**Business Book Awards 2023: People, Culture & Management Book of the Year**
The way we value and manage time at work is broken.
Businesses are squandering time when making decisions, delivering work and managing people. Employees are rewarded for 24/7 availability, speed of response and hours worked.
The results are clear: low productivity; high stress and burnout; falling retention; and stalling diversity.
The Future of Time reveals how ‘re-working’ time – transforming organizations by adopting positive time practices – can help you build a more diverse, engaged and productive workforce.
- Diagnostics to quickly assess the ‘time defects’ damaging your business
- Compelling evidence, case studies and strategies to ‘re-work’ time successfully
- Timelines and tools to bring about fast, effective change.
Helen Beedham, MA Cantab, speaks, consults and leads research on how to create more inclusive, productive workplaces where everyone can flourish. For the past 25 years, as management consultant then chair of a City-wide professional network, she has led change programmes for FTSE 100 businesses and regularly brought together Heads of HR, Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing to exchange market-leading practices.
Table of Content
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
- A story about time
- The path to here and now
- ‘The Future of Time’s central premise
- How ‘The Future of Time’ will help you and your organization
Part 1: The ticking timebomb
How we’re collectively failing to manage time.
- Chapter 1: Time today
How we value and treat time in business today - What knowledge-based businesses value now
- How businesses typically value time
- How we typically think about time at work
- What we mean by collective time management
- How we factor time into our decision-making
- What our typical collective ‘time habits’ are
- Chapter 2: Time blindness
Why we have developed time ‘blindspots’ in the workplace - What ‘time blindness’ is and why we aren’t talking about this
- How time is ‘baked into’ our structures and processes
- We mainly talk about time in terms of the working week & working patterns
- Accepted, non-verbalised norms relating to time
- How technology is helping/hindering
- How time blindness manifests itself
- Chapter 3: Time defects
How to recognise the signs of ‘broken’ time in your organization - Some verbal and visual indicators
- How time defects affect employees generally
- How they affect individuals
- How we are valuing and measuring time wrongly
- How we are being wasteful with time
- Time defects: steady drip or major time fails?
- What we are rewarding in the way we value and measure time
- Chapter 4: Changing times
What’s influencing our wider relationship with time
o Big pressures impacting businesses that relate to time
o Major demographic factors affecting our approach to time
o How climate change is affecting our relationship with time
o Other factors influencing the way we run businesses today
o Social justice movements that are relevant here
o So what? What employers need to be paying attention to
- Chapter 5: Out of time
How ‘broken’ time is hurting your business and why you need to act now
o The impact of ‘broken time’ on businesses
o How it is hurting productivity
o How it is impacting diversity and inclusion efforts
o The impact on employee engagement, motivation and retention
o The link to employee wellbeing
o Why this is urgent
- Key points summarised
Part 2: Time re-worked
Better ways of valuing & managing time.
- Chapter 6: Time reimagined
What the future of time looks like at work
o What the future could look like in broad terms
o How leaders could run businesses differently
o How commercials/financials could be managed
o How people could be managed
o What future working practices could look like
o What a more time-aware organization culture looks like
o Outcomes we would see
- Chapter 7: Time solutions
The positive time practices that enable organizations to flourish - Ways we can be more ‘time aware’
- Implications for leaders in their day-to-day choices and action
- How teams can implement more time-aware practices
- Time solutions for different kinds of work
- Interpersonal relationships
- Time-aware commercial practices
- Time solutions that enable better employee wellbeing and more sustainable careers
- Chapter 8: Time and talent
Implications for recruiting, managing and developing people - How we bring people into the organization
- The jobs they do
- Reflecting time-awareness in individual and team goals
- HR, D&I and other workplace policies
- How to build better time-awareness into people management
- Pay and benefits
- Time-aware careers
- Chapter 9: Ahead of time
Organizations that are leading the way in managing time - Proof it’s possible to achieve this
- What other organizations are successfully focusing on
- 4 case studies
- Impact of their efforts so far
- What they are learning that will help the reader
- Key points summarised
Part 3: Time to act
How to re-work time in your organization
- Chapter 10: Taking stock of time
How to diagnose your time defects and get time on the agenda - How to find out what your time defects are
- How to gather evidence and create a burning platform
- How to tell if it’s an emergency/how bad it is
- How to get senior buy-in and support for addressing this
- Chapter 11: Time strategies
How to tailor and implement your time solutions successfully - How to tackle it and how long it will take? Some principles
- What you’ll need and how much it’ll cost
- Where to start, how to prioritise, what order to adopt
- What will help make/accelerate progress
- 3 implementation tools to help avoid reinventing the wheel
- Pitfalls and setbacks to watch out for
- How to assess progress
- Chapter 12: Anchoring time
How to embed new time practices in your work culture - Why embedding matters
- What embedding means – some examples
- Who needs to do what to embed time practices
- Specific embedding actions for productivity
- Specific embedding actions for diversity
- Specific embedding actions for wellbeing
- After that, are we done? (no)
- Chapter 13: Time toolkit (this may move into the Appendix)
Further resources to help you deal with challenges and stay on track - Agendas and/or checklist for business leaders, HR, D& I leaders, team managers, individuals ‘What can I do as …?’
- Ongoing time check-ins
- Ways to share and celebrate your time successes
- Time solutions mini-library (e.g. ‘100 time solutions’)
- Key points summarised
Conclusion
- A closing story about time
- Hopes for the future
- ‘Book on a page’ (1 page book summary)
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the author
Join the ‘Future of Time’ community
About the author
Helen Beedham is an organizational expert, speaker, and host of The Business of Being Brilliant podcast. Her first book The Future of Time: How ‘re-working’ time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing was named People, Culture & Management Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards, and she regularly comments on the future of work in national, business and HR press.
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