All entrepreneurs, managers, and team leaders in countless companies all over the world are familiar with the fact that time tracking is one of those things that shouldn’t be skipped if you opt for any type of monitoring. Such procedures are required primarily in order to monitor the activities and tasks performed by employees, but workers, and often superiors, usually consider them too aggressive a method. Why? Well, no one likes to be followed every step of the way. As human beings, we’re aware of our tendency to make mistakes, especially while being under pressure, and we aren’t the most comfortable when anyone measures our time and controls what we do. The whole performance becomes focused on the desire to show off as well as possible so that tracking doesn’t ‘notice’ flaws along the way, while the charms and satisfaction of doing business obligations tend to get lost.
However, here we come to the key question and a major point of the dilemma related to this issue – does this concept of activity hours monitoring have more advantages or disadvantages? Our opinion is that the benefits definitely take precedence in this case, if the superiors know how to use this system in the right way and at the same time explain to the employees what its purpose is. When you read the text that follows, you’ll realize that tracking can bring you tons of good things, improve the way you do business, and bring even greater progress. And here’s how.
Table of Contents
1. Better planning strategy
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When working on a significant project, it’s extremely important to be aware of the true capacities of each team member. Not that anyone would be overthrown from the place to which they belong, or that those who work more would be praised, and those who work less would be rebuked. The point is to consider the average number of hours that each employee spends on certain actions within the project. Time tracking measures exactly this segment of work and its task is to properly record and log all the hours spent in performing the activities so that planning future moves would be a shade easier. This is done by specific applications or platforms, for example, Keeping.nl – and the great thing is that it’s adapted to all devices and you can choose where you will count the hours and observe the effect.
In this way, after the current project is completed, we’ll be able to check at any moment how much effort certain aspects of similar new projects require in order to distribute work responsibilities in the most appropriate way. This benefits everyone, doesn’t it? Sometimes clients have specific requests that a company needs to fit in in order to successfully complete a task – and one of them is precisely efficiency and speed.
2. It’s a productivity boost
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Okay, we know – just like we said, no one’s actually over the moon or extremely happy about the fact that every step they take as part of their business assignments is monitored. However, with the right approach, this can be turned into additional motivation for employees who won’t be afraid of this process, but use it as a kind of means to reach the goal faster. These can be bonuses, higher earnings, some promotion, and in the end, a prosperously done project.
In addition to having a beneficial effect on motivation, it also increases the efficiency with which the task’s approached, which might only have good consequences for the project. Also, if the results of counting logged hours are shared with team members, it may even better affect their awareness of the way they do the job. Those who do it well will get the desire to be even better, while those who lag a little behind and don’t manage things quite well will want to correct the result. What is quite certain is that the time tracking, in this case, sets certain priorities that all the forces of the employees should strive for and do everything in their power in order to finish everything in the right way. Find out more about this here.
Maximizing Efficiency with Resource Allocation and Workload Balancing
Effective management hinges on the optimal utilization of resources, notably the workforce. At the heart of this lies employee time tracking—an invaluable tool in the realm of business operations. By scrutinizing how employees distribute their time across tasks, leaders unearth critical insights. They can promptly spot bottlenecks, ensuring tasks don’t stagnate at one end while there’s untapped potential at another. This is why you could use clock-in clock-out apps for better time management.
Consider a marketing team: if a graphic designer is swamped with requests while a content writer awaits assignments, a discrepancy emerges. Addressing this by redistributing tasks can cultivate balance. This proactive approach not only streamlines operations but safeguards against employee burnout—a phenomenon costly to both morale and productivity. Ultimately, time tracking transforms raw data into actionable strategies, championing efficiency and harmonious workflow in the workplace.
3. Feedback related to the employees
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In addition to how fast we work, of course, it’s also noteworthy how we work, and even more so when we choose as team members. It’s certain that all the people you have hired are there for a good reason, but that doesn’t diminish the significance of controlling the level of their productivity periodically. By this, we don’t mean that it’s required to observe statistics non-stop and see who’s good or bad in order to praise or warn him. This is more about the insight into the capabilities of the people you work with, their way of coping with pressure and obligations, and ultimately, their overall results.
Depending on how they perform, you can decide which one of them deserves a better salary or a certain climb to a higher place on the company’s ladder, and who might need to engage more about their speed, timeliness, or anything like that. This can also help in the distribution of work, as those who perform better, in general, will probably have more delicate or difficult tasks.
4. The possibility to give appropriate time evaluation to the client
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Finally, imagine the following scenario – you’ve already agreed in advance to start a great project with a serious client. In the desire to impress him and present yourself in the best possible light, but also upon consulting with the team, you set a rather challenging deadline for which you claim you can do the job. However, the days go by, the employees do their best, but they can’t finish everything within the prescribed time frame. Nervousness occurs, sparks light up and everything gets much worse than usual. Well, in order to avoid such scenarios, you have to get in the habit of tracking time.
If you do this on a regular basis, each time a new investor or client contacts you, you’ll be able to go back to previously made and recorded results and calculate approximately how long it would take you to complete everything. When there’s a false image here and when you’re convinced that the team is more engaged than it actually is, but in the end, it turns out quite the opposite, it can only be disastrous for a joint project. Therefore, this method will help you determine the necessary number of hours and the costs much more easily. In the end, what else could you possibly wish for?
