Nurses often operate in high-pressure environments that require them to prioritize tasks and make quick decisions. This is partially due to the nature of the work, but is also affected by the current need for more skilled workers in the nursing profession. Unfortunately, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the nursing shortage in the U.S. is expected to worsen, putting even more pressure on RNs.

Although the larger issue cannot be solved by a single institution, making the investment to develop delegation skills at the individual level can help ease the burden on nurses and improve the patient experience at the same time. Understanding which tasks can be delegated to LPNs or nursing assistants can help reduce stress, improve efficiency, and allow nurses to focus on the most important duties. Because nurses are accountable for the safety and comfort of patients, delegating effectively is critical.

The Importance of Delegation Skills in Nursing

The patient experience should always come first, and nurses play a major role in ensuring that their patients get quality care. Nurses must also balance this with more administrative requirements, ever increasing staffing issues, and other competing priorities.

In many cases, nurses are responsible for tasks that others could do just as, if not more, effectively. Handing off those tasks to other qualified professionals frees up valuable time for nurses to focus on the core work for which they are best suited. Delegation also enables assistive caregivers to positively contribute to patient outcomes while lowering costs for employers.

How to Improve Delegation Skills

The healthcare industry has unique requirements when it comes to delegation, so it’s important to understand what can and cannot be delegated. For example, there are legal considerations to take into account. Nurses must know which activities the state regulations allow LPNs and unlicensed professionals to perform. These employees must also understand the limitations of their roles.

Once you know which tasks are appropriate to delegate, nurses can become that much more effective by honing their delegation skills, thereby “multiplying” themselves in a short-staffed world. Things they can do include:

• Learning how to set and communicate clear goals to team members
• Defining the scope for assistants who are performing delegated tasks
• Taking personal accountability for the outcomes to which they committed
• Learning how to coach employees as they learn new tasks
• Understanding how to recognize the potential in employees

Learning how to delegate takes practice. It’s not as simple as just telling an employee to complete a certain task and expecting it to be done right the first time. You must be patient; help employees learn which tasks are appropriate to hand over, identify the best person for the job, clearly communicate the goal, and provide the necessary support to help them succeed.

How to Teach Delegation to Nurses

Because of the nature of the work, there is little room for error when nurses delegate. Nurses can’t test new skills on the job and evaluate the outcomes because if anything goes wrong, it can mean life or death. They have to use proven techniques that they have practiced and tested in a safe environment that does not impact the patient. For these reasons, experiential learning is an excellent approach for teaching delegation to nurses and other healthcare professionals. Experiential learning creates an immersive environment for participants to learn new concepts, practice new behaviors, and adapt them to produce the desired outcomes. Trainees leave with confidence that the skills they just learned will work in real life because they just experienced success in a parallel scenario.

When effective delegation skills are used in a healthcare setting, patients, nurses, and employers will benefit. These skills can be taught and sharpened over time to improve efficiency while ensuring patients receive the best possible care. Consider training opportunities for teaching delegation skills so nurses can practice them in a safe environment before confidently deploying them in a healthcare setting.

While the importance of teamwork has been recognized in business for 100 years, technology has deconstructed boundaries of work and made the skill of teamwork more important and more complicated to operationalize in the modern workplace. Given this reality, many companies are focusing on improving the way teams work together to get the benefits of more innovation, better problem solving, and faster results through high functioning, competent teams. However, these benefits only come to fruition when the team is working collaboratively and firing on all cylinders.

Google recognized the many benefits of high-performance teamwork in a software engineering environment and committed to building the perfect team. In 2012 they launched Project Aristotle, an initiative to analyze teams and identify which factors contributed to success (and which ones did not).

While it’s true that few companies can match Google’s resources, you will see from their findings that many of the essential elements are not resource dependent at all.

One of Project Aristotle’s key findings was that it doesn’t matter who is on the team, but what the accepted behaviors within the group are. So what are those behaviors and group norms that help make a great team?

1. Allow Equal Talk Time

Teams in which every member speaks in roughly the same proportion tend to be more successful. Interestingly, the distribution doesn’t necessarily have to be even all the time, but as long as all members of the group have an equal opportunity to speak, the team will work better together. To ensure each team member receives an equal opportunity to provide input, implement one of these methods at your next meeting:

1. Every team member speaks for about the same amount of time on each topic
2. Team members speak up more when they have more expertise on the topic, but the total amount of speaking time is roughly the same

Researchers found that either way was likely to succeed, but teams in which some members spoke little or not at all suffered from a lower collective intelligence.

The team building takeaway: Make sure all members of a team have an equal opportunity to share their thoughts.

