I was in a factory sometime last year and my friend was a manager there. I saw workers moving everywhere doing one thing or the other, they were all busy. When my friend came to see me, the first thing I told him was “Tony I am quite sure a lot of production go on here seeing everyone is doing one thing or the other” Tony said “I wish”. That was enough word to ring bells in my mind and my head, why will a factory with everyone doing something not be producing so well that they are short of products to distribute?
It is a different thing to be busy, it is a different thing to be productive. Wasting a workers time doing a job that won’t be productive is equal to wasting your time, wasting the time of the worker as well as wasting the resources of the company. Why waste a workers time doing something that is less important to you because seeing them idle makes you feel they aren’t doing well for their pay. Instead of wasting their time doing the irrelevant in a company, you could save their time by telling them what to do, giving them the right tools and resources, show them the right way to do it and let them take action on their own while you keep an eye on them. Your interest should be in the results and feedbacks and not the trivial matters of how they used every jiffy, as well as do not interrupt them when they are attending to their duty for a needless reason.
Seeing people staying idle at work isn’t supposed to pose any threat on you, it is either they do not have enough tasks to keep them busy or they are far more efficient that you thought. When you see this, it is advisable that you re-plan so as to keep them busy doing the needful and getting them done rather than making them feel less.
Make sure as part of the management team, you need to be able to differentiate between important tasks, urgent tasks and unnecessary tasks given to your workers. What you employ your staffs for are their important duties and they are what serve the central mission of their jobs which serves the central mission of the business, other things you ask of them out of their scheduled work is either urgent or unnecessary. When you are giving your staff an urgent work that doesn’t have anything to do with her job’s mission, then you should be able to tell them why they need to get this done. If what you need them to do outside their usual work doesn’t have a why that will supplement their work and be valuable to the company’s mission, then it is irrelevant. Staffs will be willing to do urgent jobs if they have a good why and it Is going to make their job effort productive but when you start giving them unnecessary task not related to their job values and won’t add up to their success, they start to lack trust in your ability to plan and give tasks.
Productivity isn’t about working all day long, it is about doing the necessary and leaving the unnecessary. It is difficult to manage people when you are finding it difficult to manage their tasks.