The average employee spends 2 hours 11 minutes procrastinating daily. Texting, daydreaming, and gossiping are the most popular ways to waste time at work.
Many business managers are furiously trying to make their employees to fulfil their goals and manage their time better. Are you one of them? Are you on edge daily trying to meet deadlines?
You should know by now that employees don’t like the idea of someone breathing down their necks, so when you bring into discussion implementing a time tracking system, they may fret over it.
But if you highlight that the app’s purpose is to boost productivity and not hold people accountable, they may be able to see the unlimited benefits this kind of software can offer.
Here Are Some Bits of Information About Employee Time Tracking
The average individual can be productive up to 6 hours daily. Beyond this period, they start slacking, and their drive and productivity diminish as the work hours go by.
Most employees spend 1.5 hours reading and responding to emails, and this duration can scale up if they have more responsibilities.
Technically speaking it’s not bad that they read and respond to emails, but the issue is that once they start doing it, they can end up spending half of the workday in this activity.
And this is only an example because all other activities can make employees lose track of time.
But what if we’d tell you that most employees don’t track time? 82% of people don’t have a dedicated time management system, and only 12% of workers schedule all their tasks in advance.
They just deal with what comes up, which is one of the most unsuccessful time management strategies. Still, 1 in 4 workers uses it, even if they feel their job is never under control.
A List of the Most Common Time-wasters for in-office and Remote Work
- Idle-talk
- Conversing and texting
- Reading and responding to emails
- Browsing the internet
- Multiple breaks
- Meetings (physical or teleconferences)
- Interruptions and distractions from co-workers
What does time tracking imply?
Time tracking isn’t about spying on your employees. Your workers want to feel motivated at work, and a key factor is feeling you trust them to do their job. Tracking their activity in detail may feel empowering for you, but it’s counterintuitive because imposing your authority can actually drive down their productivity. Keep them motivated by trusting them to complete their tasks.
Time tracking is about understanding how your organisations use time and learning and leveraging the data to make smart business decisions. You can use time tracking to estimate further jobs better and determine how long a large project takes. Time tracking is also about learning about your workers’ capacities and encouraging them to work to their fullest potential.
Benefits of time tracking
Time tracking is important for your organisation for multiple reasons, but the obvious is to offer your clients accurate billing. Having access to accurate data enables you to charge for every bit of work required to deliver a product or service.
For your company, being able to charge the right amount of work is essential in maintaining profitability, but time tracking apps also offer insight into how your team and overall business is performing.
Suppose data reveals that many employees are losing time because they have to read and respond to emails.
In that case, it indicates a problem you need to solve by hiring a specialist to handle this particular task and allow your professionals to focus on their tasks.
Many employees will stop their work to respond to emails and then return to what they’re doing without saying how it breaks their concentration and impacts their performance.
But if they approach it as a normal part of the working day, they encourage two things. You never account for the lost time, and their productivity has plenty to suffer.
Your employees can also learn from their own tracking data because they can see where they waste time and refine their performance.
Also, suppose you notice that some employees are having difficulties completing particular tasks or taking them longer than it should. In that case, you can take measures like offering extra training to help them be proactive about their job.
Reasons to Use a Time Tracking Softwareers
A time tracking program enables your employees to take ownership of their workload. They enter the time each task takes them to see how they perform.
Some workers see time tracking as a personal challenge because they want to beat the time for the previous months.
If you use a tracker like the Timesheet Portal online you can also produce accurate quotes because you know how much time each task takes.
Your employees can offer a rough estimate of how much they spend completing a task, but a rough estimate isn’t the same as an accurate one because you need to know exactly how much they spend on a job to determine how to bill the clients.
You can use the time tracking platform when working with third parties and freelancers to keep an eye on their workload.
Ask them to fill out the same timesheets as your employees, and check them regularly to ensure you’re paying for what’s actually done.
Tips for Introducing Time Tracking
Communicate clearly the purpose of the time tracking software, and explicitly mention that you won’t use it to spay on your workers.
Share with your team the reasons behind your decision.
- You want to invoice clients more accurately
- You want to align tasks and projects better across multiple teams
- You want to learn to make better estimates
- You need to identify if there are meaningless activities that take too much time.
In time your employees will understand that time tracking isn’t synonym with monitoring. It’s a way to increase business productivity and manage time instead of letting time manage them.
Time tracking is a game of empowering and enabling employees to assess their vulnerabilities and improve them.