2. Empathy is Important

The ability to recognize how other team members feel contributes to a more successful group. An important empathic trait on a team is noticing when others are not participating and giving them an opportunity to share their thoughts. Of course, some individuals are naturally more intuitive than others, but team building training can teach empathy skills like active listening, sharing your own vulnerability, and considering how others might feel.

The team building takeaway: Highlight the importance of recognizing how other people in the group feel to encourage a more collaborative environment.

3. Create a Safe Space

The researchers at Google discovered that encouraging equal talk time and exhibiting empathy are two critical factors for creating a safe space in which every team member believes they can voice an opinion without risking judgment or rejection. Groups in which the leaders set a calm, respectful tone are more likely to succeed than those in which the leaders have little emotional control.

The team building takeaway: Create a team culture of mutual respect and interpersonal trust to allow all team members to feel that they can safely contribute to the conversation.

Google spent the resources to crunch the numbers and found that the best teams were those that created safe spaces that allowed every individual to speak for an equal amount of time. The most successful teams also displayed more empathy, recognized when other members weren’t contributing, and made an effort to include them. You can apply this knowledge to your own company, no matter how small or large, to develop strong teams. Remember, it’s not the individual personalities but the culture you create that will inform how well a team will perform.

Everyone, at one point or another in their career, struggles with time management and can benefit from planning their time better. In fact, one study found that employees can free up 20 percent of their week simply by exercising more discipline in how they manage their time. That’s reassuring news considering that, just as an example, the average corporate executive receives over 200 emails a day and meetings take up 35 percent of the workweek.

Here are six specific steps you can take to help employees who are struggling with time management.

1. Uncover the source of the problem (and try to minimize it)

Whether someone gets caught up in the details of lower-level priorities or they get overwhelmed and paralyzed by the volume of work, uncovering the source of time management issues can be the first step toward solving them. To get started:

• Talk it through: Have conversations with employees to understand the cause of their time management issues. For example, when an employee complains that they don’t have enough time to complete work and they’re feeling burned out, offer reassurance and help the employee understand which responsibilities are a higher priority and where they should focus their efforts.
• Minimize distractions: Identify distractions like white noise levels or inefficient workspace configurations and try to minimize them. A possible solution is providing flexible work arrangements that allow employees to work on larger, more complex projects from home.
• Recommend a time log: Have employees fill out a time log for a week and then examine the alignment of their time with priorities, where they got derailed, and strategies they can use to get caught up. This is a useful tool that will direct their personal reflection and how they can improve going forward.

2. Make expectations and priorities clear

One of the best ways to ensure individuals meet deliverables on time is by making expectations crystal clear and repeating them as necessary in meetings and one-on-one. Some examples of how you can do this include:

• Using direct language and project schedules to communicate goals, due dates, priorities, and accountability for assignments.
• Talk about team culture when a new member joins. For example, during onboarding, stress that time management is important and employees are expected to be at meetings on time.

3. Offer a helping hand

Some employees may recognize that they need help with time management, while others may not. In any case, you can offer help and support to employees who seem to be struggling with organizing their time wisely. The following techniques are usually quite effective:

• Checking in periodically with employees and simply asking, “What can I do to help?”
• Putting employees in small teams that allow them to divide a large deliverable into smaller, more manageable tasks.
• Meeting with individuals one-on-one to brainstorm ideas and create a plan that will help support more effective time management.

4. Model behaviors and coach employees

Employees take time management cues from their team leader. When you arrive at meetings on time and deliver on your commitments, they can see that you practice what you preach. Once you’ve identified that an employee is experiencing a time management challenge, you can also coach them to make the appropriate changes in their behavior through MCR (Model, Coach, Require) coaching, which is comprised of the following steps:

1. Model: Leaders model the behavior they desire from an employee, so that the employee sees, understands, and believes in the change.
2. Coach: Leaders assess employee behavior and provide coaching, ideas, and a plan for making the improvements a reality.
3. Require: Leaders set expectations that require the employee to be accountable for making the necessary changes to their time management behavior.

5. Teach new techniques

An excellent way to help employees practice better time management at work is to teach them how. Effective time management training includes ways to effectively manage resources, as well as techniques for staying organized. Training in the following three areas will significantly support effective time management:

1. Planning and prioritizing: Learning how to plan and estimate the timing of key tasks helps employees anticipate how their day will play out. Prioritizing also helps employees avoid playing catch-up on overlooked deliverables.
2. Organization skills: It’s necessary to organize time, as well as the space around you. A disorganized work space can lead an employee to waste time looking for a lost item, which can result in a missed deadline or late arrival to a meeting.
3. Communication skills: Training that focuses on improving communication skills teaches employees how and when to give updates on the progress of their work.

