‘Time is money.’
We’ve heard that old, cliche adage a lot yet it’s still relevant. Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or a team member, knowing where your hours are going is extremely important so that you can gain control of what you achieve during the day.
When it comes to business, time has always represented the key to competitive advantage. It’s the key to productivity and a healthy workflow. Therefore, it’s crucial to take extra efforts to ensure that you manage, control, and get more from it.
But, in such a fast-paced and changing world, who has time for that?
Thanks to the internet, though, you can now manage and track time with fewer efforts using time Tracking apps out there. With the help of time tracking tools, it’d be much easier to understand your time personality, what point you find yourself struggling at, and what you can do to increase your individual productivity.
In this post, we’ll dive more in-depth into the importance of time tracking and how to implement it in your company. This way, you and your team can nip and tuck your speed and performance in tasks for ultimate efficiency.
“Looking for a smarter way to track and manage your time? Switch to ProofHub.”
How Important It Is to Track Your Time?
One thing we know for sure that efficient time tracking equals more efficient results. In general, time tracking is all about helping you and your team to manage work hours effectively.
Time tracking makes it easier for you to understand the way you work and how much time you usually need to complete a task. In this case, you and your team or other employees get solid insights that help you boost productivity and, eventually, improve Employee engagement and performance.
As an employee, you might have a lot on your plate — from replying to emails to catching up with your explainer video production process, it’s hectic. But, with a decent time tracking tool, every employee knows which task they should prioritize so they can spend the time well and avoid distractions and burnout.
Meanwhile, for managers and executives, time tracking comes in handy to address the issues springing from the misuse of time in the workplace. They’ll understand how their employees use their work hours, including monitoring if there are employees that are less productive, or even overworking, and address other problems in your daily workflows.
So, if you asked, ‘how important is it to track my time?’ The answer is: extremely important.
That being said, only 17% of employees are currently making an effort to actively track their time. What’s more the stat says that multi-tasking without a decent time-tracking process can decrease productivity up to 45%.
So, if you aim to improve your overall productivity, bring the entire organization to stay on top of work, and keep up with competitors, time tracking is one of the most important factors you should seriously consider.
6 Ways to Implement Time Tracking in Your Company
Now that you understand the importance of effective time tracking, it’s time to break down some handy and actionable ways to successfully implement it in your company.
One thing you need to bear in mind is that time tracking isn’t all about the time per se. It’s also about strategy and knowledge — it’s a process, after all.
So, when you’re about to implement time tracking in your company, it takes quite some steps in order to get the desired results.
Rather than picking a time tracking tool and simply use it just for the sake of doing it, there are some rules you should follow to make sure that you implement time tracking successfully.
Here you go:
1. Introduce It to The Whole Team
This is the most basic one: introducing the time tracking process to every member of the team in the company. You need to make sure that everyone in the company is well aware of the importance of time tracking, why they need it, and how it will help and benefit them in some ways.
A clear understanding of benefits makes your teams more open and receptive to new ideas. Highlight the advantages that each individual member will get from time tracking. Note that you also need to make it all about them, not only your company’s interests.
Photo by fauxels on Pexels
You can communicate some benefits of time tracking like:
- Protecting employees from overworking and burning out
- Identifying priorities
- Revealing how each employee can work their best
- Giving an insight into common distractions and how time tracking helps employees to deal with it
When you have everyone on the same page, it’d be much easier for you to build transparency, empathy, and trust to leverage time tracking so that your team thrives by it hassle-free.
“Make it easy for your team to track every productive minute they spend at work by switching to ProofHub.”
2. Use the Time Tracking Based on Team’s Needs and Preferences
Remember, the time tracking process is meant to improve employee engagement and help them focus on their task more. That’s why it’s supposed to make your employees feel much at ease — and not threatened or even become hostile towards time tracking.
You need to use time tracking to respond to your team and employees’ needs or protect its values. In other words, you need to ensure that time tracking is there to make their work much more effective and efficient and not to spy on them.
If you fail to do so, then your time tracking efforts will fall flat.
