Time management: how much room for contact with beneficiaries?
In a busy schedule, a conversation with the people who benefit from the work can easily come second to the next deliverable. The management question is specific: should this time be protected when it helps people understand what their work actually contributes?
What the literature establishes
Adam M. Grant (2008, Journal of Applied Psychology) shows, through field experiments, that interventions making a task’s significance for others more apparent can improve performance. The findings highlight, in particular, the role of perceived social impact and the sense that beneficiaries appreciate the work. They suggest distinguishing time spent directly on production from time that helps people understand why their effort matters.
The mechanism: making the value of work visible
J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) identify task significance as one of the job characteristics that can foster experienced meaningfulness, alongside skill variety and task identity. Their model distinguishes this mechanism from autonomy and feedback on results. A conversation with a beneficiary could therefore clarify a consequence of the work without, on its own, providing greater discretion or showing how to work more effectively.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that contact with patients, customers or service users should be increased. Yet these studies do not establish that an additional conversation always justifies the time it takes, or that it should take precedence over a safety requirement. The useful hypothesis is narrower: protect relevant contact when the value of work remains abstract, rather than adding a relational obligation to every schedule. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot decide
The field experiments concern specific activities and interventions; they do not establish an optimal contact duration that applies across occupations. The job characteristics study, meanwhile, is not a trial comparing different allocations of time. Finally, positive feedback does not establish that a task deserves more resources: it may make some beneficiaries visible while leaving others out of view.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR’s time management and prioritisation programme, a team in Sion could trial a brief conversation about the value of a specific piece of work: with a service user in hydropower, a patient with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in healthcare, a buyer in viticulture or a visitor in Alpine tourism. Before the conversation, the team would record the task concerned, the planned time and the activity displaced; afterwards, it would note the concrete consequence it had learned about and any resulting change in priorities. The measure would be the proportion of conversations providing new information used in a documented decision, alongside the total time involved, including preparation. This monitoring would not prove a productivity gain, but it would help establish whether the time genuinely informs trade-offs rather than merely filling the schedule. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Sion
- time management & prioritisation
- Sion
- research
- training sion