Organisational skills can help you and your employees to maximise well-being and productivity. Although these techniques can benefit individuals by streamlining their workflows, they can also help ensure that teams work harmoniously. They provide structure and can reduce instances of conflict between colleagues. This article looks at five organisational skills, together with explanations of how to assess them. 

Prioritising tasks in the workflow

When employees are busy, it is useful for them to take on tasks in order of urgency. This is an especially useful organisational skill during busy hours, particularly in client or customer-facing roles where tasks have to be dealt with immediately.

However, being able to see the bigger picture is an important skill too. If there are any project deadlines or orders that need to be filled, it is good to ensure that employees stay aware of these tasks as well, while dealing with immediate responsibilities. 

Tools to help prioritise tasks in the workflow include having a colour-coded workplace calendar and reducing procrastination in your employees. If you have reason to believe that your employees are procrastinating over important tasks, you can help them to deal with this by providing them with time and stress management training. 

You can assess this skill during an employee performance appraisal or with 360-degree feedback. An appraisal is a useful time to find out whether your employees have any time management strategies of their own and how they are currently managing their workload.

This provides a reflection of whether your employee lacks the organisational techniques to prioritise tasks efficiently, or whether these tasks perhaps need to be designated to a different employee.

With 360-degree feedback, you can also learn about your employee’s time management skills from anonymous colleagues, clients and customers. Whether during an appraisal or 360-degree feedback, you can assess time management skills using criteria such as the following:

Time management

In order to help them achieve their goals of any size, your teams and employees could benefit from good time management training. This involves working out how much time to allocate to each task, and how long it will take to complete each task.

Time management requires the prioritisation skills described above. Time management skills involve breaking down complex tasks into more manageable chunks, such as daily and weekly tasks.

This ensures that employees do not jump from task to task. Instead, they know which tasks need to be completed by when. You can assess time management skills in your employees by looking at their approach to various challenges:

Ability to delegate appropriate responsibilities

Delegation by itself is an organisational skill, but it is usually more effective when an employee knows when to delegate responsibilities to an appropriate colleague.

In contrast, the delegation of more difficult or time-consuming jobs to another colleague is not always appropriate – it can sometimes lead to resentment and conflict in the workplace. Delegation is most effective when an employee knows that another junior team member has the right skills to help them with a particular task. 

However, with delegation, it is important for your employees to remember that regardless of whether another employee is taking on the bulk of their job, it is ultimately still their responsibility that the task is completed to the best of everyone’s abilities. Delegation is not the same as micromanagement. Instead, delegating a task means that you trust your colleague to be able to complete the tasks unassisted if need be.

You can assess an employee’s ability to delegate through a 360-degree review, gathering anonymous feedback from other employees about their experiences of working on tasks delegated by that that employee. You can also use these criteria to help develop employee feedback on delegation:

Setting goals

To complete a project, it is useful for your employees to be able to see a clear route to the end goal. This does not just involve the long-term goal of finishing a project. It is also useful for your employees to break their projects down into smaller goals.

By combining this with an ability to prioritise tasks appropriately, an employee can turn what seems like a daunting challenge into something that is manageable within the given time frame.

A manager or team working on an advertising campaign, for instance, could break down the early stages of the project into smaller goals for market research, budget outlining and establishing targets. 

You can assess an employee’s ability to set goals during an appraisal or team discussion. After all, the ability to set goals is both an individual responsibility and a team responsibility. You can do this by applying some of the criteria suggested below:

Project management

This leads on to project management skills. In order to achieve small goals as well as your overall goal, your employees and teams will need to have effective organisational skills. Project management skills involve:

As project management is a complex area, often requiring a qualification, you may choose to recruit employees on the basis of having a degree or vocational qualification in this skill. You could create a project manager role within your team, to help employees with the management of high-stake, high-budget projects.

Alternatively, you could offer your employees some basic project management training to assist them with their day-to-day organisation.

To find out more about their current level of ability, you can conduct a skill assessment by:

By becoming familiar with the different types of organisational techniques, you can assess your employees’ organisation level more confidently. Although this guide provides some useful criteria for assessing your employees, you can choose to create your own to reflect the needs of your business.