Organizational skills are useful across all facets of life. Be it in school, home, or the workplace, it is a skill that can help you maximize time, and carry out your work effectively and efficiently.
Because of the bulk of work that managers or entrepreneurs have on their table every day, many of them opt for the services of a personal assistant who can help them organize their schedules so they don’t miss out on appointments, meetings, and their daily activities.
This goes to show how valuable organizational skills are in the workplace. Furthermore, employees who exhibit excellent organizational skills are able to perform their tasks optimally.
Additionally, demonstrating the possession of excellent organizational skills in your resume puts you in a better position when applying for administrative, managerial, clerical, and accounting jobs.
This article explains what organizational skills are, their importance, examples, how to improve them, and ways to demonstrate them in your resume, cover letter, and during interviews.
Definition Of Organizational Skills
Organizational skills are abilities, knowledge, and skills that help you maximize time, resources, and people for optimal performance of the task.
It is an essential skill in organizations as it helps to achieve the best possible results while utilizing available resources efficiently. For instance, an accountant utilizes organizational skills while dealing with different clients’ data, computing numbers, and multitasking.
Also, a secretary employs organizational skills for handling documents and files. Managers, on the other hand, use the skill to assign tasks, manage their schedules, and plan strategies to meet organizational goals.
Whatever the case, organizational skills help to facilitate workflow, reduce work time and stress,
Benefits of Organizational Skills to Employees and The Organization
1. Greater productivity in the organization
One noticeable advantage that organizational skills present to the organization is that the organization becomes more productive.
Organizations with employees and managers that have these skills know how to plan their work schedules, and prioritize tasks so as to always meet up with deadlines or even exceed targets.
Through this, organizations are sure to always achieve their goals and stay productive.
2. It can make work easier
Employees and managers who can easily organize their tasks are able to work easily.
Furthermore, a manager and employees who possess strong organizational skills can help come up with creative strategies that can make a task easier to do and reduce work time for all employees in the organization.
3. It helps to establish a sense of professionalism and gain customer’s trust
Being professional is not just about having the best quality product or having the most skilled employees.
From the way, you attend to customers, to the way you address their complaints, to delivery, and packaging, customers can always sense a difference.
Hence, possessing excellent organizational skills within your organization impacts your business overall and this helps you to gain the customer’s trust and attract better clients than competitors.
Examples of Organizational Skills
1. Project Management
Project management involves planning step-by-step strategies or processes toward achieving a task. Usually, there is a time frame and deliverables while undertaking a project. Also, it involves working with a team most of the time.
Hence, it requires strong organizational skills for efficiency and effectiveness. Additionally, from the planning stage to execution, strong organizational skills are required so as to avoid errors or overlapping of functions.
2. Delegation
Managers who possess excellent organizational skills are good with delegation. They know who can perform a task best and those who will do well together as a team.
As a result, each employee stays productive and the organization can achieve more success.
Furthermore, through delegation, you can take some heavy duties off your neck as a manager, and focus on more important aspects of the business.
But those managers who lack organizational skills may become overwhelmed with too much work. In the end, they may not be able to achieve their goals.
3. Time management
A key quality of individuals with proficient organizational skills is the ability to manage time. The ability to organize helps employees properly schedule work and allocate time to them.
This way you can easily meet up with deadlines and do your job efficiently.
As a manager, organizational skills help you to break down complex work into steps, thereby making it easy for you to do.
As such, you will always be able to meet up in time regardless of how bulky the work is.
4. Teamwork
Whether as a team leader or member, demonstrating excellent organizational skills can help you stand out in the team.
As a team leader, it helps with planning clear-cut strategies, apportioning time to tasks, and delegating functions to every team member. This way, the desired outcome can be easily achieved.
Furthermore, as a team member, organizational skills help you to carry out your functions effectively and easily as well as meet up deadlines.
5. Leadership
Individuals who possess organizational skills are not only excellent team players. Rather, they can juggle between being a team player and a team leader effortlessly.
Greater responsibilities come with greater roles.
As such, supervisors and managers have a lot more on their plate than most employees.
They have to see to meet with clients, get and study reports from different parts of the organization, access what is not working in the organization, seek new ideas to move the organization forward, etc.
However, a leader with strong organizational skills will assign tasks to employees, set up teams, and draw plans and strategies for each member of the organization to achieve their goals. This way, he is able to ease the stress himself while ensuring that the work continues.
6. Ability to Work Under Pressure
The workplace is fast-paced, as such, many job functions require that employees are able to manage pressure. However, to manage pressure in the workplace, you need the ability to organize your work.
Since, organizational skills help in knowing how to plan, schedule, and prioritize your work, you’d have fewer problems coping with the fast pace of work.
