If you’re the kind of employee who gets things done in the most efficient ways, your company values you! It’s a core skill that recruiters look for the most in potential candidates during the hiring process. Employees who demonstrate better organizational skills are highly sought after. They are regarded as valuable assets that can drive the company toward success. Possessing these skills is essential if you want to scale the heights of your career and live your dream life.
When you’re organized, you work more efficiently and effectively, get tasks done on time, and create a more relaxed work environment. Additionally, organizational skills have a direct impact on your productivity, performance, and promotion.
However, just how important are organizational skills to a business?
What Are Organizational Skills?
So, what is the organizational skills definition? Is it planning your time carefully and setting some aside for hobbies? Does it mean creating a to-do list and organizing your workspace?
Here’s our take.
Organizational skills can be described as the ability to manage duties, tasks, and responsibilities in a structured and orderly manner. These have to do with you prioritizing your time, energy, and mental capacity to meet organizational objectives.
A person who demonstrates strong organizational skills manages their time better, communicates appropriately, and avoids procrastination. Employers seek such employees for one major reason: they save the company time and money.
Conversely, disorganization leads to undesirable results, such as missed deadlines, misplaced information, forgotten appointments, and miscommunication. Resources go to waste, teamwork fails, and the organization risks going under.
Even so, organizational skills are not for employees only. They are even more crucial for team leaders, managers, and supervisors. After all, you should lead by example, right? Employees look up to you for inspiration and motivation. If you don’t prove them right, they will lose focus and dedication in their work.
Importance of Strong Organizational Skills
Efficiency
The success of any business largely depends on people with strong organizational skills. Such employees are consistently efficient and effective in everything they do—even in small tasks. Not only do they maintain a neat workspace, but they also know how to separate important and urgent tasks. In essence, they can stay on top of things and meet their goals.
Work-Life Balance
Employees with excellent organizational skills stay calm in frustrating moments and can adjust quickly to changes in scheduling and task prioritization. They know when to break down and delegate tasks.
When you already have a to-do list and know how to prioritize tasks, it becomes easier to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Better Quality of Work
An organized employee avoids making costly mistakes, like missing deadlines, forgetting appointments, and neglecting proper communication. They consolidate all their tasks in one calendar or utilize project management tools like monday.com or Asana to help them to stay on track.
Getting and staying organized prevents you from making money and time-wasting errors. These are mistakes that can also cost you your job.
Opens You up to Future Opportunities
Having excellent organizational skills not only helps you to make a good impression on your bosses and managers, but they also set you up for a better future. Your efforts are not going unnoticed. Your supervisors can see your level of responsibility and know that they can rely on you to deliver on every task.
Whenever there’s an opening in the company, your name could find its way to the top because you’re efficient, organized, and productive.
Better Time Management
When you’re organized, you can balance your day so that nothing is left unfinished. You take a strategic approach to handling your projects, duties, and responsibilities. It means you have excellent time management skills, which help you stay focused and become more productive.
An organized employee knows the importance of setting and adhering to a schedule and completing tasks before deadlines. If you want to keep track of your time and projects, a tool like Traqq simplifies your work. The software automates time tracking and activity monitoring. It allows you to check your work progress and activity levels on detailed timesheets, allowing you to review your performance.
Traqq has a feature that records the apps and websites that you use. This way, you’ll see some of the time-wasters that are slowing down your progress. More importantly, this time tracking tool helps you manage your time more effectively. It records every minute you work and alerts you if you start working without it running. The app works whether you’re online or offline, which means no time is lost even when you’re out in the field.
The smart alerts and notifications also ensure that you take breaks conveniently, hence avoid overworking.
Improved Performance
Being organized boosts your performance at work because you don’t have stressful moments. You follow a specific routine that gets you smoothly through your workdays. You use a to-do list and decide when you’re going to do a task.
Everything is clearly outlined, and you have no worries about unfinished work or missing deadlines. Your day is well planned, and you don’t let unnecessary things interfere with your tasks. In the end, your organizational skills make you more productive and you stand a better chance of getting a promotion.
