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Identifying Common Accounting Department Productivity Roadblocks and How to Solve Them
From long meetings and water cooler talk to constant buzzing and poor planning, everybody has their Achilles’ heel in terms of common productivity roadblocks. Avoiding productivity roadblocks is paramount in maintaining the sufficient workflow required in a finance and accounting department and atmosphere. Here are a few ways to avoid roadblocks to productivity that can keep you on track and impressing your employers.
Floating schedules
A loose schedule can kill a worker’s momentum. Having to plan out your next step each time you complete a task requires time that cuts into your head space and energy. Having your days, if not weeks, planned out ahead of time can keep you on track and moving forward at all times instead of standing still.
Make sure you are realistic with your planning and factor in a certain amount of flexibility to account for unforeseen or uncontrollable distractions that inevitably occur in the workplace.
Red tape
Find ways to eliminate red tape in your daily processes either by suggesting leaner processes or proving yourself worthy of bypassing consistent supervision. Nothing is worse than relying on a busy manager or strategy team to approve your every action. Finding ways to eliminate red tape from your workflow will help limit your barriers to productivity and keep your days smooth and efficient.
Waiting for the perfect moment
Perfectionist tendencies are major productivity barriers. While the want to make things as good as they can possibly be is not inherently a bad thing, it can make employees overthink their every move. It only takes a few instances of an employee questioning their decisions to throw off their productivity for an entire day.
If you know you have perfectionist tendencies or work anxiety, keep in mind there are no perfect moments, and eight hours of steady productivity is always going to be more valuable than four hours of sporadic work, regardless of how focused and perfect those four hours were.
Gossip
While workplace socializing is a natural and healthy part of developing working relationships, limiting your extra chatter can majorly increase your productivity. Something as simple as talking about last night’s game or asking when Tammy from HR is due to deliver her baby can derail your mental state from its productive track. Studies have shown that it takes 23 minutes to get back on track after a distraction. This means in a day with just four distractions, you will spend nearly a quarter of your working hours readjusting to your task.
Separate yourself from gossip on day one to establish yourself as a dedicated employee. If you already have routine non-work-related conversations throughout your day, you will need to be more diligent and stern at enforcing and reinforcing a new expectation of your work ethic.
Another great way to eliminate roadblocks in your career is to work with a finance and accounting staffing firm to help you find the Greater Toronto Area's best accounting and finance jobs that you have been searching for. Take your career to new heights by contacting Halcyon Finance & Accounting Recruitment today!
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