Moreso, even if you are given additional roles or tasks in the organization, your ability to organize will help you adapt easily and handle the situation perfectly.
This way, you earn the respect of employers and they can trust you for top roles in the organization.
How To Demonstrate Organizational Skills In The Workplace
1. Have a special journal to write your activities for the day
Writing is as important as doing. Don’t conclude that you cannot forget all that you have to do. You might get overwhelmed with a task that you forget about others.
Hence, what’s best is to write down all that you have to do in a journal or notebook. Furthermore, it is best that you use a book designated for this purpose only. This is because using a book filled with unnecessary things can distract you.
Moreso, putting it down helps you to keep a mental picture of your activities for the day, and you can easily pick it up, again and again, to remind yourself of what you have to do.
2. Note your goals
Don’t just note your activities for the day, rather pen down what you aim to accomplish with each task. This helps you to stay focused on the big picture.
Also, it defines your actions. That is to say, you wouldn’t be able to channel your energy and resources in the right direction.
3. Make a plan
While you have a goal in mind to achieve, most of the time, it requires step-by-step activities. Furthermore, goals could be cumbersome, therefore, it is important that you come up with actionable steps that can help you achieve your goals.
4. Apportion a time frame to each task
So as to maximize the time of work, it is better that you set time for everything you want to do. This will help you avoid wasting time.
For instance, if you have about five to six items on your to-do list, simply write the amount of time you’d need to complete the whole task. Then you could write a time for each of the tasks.
How To Improve Organizational Skills
1. Use a time tracker
Using a time tracker app, stopwatch, or setting an alarm is a great way to know the amount of time you spend on a task. This way you can know If you’re spending too much time on a task and need to develop better speed doing it.
As such, you stay alert and conscious, and intentional about improving yourself. Over time, you’d begin to deliver the same result in less time.
2. Identify what time of the day you work best
While others are nightcrawlers, some perform better at the wee hours of the day, while others are very active in the afternoon.
Whatever the case, knowing what time you are most productive can create a ripple effect on your work.
For instance, if you discover that you are more productive in the morning, you may do those tough activities in the morning, and handle-less demanding tasks in the afternoon or evening. This way you can always stay on top of your game.
3. Prioritize projects
It is not enough that you make plans for undertaking a task. More importantly, try to prioritize them as this will help you to keep a great workflow.
A good way to do this is to categorize your activities for the day by separating them this way:
- Urgent and important activities
- Important but not urgent activities
- Neither urgent nor important activities
4. Take a break when you feel overwhelmed
Sometimes being organized is knowing when to stop working. When you feel like work is taking a toll on you, you can demand a break or a leave so as to put yourself together.
Furthermore, adequate rest helps you stay productive. But if you deny yourself the required rest after much work, you might break down totally and this will affect work.
Hence, take a break when you should. It is also recommended that a regular twenty-minute break away from the screen should be taken when you work mostly with computers.
How To Articulate Your Organizational Skills In Your Resume, Cover Letter, Or During Interviews
Since an organization is a valuable skill set in organizations, it is important that you know how to prove it in your resume for you to gain an advantage when applying for jobs.
So the first thing to do to show your organizational skill in the resume is to highlight it as part of those skills highlighted in a separate skills section of the resume.
After that, describe a situation in the workplace where you applied organizational skills.
For example, if you’re applying for an accounting job, you may explain how you managed the client’s data, and even helped reduce accounting costs by 21% using QuickBooks in your previous workplace.
Furthermore, during interviews, employers may not ask you a direct question about when you used organizational skills.
Therefore, when you are asked to describe your strengths or talk about your achievements in your previous job, that is an opportunity for you to prove your organizational skills.
FAQs
Do all employees need organizational skills?
Yes. Organizational skills help every individual in the organization to schedule their task, achieve their goals and meet up with deadlines.
Why are organizational skills important?
It helps organizations to achieve their goals, achieve greater productivity and reduce work time.
How can you improve your organizational skills?
You can improve your organizational skills by prioritizing projects, identifying what time of the day you work best, taking breaks, etc.
Conclusion
Organizational skills are crucial skills in organizations. Employees who possess this skill are able to do their jobs better than many others. Also, managers who demonstrate an excellent degree of skill stand out.
As a result, employers are always on the lookout for those who possess strong organizational skills during the hiring process. Therefore, you should make sure to prove possession of the skills in your resume.
Furthermore, employers may consider you for top positions in the organization because management requires high-level organizational skills.
Finally, you can see the article on soft skills required in the workplace to know more about those skills that can help you land jobs.
I hope this article helped.
Thanks for reading.
