Are you ready for a time flexible job?
In the past, employees usually had strictly fixed working hours. In many cases they started their working days at 9 AM and finished at 5PM. During the last ten years the job have changed a lot and for many jobs the time you have to spend at the office is not strictly limited. For some jobs employees can work even at home. This is to a great extent caused by changes in the management culture. In today’s firms workers are lead more by assigning them broader projects and goals rather then detailed work tasks. Employees are given more control over their working process for motivating them. This has changed the nature of jobs and given the employees possibilities to do more what and when they want to do on their jobs. It may lead to better job performance and job satisfaction but at the same time it poses new challenges to the employees.
If you do not have strictly fixed working hours and you are working at home then you are away from your boss. The boss will not see what time do you start working in the morning, how long are your lunch breaks and how early do you finish. You are away from your co-workers and nobody will notice at once when you are shirking or not doing good quality work. If you have that type of job then you have to be your own supervisor and motivator, who has to guarantee that you put enough time and effort into your work in order to achieve your goals.
During the recent weeks I have been training sales consultants for an investment and insurance broker company. All the sales consultants have time and place flexible jobs. They do not receive any base salary and are paid only on commission. There are pretty good possibilities for earning nice money in that company as better sales consultants are earning about $25,000-$35,000 annually, whereas the average annual salary in Estonia is $12,000. However, most of the new sales consultants drop out during their first two months. I have been analyzing the reasons for that and found that on of the major causes for that is that these people are not ready for a time flexible job. Many of the new trainees are already in their forties and fifties, which means that they have spent several decades on regular jobs with fixed working hours.
When people are faced with that kind of new job conditions many of them cannot handle that situation. If you are lazy by your nature and there is no boss looking after you then you will tend to start late, make frequent pause and waste your working time. It will lead to poor work performance and low pay. After a couple of week many new sales consultants see that they are not suitable for that work and quit.
The previously listed problems, which the new consultants have in that firm, are related to their poor time management skills. Fortunately, these skills can be developed for everyone by specific training courses. On the general, these people need to possess free vital time management skills to be successful in their time flexible job:
- Goal setting. You have to know what you are pursing. How many sales do you want to achieve? What income do you desire? How to judge your abilities and set realistic targets?
- Planning. You have to make detailed plans for achieving your goals. Most often it means regular weekly and daily scheduling. Although your boss will not tell you how many hours you have to work, you should make that kind of choices on your own. How many clients you have to contact? How many sales presentations do you have to perform? How would you plan your daily work tasks?
- Working efficiently. You have to be motivated and organized in order to save your working time. You have to beat procrastination and keep yourself working the for extended time periods. You have to eliminate time wasting on chatting with friends, surfing internet or doing anything during your working time, which will not improve your work results.
These skills are vital for many other jobs too. The nature of work is continuously changing and the trend is that there will be more and more flexibility, which calls for better time management skills. Therefore it is time to start working on these skills.
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My name is Kristjan-Olari Leping. I am a speed reading trainer. I have an associated professor position at the University of Tartu, am a policy analyst in a policy research center, I am a trainer and I am involved in many other business projects. 