Building a Better Knowledge Worker, While Improving Your Team’s Productivity

Hi my name is Jason Grimes and I’m the VP of Product Marketing and Sales here at RescueTime. Not long ago, I hosted a webinar about how we can Build Better Knowledge Workers, While Improving Your Team’s Productivity. Quite a few RescueTimers, reporters and thought leaders attended. In this post I’ll cover some of the basics of the talk and for those that prefer the full length video it is included at the bottom of this post – http://youtu.be/kSVIfoT7lZ8

What Is a Knowledge Worker?

Hopefully, when you think of knowledge worker, Dilbert is not the first thing that comes to your mind. For those of you unfamiliar with the Dilbert computer cartoons he is a character who experiences extreme productivity challenges in trying to achieve his every day work. Instead, what I’m picturing for a knowledge worker is someone who spends several hours in front of a computer performing their daily activities both online and off. Could be anyone from a Internet marketer, Software Engineer, Graphic Designer or Salesperson.

And as managers and business owners you already know that their time, is your money – SO

Imagine, Instead of having a team with 1 or 2 star performers you could encourage the use of a toolset that will enable your entire workforce to improve their efficiency, job satisfaction and help them gain an understanding of how they spend their time.

Let’s take a look at this further and see if RescueTime can help you.

What Is RescueTime?

RescueTime is a service that helps people understand how they spend their time on the computer and make changes based on that information.

Why Is Understanding Your Time So Important?

It’s really important, because it gives people the proper information to make good choices and helps them ask a really critical question “Am I really spending my days the way I’d like to?” Once people start asking that question, a lot of fantastic things can fall out of it. People become better at self-managing. They get better at spotting inefficiencies in their day. Ultimately, they learn how to make measurable changes to impact their time in a positive way.

How to Build Better Knowledge Workers

So, knowing what a knowledge worker is and RescueTime’s purpose – How do you build better knowledge workers?

In any scientific experiment where you want to measure change you need to have or create a baseline. If you sign up for RescueTime and use it for approximately 2 weeks you should have an accurate baseline of how your teams are performing.

But graphs and baselines are not enough – you need to provide a digital toolkit with features like Productivity Dashboard, FocusTime.

By providing continuous feedback through the use of weekly emails, goals and alerts. We can provide these feedback loops that help knowledge workers improve their time management.

Now let’s examine each of these points.

Your Productivity Dashboard

Each of your team’s knowledge workers is presented with a customized Productivity Dashboard where it specifically looks at the following information:

Starting from across the top:

• Total Time – per time period (in this case a week)
• Average / day in hours and minutes
• Your employees productivity
• Their most productive day.

With any of our RescueTime products you get this dashboard that will allow you to zero in on the information you want to see and you can print it, or export it to a CSV for further analysis.

Where Is Your Team’s Time spent?

This is often the most asked question from RescueTime users and managers – how is all of my time spent and in what categories?

If I zero in on one of the important reports in the Productivity Dashboard, the All Categories report and It’s hard to see the graph at scale, but it shows approximately 10 hours of time spent on email and scheduling that have been recorded for the week posted. That’s valuable data – it shows where the bulk of my time is being spent and can provide business owners and managers with a high level of detail on how their employees are spending their time.

When Is Your Team in the Zone?

Note this is my data taken from our RescueTime team account, with myself selected as the employee.

You may think you know everyone’s schedules and have a guess at their productivity – now you don’t have to guess. By looking at the schedules below you can quickly see when each employee is the most efficient – morning, afternoon, during the week or over the weekend – and you can have all of this measured against the Team’s average.

Taking a closer look at my schedule – I am most efficient in the morning. Why is that? My son is a rooster and I get up around 5:30am each day and start working not long after that. So mornings are my most productive times.

The take away from this slide is: Block your team’s most productive time out during the day and reserve it for their most important tasks.

FocusTime

This is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your employees productivity.

Start timeboxing your activities using RescueTime’s FocusTime feature. Free yourself from distractions and have laser like focus for periods of time. Most of our customers utilize this tool when they are under a deadline for a manager or studying a particular topic – and they use the heck out of it.

Weekly Email Summary

Our Weekly email summary is one of our most popular features

This email provides your team’s knowledge workers with the following level of details: (Looking from top down)

• Know that you are getting the most out of your team
• Ensure your team isn’t getting bogged down in communications or meetings
• Understanding the overall flow of your team
• And potentially increase billable hours

Building a Better Knowledge Worker is Possible!

So more than anything I want you to know that YES, it is possible to build a better knowledge worker!

• Protect your most precious asset – TIME
• Create a basic understanding of how your team operates (baselines)
• Use RescueTime and all of its features to make better choices of how to use your time
• Continuous improvement through feedback loops (dashboard, emails, goals, alerts)