When in the working environment, whether you are an employee or you own your own business, organisation is imperative to the smooth operation of the business and to get the most from your team. For this to become a reality, your whole team needs to be on the same wavelength and organised themselves. To ensure that this happens, we here at kaizenprint.co.uk highly advise making use of calendars within the workplace, whether they are individual ones, ones on the wall the whole team can see or even making sure the team makes use of digital ones alongside the physical thing. If your team is making use of calendars in some way, you can bet that you will have smooth operation and running if your business.
Within this article, we are going to share the best ways we have found to get your team using calendars, to make sure that they are all as organised as each other.
Weekly meetings and viewings
The first way comes from meetings, so this part falls partly on the responsibility of the owner, to make sure that these meetings happen. But at the beginning of every week, get your team together, or if you have a large team take them in groups and go over the calendar for that week. Point out all of the upcoming meetings, presentations, calls and people that are on holiday. Make sure that everyone in the team is crystal clear on what all is happening that week. From this, they will then know whether they are required to pick up work from somebody else because of holidays, or what they need to have ready for presentations and meetings for that week. This will mean that on those days, you won’t have any team members coming in unprepared on completely unaware of what is supposed to be happening. An excellent choice of calendar to have in this situation would be a Wall Planner. Even if it isn’t kept where everyone can see it, have it and make a point of brining it out at the beginning of every week. From there, make sure that the previous week both you and your team write up there what they have to.
Get everyone to have their own
Apart from making sure that their is a general calendar in the office or building, it would also be a good idea to make sure that everyone has their own individual one. These can be Wall Planners that they have near their desk or desktop ones themselves if there isn’t enough space. This way, there will be two places that they can write and make a note of what all is upcoming over the course of the week, especially their own things.
Encourage the use of digital alongside physical
While physical calendars are an excellent and important addition to any offices stationery, it is also a good idea to encourage the use of digital calendars, whether that is on the computers and laptops that the employees work from, or even the ones that they have on their phone. By using these, you are making sure further that no-one forgets anything important, especially as we work from something like computers nearly everyday, or else we always have our phones on us.
Encourage time taken to sort them out
Over the course of a couple of months, if employees and work colleagues are busy, their calendars can start to fill up. And while a busy calendar certainly looks good, it can sometimes lead to more disorganisation than organisation. Small but important items may get lost among the bigger ones, and be forgotten about before it is too late. This is why it is a good idea to encourage your team to take some time, even half an hour at the beginning of their day to go through their calendars and sort them out. This might meaning colour coding them, or if using a digital one, deleting items that are no longer needed. By doing this, it is ensuring efficiency of your team and making sure that nothing gets lost.
We are big advocates of the calendar here at kaizenprint.co.uk, using them all, from our Wall Planner in our print department, to all of our laptops and desktop computers having iCal on them. And it definitely does help us to get the most out of the team, as everyone is organised, and knows where everyone is and when they are needed. That’s why we would be more than happy to help you start your organisation through the use of calendars, by printing them for you. Just give us a call on 029 9002 2474 or send us an email via our contact form to discuss the options that we have!