Examples of Organizational Skills
Communication
Miscommunication is a big hurdle for efficiency and team collaboration. That’s why communication and active listening skills are crucial for both employers and employees. These skills ensure that all team members are on the same page regarding client work and company matters.
Clear and concise communication clarifies issues and contributes towards effective teamwork. What’s more, being an active listener enables you to clearly understand what your team leader or colleague requests from you.
Collaboration
Teams that collaborate effectively communicate and perform better. This organizational skill helps you determine who to turn to when you need help. You also become available for any team member who needs your help.
When you’re stuck on a project, you won’t waste a whole hour looking for assistance since you already know who to ask.
Planning
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Poor planning often results in more pressure and stress because it means you’ll have to leave other projects pending. Planning comes in many forms. It can be something as simple as outlining your daily activities, or it could be more complex, like budgeting.
It’s important to note that no planning is less important in a business setting—even those that seem trivial. Some of the skills associated with planning include:
- Information gathering
- Analyzing strategies and data trends
- Decision making
- Project management
- Scheduling
- Structural planning
- Problem-solving
Physical Organization
The office workspace needs to be conducive for employees to work efficiently. Things like the room’s layout, availability of ergonomic desks and chairs, and storage of documents contribute to physical organization. You will need people to manage the working space and make sure that everything is in order.
Skills associated with the physical organization include:
- Workflow management
- Administrative
- Policy enforcement
- Documentation
- Creative thinking
- Managing appointments
- Situational assessment
Teamwork
Team collaboration depends on how well the members work together. For there to be teamwork, everyone must learn to communicate effectively, collaborate with ease, and listen proactively.
With these skills, teams can accomplish more, meet deadlines, and handle obstacles efficiently. Other skills related to teamwork include:
- Goal setting
- Delegation
- Conflict management
- Management
- Meeting goals
- Team building
- Training
Resource Allocation
As we’ve mentioned, employers value anything that saves them time and money. These are the two major resources of a company, and to allocate them (along with other resources) properly, requires organization. You need to know the available resources and when to use them for various projects.
Lack of organizational skills may lead to wasted resources and financial losses. This is not a good picture for employers, and it can put you on the employee review list. So, it’s crucial to ensure that resources are distributed equally, and teams have all they want to complete a project. This way, your employees won’t end up working overtime on a holiday.
How to Improve Organizational Skills
Excellent organizational skills take practice and time to perfect. Everyone has their strengths and weakness. Now, when it comes to developing organizational skills, it’s essential to identify your areas of weakness and find ways to tackle them.
Remember, you need outstanding organizational skills to make it to the top. If you don’t know where to start, here are some pointers to help you:
- Always prepare for the next day.
- Create a list of things to do each day and organize them in order of priority.
- Learn to stick to your to-do list and tick off each one as you complete it.
- Develop a routine. Everyone has their ‘peak time’ – that time of day when you are at your most effective. Find out when that is and schedule the most complex tasks for that time.
- Use a time tracking tool to keep track of everything you do. This will prevent you from spending too much time on certain tasks than you need to. In the end, you’ll be forced to postpone items on your to-do list. Additionally, when you track time, you’ll know exactly when it’s time to take a break.
- Get rid of distractions. When you start working on assignments or projects, switch off your phone and avoid checking emails. Use your break time to check your phone and set aside time to reply to emails.
- Learn to delegate tasks when necessary to avoid overworking yourself.
- Organize your workspace for convenience.
- Acknowledge your achievements by rewarding yourself regularly. It’s one way to encourage yourself to remain motivated and organized.
- Be sure to maintain a healthy work-life balance. You won’t be able to enjoy your success if your brain is exhausted and overwhelmed. Find at least two days of the week to spend with family, friends, or on hobbies. This will help clear your mind and return to work with a fresh, rejuvenated mind.
Closing Thoughts
Organizational skills breed confidence, professionalism, efficiency, focus, productivity, and goal attainment. All these are vital skills that can help boost your career, regardless of your job position. While it takes time to learn, taking the first step today will bring you closer to your goals.
