Whether you work from home or an office, tracking your time for effective billing and project planning is mandatory. Exact time tracking ensures that all employees’ hours are accounted for so that they are paid fairly, and any deficits and profit losses can be addressed quickly and efficiently. You need to know how much of your time is taken up by work and how much of that is going to each individual project. Time tracking is also essential to understanding how you can better guide your working hours and how to make more money!
Unfortunately, this process is not very exciting. Filling in timesheets can be time-consuming and inaccurate, and not all of your employees may be on board with tracking their every moment of work. However, there are steps that you can take to make this necessary process easier and more appealing to everyone in your office, as well as significantly decreasing the margin of error. Watch your productivity soar with these simple tips to get you started.
Keep it simple. Nobody wants to spend hours handwriting timesheets after every block of time working on a project. This process takes up valuable time that could be spent on new projects, and is prone to human error (or exaggeration). Not only does this task feel cumbersome, the data that is revealed is often not even reviewed. Your business could be utilizing this data for project management, taking the reports and using their information to streamline business. If you know just how much time a task will take instead of estimating the hours, you can then apply this to future projects to save and make more money. If the process itself is simplified, that will also save you money: time tracking by everyone involved in the company can be automated, accurate, and easy. Find a time tracking tool which is easy to understand and intuitive to use. By utilizing time tracking software, everyone can quickly and easily track every moment of their working day via their mobile or desktop computer, remotely as well as in the office.
Make it a team effort. Everyone who works for your company should be invested in how their time is spent during the workday. Missed deadlines and false promises can harm client relationships, and without accurate time tracking, employees can be unfairly assumed to be unproductive, simply because they have a different working style or an unrealistic idea of how long their projects will take to complete. To help to clear up these inconsistencies and to balance out the working relationships of your team, everyone must be clear that effective time tracking will help to smooth over some of these issues. To avoid over- or under-estimating time, be sure that your team has an easy to use platform for tracking. No one wants to work in an environment which can feel contentious because of the differences in work styles. Some of your employees habitually underestimate time given to a task, which gives the illusion of higher productivity, while others perhaps give themself a bit more time so that they know their work will be completed to the deadline. They are not lazy or trying to stretch out the time and therefore be paid more, but simply have a different understanding of time than the worker who works faster and perhaps more inefficiently due to the perceived time crunch. By time tracking as a team, each staff member will start to gain a clearer understanding of how they can best spend their time by knowing how long projects actually take, and how their work styles can be reconfigured to better match how their time is being utilized.
Get smart about time management. Now that your team is working together to effectively track their time, you can begin to establish some rules about time management in your company. Using the insights gleaned from reports and timesheets will build a solid base to help you understand how to put your time to best use from now on. Be sure that your team is now working to agree on how to avoid estimates by tracking in real time, as well as how to log things like overtime hours. These factors can help to establish accurate results and allow for more workable strategies for time management across the board. If everyone is on the same page, time management will seem effortless. Each staff member will be clear about where their time is actually going, and can use this data to formulate a working day which is more productive for them. This of course translates into a more productive company, as these insights come together to benefit the business as a whole. Understanding the true time costs of each task from each level prevents inaccurate estimates which can cause projects to fall behind schedule and your team to point the blame.
Use a time tracking app. Outsourcing your time tracking to an automated service will allow your business to implement all of these tips, in addition to giving your company more time to work with. Your employees will be able to quickly and accurately track their time from the comfort of anywhere, via their mobile phone or on their laptop or desktop computer. At Time Tracker, we offer single time entries where you can start a timer from your device with one click. Our multi-timers will increase your efficiency and you can run as many as you like simultaneously. The weekly timesheets are easy to use and will help your team to easily add their time in blocks, tracking from anywhere and submitting their entries for approval. All approved time entries will automatically sync to your accounting software. With geolocation, you will know where each employee is working and tracking from, and verify their location and travel times to prevent time theft.
Analyze the results. Taking the time to carefully analyze your time tracking data is crucial to understanding where your time is going. Understand which employees are most productive and who may need better strategies, check who has logged the most time over a week and check out how each team member has spent their individual time before comparing it to the company time as a whole to correct any imbalances. This process has the added benefit of helping each employee to understand the benefit of spending extra time for higher wages by laying out exactly whose hours are spent where and at what cost. By having precise and measurable data, you will understand how to develop a plan going forward, which takes into account your current time management and performance.
What are you waiting for?
Don’t waste another minute thinking about how to best manage your time tracking needs. Time Tracker integrates all of the above tips, so that your employees can track their time effectively and accurately from anywhere. Get smart about your time, and try us today, with our free 14-day trial. No credit card required, and no hassle.