6. Recognize improvements

Positive reinforcement and recognition help employees understand that they’re meeting performance expectations by effectively managing their time. You can recognize employees who meet deadlines in one-on-one discussions and team meetings. Intentional reinforcement of what employees are doing right will inspire them to continue their efforts and strive for greater improvements.

Time management can be challenging for everyone, but it is a crucial skill in every industry, department, and role. There are many ways to help employees who are struggling with time management, like making expectations clear, providing them with coaching and skills training, and reinforcing their behavior when they master skills. The outcome is less burnout, improved productivity, and an organization full of teams and individuals who manage their time effectively.

Given that the service industry employs about 80 percent of the U.S. workforce, many organizations are focused on measuring employee productivity and improving it. Unlike the manufacturing sector, in which employee productivity can be measured by the number of items produced, in the service industry you need to know how the service was delivered, as well as the degree to which the service impacted the customer experience. The good news is that there are many ways to measure the productivity of employees in the service sector, and you can improve employee productivity with training and development activities.

Ways to Measure Service Sector Employee Productivity

The traditional employee productivity calculation equals total output divided by total input, for example, the number of cars (output) produced during a 12-hour shift (input) in a manufacturing plant. But for organizations in the service industry, a purely quantitative method of measuring employee productivity doesn’t work quite as well. In the service sector, the input (for example, decision-making, judgment) and output (customer experience, achievement of performance objectives, and so forth) may be harder to measure and are subject to variation from employee to employee.

Instead of focusing on the number of customers served or hours worked, an effective strategy for measuring employee productivity in the service industry takes into account a range of factors that will vary depending on the sector, company, or employee role.

Here are a few examples:

Customer Satisfaction: A focus on quality outcomes rather than number of transactions often makes sense for service sector employees, because the service industry provides customer experiences rather than products. For example, a customer service representative’s patience, professionalism, and friendliness matters as much as the number of calls taken in the space of an hour.

Employee Engagement: According to research conducted by Gallup, teams with high employee engagement are 21 percent more productive than teams with lower engagement rates. While engagement is no guarantee of employee productivity, when employees are engaged and have the desire to perform at their best, they may be better positioned to do so than those who lack engagement.

Performance Against Goals: Productivity can be measured according to how successfully employees meet their performance goals. As an example, a salesperson has a goal to increase business from new clients by 10 percent. Business development productivity requires that salespeople deliver a high level of service to potential clients. The degree to which the employee meets the goal shows his or her level of business development productivity.

Examples of Employee Productivity Measures by Sector

The following examples illustrate how the factors described above help with measuring employee productivity in different service sectors:

Transportation: Instead of focusing on the number of routes a train conductor completes each year, it would be more effective to measure the conductor’s productivity by the number of on-time arrivals or the length of time gone without a safety violation or accident. Strong marks in these areas also help build customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Food Service: The fast pace of many food service establishments requires engaged employees who want to provide excellent customer experiences. The productivity of waiters, chefs, and hostesses is not measured only by the number of customers served, but also the degree to which their engagement enables them to provide great food, courtesy, and a swift resolution to any customer complaints.

Merchandise Retailing: It’s true that dollars per sale and sales per employee matter when looking at the productivity of retail employees. However, as one study found, high engagement among retail employees not only increases their productivity, but also results in significant reductions in inventory shrinkage, waste, cash loss, and lost sales.

Healthcare: A quantitative measure of employee productivity for a hospital might be the number of patients seen by a nurse in the course of a workday. However, that might not adequately measure the nurse’s productivity if each patient didn’t receive proper care and attention. In an age when the patient experience is a critical component of a hospital’s competitive advantage, a more important measure of the nurse’s productivity would be the number of satisfied patients, which can be quantified with patient experience surveys.

Improve Employee Productivity with Training and Development

There is no one way to measure employee productivity in the service industry that works for every organization. However, many factors together compose an effective strategy for getting at the heart of employee productivity.

At the end of the day, once you’ve effectively measured employee productivity for your specific industry, the next important step is to work to improve the areas that need it. A combination of employee development and training exercises can improve productivity and performance, leading to increased customer satisfaction, more efficient service delivery, and highly engaged employees.

You might have heard the adage, “teamwork is less me and more we” before, and for good reason: this simple sentiment gets right to the root of teamwork. Yet, as simple as it is, for too many organizations, employees lack the skills they need to pull it together and “get the job done.” A lack of team-building skills among team members can kill productivity, negatively impact morale, and hurt bottom line results.