The Reasons Why Employee Time Tracking Improves Productivity

In deploying the time tracking software with advanced functionality, there are several aspects, which are worth discussing with your team to prevent negative perception of time tracking or let it fall under category of the tool of oppression.

To achieve effectiveness in time tracking, employers should back up its implementation with giving reasons why employee time tracking improves productivity: the best way to do it is to unlock a wide range of time tracking application stretching far beyond monitoring the employees' activity.

Introducing the benefits, employers and business owners may start with building the list as below.

Work Life Balance: Achieved ⚖️

Tagline: Time tracking proves to assist in maintaining work life balance effectively, especially in remote work mode.

The coronavirus crisis forced lots of companies to reshape their office life beyond recognition. While some people believe that we could expect returning to business as usual, others, being realistic, realize that WFH might become a permanent trend, and, naturally, they want to have reliable tools for smooth and efficient workflows regardless of employees' location.

Automatic time trackers are one of such tools as they ensure transition not only to 'work-from-home-and-staying-accountable' but 'staying-sane' as well. Time tracking clearly marks the border between working hours and time for yourselves. It prevents burnout and lets your mind feel relaxed. When you maintain work life balance, you’re able to produce better results built around quality.

Actionable tips: Inform the employees of using a time tracker as the means of setting the boundaries of work and life. Encourage them to incorporate time tracking strategically when it comes to work time calculations for proper prioritizing and experiencing the balance.

Accuracy Of Work Time: Ensured 💯🎯

Tagline: What is the worth of your time? Financially speaking, with the tool for accurate work time calculations and categorizing billable and non-billable activities, employees can easily break down their hours by projects and tasks to allot time wisely.

Time tracking provides businesses with key operational metrics vital for employers and employees and ensures:

• quantifying project estimation vs. project evaluation
• identification of bottlenecks in project and individual work
• distinguishing top performers.

Aside from keeping morale of the organizations, it lets teams feel more productive and in sync with the set goals.

Actionable tips: Time tracking for precision in work time calculation benefits employees for the obvious reason of getting work measured by automatic system that excludes bias. Besides, it arms employers with the tool of recognizing the dedicated teams' efforts.

Productivity Peaks Insights: Created 💡

Tagline: Using the time tracker equipped with a timeline and activity bar indicator, employees get the clear overview not only of their work time but also of its distribution during the day in terms of activity level and engagement.  

Focusing exclusively on time input and output metrics leads to potentially dangerous oversimplification in domains of personal productivity that always demand consideration. Rather than monitoring for spotting underperformers, activity and time tracking must be regarded as a building block in complex evaluation.

Nobody is your productivity twin: we all differ in what our productivity peaks look like. Although data from time tracking reports are not equal productivity metrics, employees can be encouraged to apply time and activity tracking data for in-depth research and exploration of personal productivity .

It allows for allocating productivity peaks as best suited time slots for performing focus tasks or zoning in deep work.

Actionable tips: Based on the number of tasks completed, it is easy to calculate individual completion rate, get metrics on ratio of planned vs. actual execution time, and work out time-related conditions for achieving your best performance.

Project Goals: Tracked 📈📊

Tagline: Employee time tracking allows to bridge planning and task management at best by bringing focus on tiniest detail of goal setting.

One of the strengths of time tracking as a full-fledged service is its capability of integration in various task management systems, which means navigating work along efficient routes leading forwards rather than looking at a project as a mountain to climb.

Working according defined time estimates and achieving short-term and long-term goals within predictable time limits results in fueling the sense of purpose. Furthermore, work based on understandable metrics aligning with goals eliminates digital anxiety that often accompanies unstructured work and disrupted routines.

Actionable tips: Goal setting is empowering for achieving results. By highlighting goals and connecting them to time metrics we create result-oriented workflow and vastly improve motivation.  Making use of rich capabilities of time tracking integration in major task management systems, employees will find it easier to focus on goals without getting bogged down.

Flexible Schedule: Managed🗓️

Tagline: With a time tracker that syncs your data across any platform or device, creating a flexibility of the working day is a plain sailing.

Providing means for creating flexibility of working hours translates into addressing multiple issues with one obvious solution: automatic recording that enables employees to work flexible hours boosts employee morale, reduces absenteeism and can be regarded as an effective measure for decreasing employee turnover.

Feeling in charge of your own time helps regain focus, cope with procrastination, build the work hours while:

• making them fit around needs of employees' personal obligations
• allocating performance of challenging tasks on productivity peaks, which reduces stress and maintains motivation.  

An insightful read on how brain works throughout the day is here .

Actionable tips: Equipping employees with a tool that supports the flexible scheduling brings considerable benefits to employers and employees alike. Make it a mission to demonstrate how a reliable time tracker enables employees to feel more in control about their working hours.

Time-Off Requests: Handled ⛱️☀️

Tagline: Submitting a time-off request from the time tracking account greatly facilitates not only HR Department work but enhances company image as an employee-friendly work environment.

Employees must be encouraged to plan their time off and use capabilities of their time tracking software, which is of utmost importance under the terms of prolonged quarantine. Studies indicate that experiencing difficulties with planning vacation can seriously nose-dive productivity and increase stress.

Overall, incorporating time off planning (including vacation, sick time and personal time) into time tracking system creates zero disruption routine for employees by optimizing the procedures implied by time off policies and, additionally, enables managers to schedule project cycles more efficiently.

Actionable tips: Businesses can benefit from creating clear guidelines and educating employees on using time tracking software for submitting PTO requests to ensure adherence to legislative regulations of labor law and prevent overlapping of schedules or miscommunication.