Often just a little more productivity at work is all that you need in order to get a promotion or a raise.
When you adopt a few easy time management practices into your daily job, you and your boss will notice improvement in the results you deliver each day. Instead of patiently waiting for your boss to pick you for that next promotion, try these suggested tactics to get noticed and get promoted.
1. Clean up the clutter around your workspace. If you work in a cluttered office with papers and files everywhere, people are going to notice. Your boss is going to notice too. Think about this for a moment. If you had the opportunity to give one of your two employees a raise and a promotion, who would you pick? The neat, productive guy or the messy productive guy?
So bite the bullet and clean up your cluttered office. Two things will happen when you do. The first thing is that you’ll be more productive when you don’t have to go digging through the mess on your desk just to find that important paper. The next thing you’ll notice is that when your manager stops by your newly clean and tidy office, he’s going to see that you’re taking your work seriously. He may even comment on it and this will be a wonderful opportunity for you to express your interest in taking on more responsibility. It might seem hard, but just bite the bullet and clean up your office.
2. A supportive physical environment is best. So often people forget about the quote from Bucky Fuller “Environment is stronger than willpower”. It’s true so why not use your environment to your advantage? Try this simple process. Pick five different things that occupy space in your office. For each of the 5 different things, ask the question “Does this ‘thing’ support my productivity goals or does it hinder my productivity goals?”. When you answer that question honestly about each of the things you pick, you’ll be taking the first step towards improving your chances of getting promoted.
When you have the honest answer, you’ll know what to do. Simply put, get rid of any element that doesn’t obviously and overwhelmingly support your productivity and time management goals. I said coming up with the honest answer is the hard part. Getting rid of the object might seem hard, but trust yourself and your honest answers. Elements in your environment that don’t support your goals drain your energy. Get rid of them and watch your energy rise.
Your increased energy and higher productivity is what managers look for when it comes time to hand out promotions.
3. Efficiently and effectively take care of your email, phone calls and verbal communications. We all live in a wired “must be done now” type of world. People who can effectively handle the fast pace of all types of communications are more likely to be at the front of the list when it comes to be promotion time.
Keeping your email inbox under control is a tough thing to do, but you have to do it. Learn about various sorting and filtering functions that are part of your email program so you can sort the emails into different groups according to where they come from. Set up one group for your boss, one group for your peer level employees and one for your friends. Handle the emails from your boss quickly and efficiently, with response that briefly communicate that you understand what he/she is looking for and that you are following through on your responsibilities.
After you handle the emails from your boss, go ahead and answer the emails to your peers or other employees at your level. Use the same efficient and effective language you use with your boss and don’t worry if these people wonder why you always answer the boss first. That’s the way it supposed to be done and when it is time for your boss to give a promotion, he will see you as the person who communicates well and good communication is critical in the work place.
Here’s a quick note about emails from your friends. First off, if an email from your friend is sitting on the company email server, your company will be able to open it and read it. If your friend decides to send too many jokes or even offensive information to you, your company will find out and this will damage your chances for promotion. This means you should have a private, non-work email address that your friends use when they want to email you.
These are 3 simple time management and productivity tips you can use to help get a promotion at work. By adopting them, you send a clear message to your boss to that you are “ready for a promotion”. Good luck and have fun with it!