Why Time Tracking Matters for Your Business and Employees?
4 min read
Confused why time tracking is important for your business and your employees? You’re in the right place!
In this post, we discuss the benefits of time tracking and how to do it the right way.
The most valuable asset for every business owner is time. If your employees don’t manage their time correctly, there will be delays and projects will go over budget. You will create invoices that don’t match time spent, and as a result, end up with unsatisfied clients.
However, to get fairly compensate employees for their time, you must keep an account of how they spend time at work. A time tracking app is a valuable time management tool that may help you and your staff get better organized, effective, and productive.
Put simply, a time tracking will help you and your business save time and money.
Table of Contents
What is Time Tracking?
Time tracking refers to how businesses keep track of employees’ working hours and ensure they are paid commensurate with their time.
Time entries aren’t just for payroll; they’re also a secure means for managers to track where their employees’ time is going and how long they take to finish a task. Once employers have determined which jobs take the most time, they may consider if that time was effectively spent.
The most time-consuming tasks aren’t always the ones that require the most effort or provide the most benefit. Often, the opposite is true. Employers can then mitigate where necessary.
How Time Tracking Can Help Your Business?
Aside from the apparent benefit of knowing how long your employee has worked, using time tracking software like Hivedesk to log your team’s time has several advantages. Here are some reasons why time tracking might be beneficial to your business:
Understand Where Resource Demand is Highest
The time spent on a task is an important indicator of the amount of resources required. It identifies whether a department requires additional labor or other inputs, as well as who delivers the greatest value to the team.
This is critical information for the team and the corporation. It’s possible that only one individual does most of the labor. In that case, perhaps something needs to be amended to bring everyone up to the same level. This could mean responsibility-sharing and workload redistribution.
Estimate and bill more accurately
You can examine your historical time-tracking data whenever clients approach you for similar projects. This way, you’ll be able to gauge the time and cost more precisely.
Consequently, there will be fewer disparities between estimates and bills, and if a client disputes an invoice, you’ll be able to back it up with reliable tracking data.
Enhance Productivity and Motivation
Time-tracking has a significant impact on your employees’ productivity. It gives high-performing individuals the assurance that their efforts will be recognized and appropriately compensated. It also keeps slackers in check or brings problems to light quickly.
With this, you can get a team member who has difficulty with a particular task up to speed. Also, if you are self-employed, you can instill the discipline and professionalism necessary to grow into a mature business.
Transform Payment Processing
If you run a bill-by-the-hour service, using timesheet software to log your time helps you keep track as you go. Rather than waiting until the last minute, when you’ve almost forgotten how many hours your organization put into a project, time tracking allows you to automate and get compensated adequately.
This also helps in payroll management for remote teams. Time tracking software can help you automate payroll operations on your computer, shortening the time you spend keying in data.
Scale Your Business More Easily
If you have robust time tracking systems in place from the start, your firm will scale more smoothly, whether you’re transitioning from freelancing to a small business or a medium-sized one.
You can deploy your time tracking data to make informed decisions at all times, and you can leverage your systems to reduce administrative chores and focus on what you do best.
How Time Tracking Can Help Your Employees?
Time tracking not only enhances your general business performance but also helps your employees optimize their performance through the following ways:
Increase Accountability
Every self-responsible person is intrinsically motivated to do their best in both their personal and professional lives. Still, even the most self-accountable of us might become disengaged from time to time. External motivation tactics come in handy in this situation.
One of these methods is time tracking. With time tracking, employees are more accountable since they know they have to report hours spent on projects. With time tracking, you indicate a willingness to be conscious of how much time your team members spend on assignments.
This develops a sense of accountability for all tasks completed during the day. Employees will be less likely to slack on their tasks and waste working time on trivial matters if they know their timesheets are constantly available for review.
Manage Procrastination
Humans are prone to procrastination. It’s likely that some of your team members frequently feel compelled to put off unpleasant tasks so they can spend their time relaxing. According to Charlotte Liebermann of The New York Times, we procrastinate, not because we’re faulty or don’t know how to manage our time, but because some aspects of our responsibilities and to-dos elicit feelings of boredom, worry, and even self-doubt. We also seem to outsource those duties that aren’t crucial or urgent enough for our future selves.
However, the approaches for developing a sense of urgency are sufficient to eliminate procrastination. A time tracker can help your employees fight procrastination in the following ways:
- Track deadlines and estimates – Most employees are naturally driven to complete projects by the deadline since it feels like a personal accomplishment or helps them avoid management disapproval. As a result, make sure to notify your team members when various pieces of work are due and equip them with the tools they need to track progress. Most advanced time tracking software provide task deadlines and estimates. You can also set up the program to send relevant users automatic notifications anytime they risk schedule overrun.
- Project management and tracking – Project management capability is present in most advanced time trackers, allowing users to plan the scope of work and assign tasks to the relevant team members. This lets your employees know how much work and timelines they have to accomplish assigned tasks.
Manage Procrastination
Staying productive requires adequate rest. Time tracking can help you prevent employee burnout. With an automatic time tracker to monitor how you spend your time, your employees may rapidly determine:
- Workload fluctuations: identifying occasions when work is spread out unevenly throughout the week, resulting in days of fluctuating intensity and pressure, can help employees balance out their workweek.
- Overtime: Working intensely for long periods can cause sleep disturbances, stress, anxiety, and depression; therefore, keeping track of these patterns helps create a balance.
- Capacity: Knowing the total work hours helps employees avoid excessive overtime.
- Breaks: failing to take sufficient breaks can have a significant negative impact on productivity. When employees keep track of their time, they can see how much well-spaced quality downtime they can get.
Types of Time Tracking
There are two forms of time tracking:
Personal Time Tracking
This solution tracks time spent across different digital platforms and subsequently categorizes them with important insights and productivity scores. Using this score, you can compare your workday from week to week, learn from your mistakes, and adjust your routine accordingly.
Those solutions are ideal for personal time monitoring or small teams, but they aren’t scalable or practical enough for teams with over ten members. These solutions don’t have a direct link to projects and tasks, and they’re not coupled with other important information like your schedule and resources.
Project Time Tracking
Project time tracking, on the other hand, is a better alternative for larger firms. This is most commonly available in project and resource management applications. These make it easy to manage all of your work across projects and companywide, giving you and your team vital insights into how best to manage your time in the future.
How to Introduce Time Tracking in Your Business
Before incorporating time tracking, you’ll need to consider how everyone will react to the news. Attempts to monitor employees’ activities at work are frequently met with resistance.
Despite the many advantages, any type of time management reporting is likely to elicit resistance from the team due to the perception that they would be constantly monitored.
Explicitly stating the underlying motivations for establishing time tracking can help you gain team support. Successful managers go to great lengths to demonstrate that time tracking is advantageous to both individuals and the business.
You can do this by clearly outlining that team members can use time tracking to work toward their own and shared goals, putting their time where it matters the most, both personally and professionally, leading to overall organizational success.
Conclusion
Time tracking carries many benefits to turn your business fortunes around and maximize your employee’s productivity and wellness. With the appropriate tools and approach towards adopting and onboarding your employees into time tracking, you will be set to chart an optimistic future.
HiveDesk is a time-tracking tool for employers managing remote employees.
Hivedesk features robust activity monitoring, geolocation tracking for field staff, automatic screenshots, detailed reporting, and much more. Reach out to us today to try out our groundbreaking time tracking solutions.
Start your free trial today to see how HiveDesk can help you monitor and manage your remote employees.
