As an office manager I often will find myself doing simple tasks, which take time, instead of delegating them to other office staff. When a business owner or management staff does this they are costing the business unnecessary expense.
Do you know what your time and each employee’s time is worth in dollars and cents? You may be quite surprised if you figure it out. It is a fact that many small business owners or key management staff do routine tasks that other employees would happily do, and do them well.
These simple tasks could be costing more in time than what it is worth for higher management to be doing. Taking the time to evaluate what you do, how much time it takes, and whether you can have an employee do the task and save the company money is important for business owners to do.
Having checks and balances in place to oversee certain tasks you delegate to your staff is important, but carrying them out can be done by someone other than you. When you figure out how much your time is really worth, you start to see things a bit differently and your time becomes more valuable, to the bottom line.
An example would be you have a large yard that needs to be mowed each week and this task takes 2-3 hours total time to finish. You have calculated your time to be worth $50 an hour, it would be wiser to hire someone to do this job at a fair wage that would be much less than what it is costing for you to do the job. It is actually costing you $400-600 a month in time to mow the lawn.
Another interesting fact which happens when you figure out how much your time is worth per hour is you begin to structure what you do and how you do it in a more efficient way. Take e-mail versus a phone call, you can shoot out a quick e-mail in seconds and if you picked up the phone to talk to someone it could turn into minutes. You begin to see that time really is money.
This also will happen when you get in your car to head out, you will begin to think about everything you need to do while you are out, the best route to take and how much time you will spend doing it. No one really wants to waste time and how we look at it will determine a lot about what we do with it.
There is one factor about time that is important to keep in mind and that is not one of us knows how much we have been given, so make the best of it no matter how you do it, because it is really valuable.
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