Managing a bigger workload in fewer hours

Asia’s banking and finance sector is feeling the pressure from global economic turmoil, with redundancies, weak trading volumes and stiff industry competition shaking employee confidence. To maintain balance sheets and achieve growth targets, financial institutions are putting pressure on leaner workforces to produce more results.

In a country where long working hours are already the norm, and in an industry that has a reputation for early starts and late finishes, how can Singapore’s banking and finance employees stay ahead of the game in this challenging environment?

Here are three tips to help you to learn to better manage your working hours and be more productive.

1. Find improvements in process
Build a business case for process re-engineering by identifying system and streamlining opportunities. Look for inefficiencies and ‘time-wasting’ tasks and focus on reducing manual workloads and increasing productivity ― that could be done by the myriad of available technologies on offer ― without compromising on quality.

In doing this, you should be recognised for your innovative thinking.

2. Know what’s expected
Certain financial services roles do require long working hours such as traders dealing in international stock exchanges. Equally, there is often an expectation in client-facing roles that employees are on call outside of working hours such as private wealth relationship managers.

Regardless of the hours of your workday, it is important to get clear expectations from your manager of what they expect and what they consider going beyond your role and responsibilities. Knowing this will define the boundaries of your role and let you spend time on projects that are valuable to the business and your own career development, rather than putting in hours for hours’ sake.

3. Set daily objectives
Once you have the right processes in place and you know what is expected of you, your focus can shift to maximising your ‘work’ time. A simple but effective way to do this is to have a clear, prioritised to-do-list that outlines what needs to be achieved. Re-visit this regularly and re-prioritise this often.

For private bankers, a strong focus on client-fronting activities would be first on the priority list, with administration or non-client focused activities occurring during down-times.

Once you get into the habit of implementing these practices into your daily work routine, you should find it easier to keep your hours in check while still being productive and producing quality work.