How to keep track of work hours

Time is an integral part of project management in any business area. A proper distribution of assigned tasks and an assessment of deadlines are essential not only for increasing a company performance, and hence its profit, but also for gaining authority at the market. It does not matter if you are a business owner or an employee, the issue of keeping track of work hours should be a priority for you.

As a business owner, sooner or later you will definitely face the challenge of keeping track of your employees' work hours. In addition, time tracking will provide you with a bunch of other benefits: you will raise discipline in your organization, coordinate your employees in order to increase their productivity, get reports about the completed tasks, obtain their real work hours, apply flexible work schedule, and much more.

The method of time tracking you choose for your company will depend on the number of employees, the level of the company's management and organization, as well as free money resources.

There are different methods of keeping track of work hours. Here are some of them:

A person who controls company workflow

It is an old-fashioned way of tracking employees' work time. Imagine that your company has one hundred employees. It is impossible for one person to control all of them or to follow all their activities.

Timesheets

Time sheets can be both paper or electronic ones. Though they allow you to keep track of employees' work hours, billing, as well as accounting, all the data should be entered manually, which is also time-consuming.

Badge readers

These devices read information from electronic cards, thus controlling the time of employees' arrival and departure. However, they do not capture employees' work activity, so you cannot know for sure what an employee spends his/her work time on.

Access control systems

With the help of these door-security systems, administrators can control their employees' activity and ensure security of the establishment. This method is related not to time or activity tracking, but to controlling employees' presence in the premises. It suits enterprises that have a strict working schedule, but not a flexible one.

Time tracking software

Of course, this method is more convenient and popular nowadays, as it displays an employee's entire work activity during the day, including breaks and visited websites. Such software also has a possibility of reporting, billing, payroll, and much more.

Time tracking motivation tips

So, let's consider the ways to make your employees track their time. It is the second challenge that you may face when running your business. People don't usually enjoy spending time on filling in a lot of papers or calculating their work hours, unless they are freelancers or get paid by the hour. Here are some tips how to make your employees control their work time efficiently:

Communicate with your employees

Explain why keeping track of work hours is important for your company. Provide some examples how the company's interests overlap with the employees' interests. In addition, explain how they can improve their productivity and grow professionally due to self-controlling.

Encourage your employees to track time

Compensate your workers for accurate time tracking or overtime which can be displayed in a time tracking system. They should realize that time tracking is not only important for their company, but it can be beneficial for them.

Help them with the system functionality

Train people in your office how to set up and use the selected time tracking system. Provide advice or technical support if it is needed.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the importance of keeping track of work hours in any organization. It is impossible to run your business productively without controlling your staff or motivating them to manage their time.

TMetric time tracker could be your best choice to keep track of work hours without the need to control your employees' every single move.

Try TMetric for free