumble. To everyone on your team, it will feel like one more thing to do that is distracting them from getting their work done. This is so important that if the people in power are not on board, they are let go from the company. It really is that cut and dry.
📅 Everyone has to be trained on the right way to do things. If people aren’t trained on how to use the project management system, no one is operating in the system consistently. It begins to feel overwhelming and frustrating for team members. If everyone is trained on the best practices and how to properly use them, then it isn’t about who likes it done a certain way; everyone is operating the same way. (You don’t have to do this on your own; we have Asana, ClickUp, and Monday Jumpstart training programs ready to go so that you can knock this out in a day instead of months).
🔝 Create templates for repeatable projects/tasks. This is probably my favorite reason to use a project management system. Think about how many repeatable processes your company has: new customer onboarding, content posting, hiring, training, new product releases, etc. The idea here is if it is done more than twice, a template or a system/procedure can be created for the process that gets used over and over again.
🚧 Use automation built into the project management system to loop in team members when appropriate. This is perfect for team handoffs or things to happen simultaneously once something is completed. For instance, you have a new product being released. Your product team is working on the actual product. Before it is available to the public, you need marketing to start working on building assets and materials before the release date. This is where automation comes in. Once the production team moves it to a specific stage in their process, the marketing team can be automatically looped in, and their part of the work kicks off. No one had to remember those steps, it is already built into the process and automated.
👐 Don’t depend on one person to do it all. Unless you are a team of one, there is not one person who holds all the information for everything in your company. Utilizing other team members distributes the work of documenting the process in the project management system across multiple resources. Other team members can be brought in to finalize things.
⏰ Get everyone to put all of their tasks in the project management system. When team members are realistically identifying the tasks that need to be worked on, priorities can be set and delegated to complete projects on time. If people have things they are working on but aren’t putting them in the project management system, your company never has an accurate view of the work being done, who is doing it, and where improvements are needed.
If this feels overwhelming or you aren’t sure how to make this happen, reach out to us! We help companies worldwide implement project management system to make workdays more efficient.
Read on for Part 2 to see how using a project management system benefits your company and increases efficiency!
Need help setting up Asana, ClickUp, and Monday?
We offer three training courses for creating a well-oiled machine at your company. Start getting massive value to your company's operations, communications, production, and customer/employee satisfaction by getting started with one of these for Asana, ClickUp, or Monday:
- Free basics Crash Course
- Jumpstart courses for training and standardizing
- Project Management Training for project owners/managers
If you aren’t sure if Asana, ClickUp, or Monday is best for your company, use our Free Selector Tool. It takes less than 2-minutes!
Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson are Workday Ninjas. After scaling their agency from 12 to 600 active clients and successfully selling it in 2018, they realized the special workday processes that gave them the ability to scale and sell could be shared with others who wanted to do the same.