How to Reduce Dead Time in Your Team

Keeping Your People Active and Engaged

Managers often go to great lengths to ensure that their people aren't overworked or overburdened. After all, we all know how bad stress and long hours can be for our health.

But, as anyone who's felt the burden of boredom knows, having too little to do can be just as damaging to morale, productivity and well-being.

In this article, we explore the dangers of "dead time" in your team, and the steps that you can take to prevent it. But we also discuss what you and your people can do to use dead time productively.

The Impact of Dead Time

"Dead time" arises when team members are left with little or no work to do.

There can be many reasons for this. For example, they may be waiting for someone else to complete a task before they can proceed. Perhaps a meeting, where work was due to be allocated, was postponed. Or, they may have finished their work sooner than you expected.

A brief respite from a busy schedule can be a welcome relief. But, left unchecked, downtime can tip over into boredom, which some business leaders regard as worse than stress for our job satisfaction and energy levels. One 2014 study also suggests that boredom can be a cause of stress.

Dead time can also have a serious financial impact on your organization. Research by management professors Andrew Brodsky and Teresa Amabile estimates that effectively paying employees to do nothing costs the U.S. economy around $100 billion per year.

What's more, if your team members are bored or don't feel challenged, their productivity will likely suffer, and employee turnover will increase.

Procrastination is another consequence of dead time. When people have less to do, they may take longer to complete the tasks that they do have, just to keep busy. This can lead to "time crunches" later on, especially if there are sudden changes in workload.

Destructive behaviors can increase, too. Idle team members may begin to distract others, to behave unethically (by misusing company property, for example), or to take more sick leave.

Six Ways to Prevent Dead Time in Your Team

You'll have a happier, more productive and fulfilled team if you can keep everyone engaged and working constructively, and prevent dead time from occurring.

We look at six ways to make that happen, below.

1. Assess Workloads Regularly

Your team members may not want to admit that they have dead time, for fear of putting their jobs at risk. But you can't address the problem if you're not aware of it, so check in with your people regularly and encourage them to talk openly about their workloads.

Management by Wandering Around (MBWA) is an effective way to do this, but take care to avoid giving the impression that you're micromanaging your team's activities.

You may find that some team members are on the verge of a "drought," while others are snowed under, for example. But the knowledge you gain by going "back to the shop floor" can enable you to distribute tasks more evenly in the future.

2. Review Your Processes

Bottlenecks that result in dead time can occur at all levels of an organization. They can be caused by people, processes or technology.

For example, certain tasks might require signoff from senior managers before your team can move forward. Systems or procedures may no longer be fit for purpose. Or projects might require a lead or point person to ensure that they run smoothly.

Our article, Improving Business Processes, includes many useful strategies for evaluating your procedures. And tools such as The Simplex Process, Swim Lane Diagrams, and the McKinsey 7S Framework can help you to identify the specific issues that cause dead time in your team, or in the wider organization.

3. Develop Skill Matches in Your Team

For your team members to perform at their best, their tasks must match their skills, knowledge and experience.

If a team member routinely finishes work quickly, he or she may be overqualified and need something more challenging to do. Job crafting can increase engagement and reduce the negative effects of boredom, so work with your team member to understand his skill set and what he wants from his role.

On the other hand, it may be that he finds the work too difficult, rushes it, or doesn't fully understand how to complete it to the required standard. In these cases, you could offer coaching or use a Training Needs Assessment to identify and address skills gaps.

4. Coach Your Team in Time Management

Good time management is another way to minimize dead time in your team. What's more, a study in the Netherlands found that employees with better time-management skills were less prone to distraction when they did find themselves "at a loose end."

Our quiz, How Good Is Your Time Management? is a great way to introduce team members to issues around planning and scheduling, prioritization, dealing with interruptions, and so on.

5. Support Your People's Goals and Self-Development

Yearly appraisals aren't always enough to keep your people engaged. Make sure that they have additional goals to strive for, even when their "regular work" dries up.

These could be special projects, for example, or developing new skills that complement their main roles. Depending on the individual and the likelihood of dead time occurring, you might choose to set goals quarterly, monthly or even weekly. Discuss them with your team members, make sure that the objectives are SMART, and check in regularly to assess your team's progress.

Take your cue from individuals' training needs assessments (see Develop Skill Matches in Your Team, above), if you have them. If you don't, consider the short-term development objectives that could benefit each individual, or the team as a whole.

There could be a new piece of software to learn, a training course that would be beneficial, or an industry conference or networking event to attend, for example.

6. Consider Annual Hours Contracts

Annual or annualized hours contracts are a form of flexible working that can improve productivity and reduce the risk of dead time.

They are most often used in businesses that are subject to seasonal variations or other fluctuations in demand, but they can be applied in other fields, too.

Annualized hours enable you to hire people for a specific number of hours each year, but to allocate those hours according to need. This means that people can be on hand during the really busy times, but take some guilt-free breaks when things slow down.

What to Do When Dead Time Occurs

Despite your best efforts, dead time may occasionally still arise in your team for reasons beyond your control.

Research shows that people are highly motivated to alleviate boredom, especially at work, and that they will try to find ways to keep busy. But, as a manager, there may be times when you need to step in.

First, acknowledge the situation. If there's a genuine lull in work that you can't address directly, ensure that your team members know you are aware of it. Then, consider the following actions:

Prepare "Just in Case" Tasks

Keep a list of necessary but lower-priority tasks that people can work on when things are quiet. These could include administrative assignments, long-term project work, or research, for example.

Be aware, though, that some people will dislike what they see as "grunt work," especially if they hold a senior position or have a highly specialized role. In such cases, emphasize the importance of these tasks to your team's business objectives.

Delegate and Cooperate

Check your own To-Do List and share your tasks with members of your team. If you're unsure which tasks it's appropriate to delegate, and to whom, our article on Successful Delegation offers plenty of guidance.

Alternatively, you could offer your team's support to other departments. Interdepartmental working can provide great Cross-Training opportunities, help to break down silos, and improve communication across departments.

Cooperating in this way could even inspire new ways of working and help to deal with dead time in other teams, too.