By all means, it’s paramount to make sure that you have a solid understanding of your employee’s and teammate’s needs and capabilities of leveraging time tracking.
Make sure you leverage the right time tracking tool and make it employee-first to address your employee’s issues with time management and understand how it will fit into their workflow.
3. Communicate the Valuable Data
Time tracking tools give you reports or data that help you to evaluate the time you and other employees spent working on projects.
From the data you have, make sure that you communicate it and show its value. They provide motivation to track time and help increase the understanding of getting the tasks effectively in general.
Every member on a team needs to know their own performance and what they can do to get the best out of their time management and tracking. That’s the reason why you need to always communicate results and outcomes.
If you’re a manager or executive, it’s crucial to make some comments on the time tracking results and present them at joint meetings.
You might also want to consider rewarding those employees whose productivity and performance have increased. It’ll give them motivation and great insight into the importance of time tracking.
For instance, in a tool like ProofHub, you get time reports that you can easily share with your team members to give them a clear picture of how they are spending their time.
4. Delegate the Responsibility for Time Tracking Process To The Right Person
To make time tracking implementation much easier, you need to make one person responsible for time tracking. It can be your HR manager or another specific employee that has the capability for time registration.
The reason for choosing one person in charge of the time tracking is to help every process focused. So, all the employees can turn to that responsible person and don’t have to bother each other whenever they have issues with their time tracking, which can lead to distractions and unproductive time.
And of course, since managing and controlling the time tracking process isn’t a walk in the park, you also need to make sure that the responsible person stays motivated.
5. Make the Time Tracking Data Accessible and Transparent
Even if there’s one person in charge of the time tracking process, you need to make sure that every employee can see the data to make the whole process more transparent.
All employees should be able to see who worked on what and see how others are spending their time. This way, they’ll be motivated to use their time well and get their tasks done even more efficiently.
Here, a little bit of competition is a good thing to help each employee unlock their full potential.
“Timesheets in ProofHub are an excellent way to share employee time data. Check out more about them here.”
6. Fill Out the Timesheet Daily
Most time tracking tools allow you to enter or log time manually, giving you options whether you prefer to fill out the timesheet each day or week, or even month. In this case, we found out that filling out the timesheet each day — at the end of the day, before you go home, it’s less burdensome.
Photo by Zen Chung on Pexels
You might think that if you fill out the timesheet weekly at once, it means that you track your timeless frequently, and that sounds much easier and less frustrating. But, that’s not quite true, though. In fact, it can be counterproductive.
If you enter all the time tracking results weekly, at once, you have to remember all the activities on projects you’ve worked on the way back from last Monday. While you are trying so hard to remember all the work you’ve done, you might end up forgetting most of the stuff to input into the time tracking tool.
It’s such a waste of time and energy right?
That’s why filling out the timesheet daily is such a sweet spot to log your time. You can fully remember what you’ve worked on that day, write the report in no minutes and of the top of your head.
Wrapping Up
Regardless of your position in an organization or what industry your business belongs in, time is your most precious resource. You can also say that it’s a scarce resource that is worth monitoring closely.
The more you are aware of where your time goes, the more chances you’ll have to track your progress on work and boost your productivity.
From all the essential methods mentioned above, now you understand that using a time tracker can be an excellent first step any business or organization should take toward improving project delivery and results.
You can leverage ProofHub as a time tracking solution. The software isn’t only providing you with robust project management tools but also a time tracker feature that helps you track and deliver projects on time.
Author:
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro
If you enjoyed reading this article:
Clap: so others can find it
Comment: if you have a question/suggestion you’d like to ask
Follow: ProofHub to read all the articles
Also Read:
- Learning to Avoid the Chaos: 5 Things That Can Go Wrong in the Flexible Workspace
- The Untapped Powers of a Motivated Team (and how to unleash them)
- How to Keep Up Stellar Project Management Work When in Stress
- Cringeworthy Things Great Leaders Do NOT Do!
How to Effectively Implement Time Tracking in Your Company was originally published in ProofHub Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
