Time Tracking Apr 10, 2017 Pros and Cons of Time Tracking: The Good, The Bad, and the Bottom Line Dave Nevogt — 7 min read Most managers and business owners face a dilemma when they’re thinking about employee time tracking. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. Keeping a time log It tracks employee productivity and project performance. It helps you decide where to allocate resources. And it provides insight into areas that may need improvement and development of employee skills. From an employee relations perspective, though, it’s not so clear. Employees may feel intimidated by demands to track their time. Or they could feel that they’re constantly being watched and evaluated. And for overly ambitious managers, employee time tracking may open the doors to excessive micromanaging. Want to get employee buy-in for time tracking? Here’s how you can. With that said, when the line is drawn, is employee time tracking effective? And does it help everyone? Or just management? Let’s take a look. The Benefits of Time Tracking In 2015, the services sector of the U.S. economy was losing about 50 million hours, or about $7.4 billion a day, in productivity. But companies can, on average, recover $52,000 in billable time per professional. How? By moving from a weekly or monthly timesheet to tracking time daily. Just imagine if your business was able to recover that kind of money. Here are some benefits of tracking employees’ time. 1. Increased productivity Research shows that people who keep track of their time more frequently are better at it. They track their work in more detail and further fine-tune their sense of productivity. This fine-tuning helps them stop spending too much time on distractions. It also helps them identify and stop multitasking. Studies show that multitasking can drain up to 40% of our productivity, so keeping this habit in check can be a big help. Start tracking your team’s time Learn how your team spends work hours and only pay for hours worked. Time tracking also sheds light on activities that take up too much time. This lets you analyze whether those activities are truly necessary. If they are, you can figure out how to optimize your processes. Continual analysis helps employees and managers further refine their productive processes. Read more about strategies to increase employee productivity here. 2. Increased accountability Employee time tracking also means greater accountability on the job. When tasks are multi-layered and involve many parties, you need to know who did whatwhen they did ithow much time they spent Increased accountability also leads people to a feeling of greater responsibility in their work. Involvement in complex projects requires that all parties work together in a consistent and structured way. By tracking the time spent on tasks, employees become more aware of their own contribution and its role in the project. This provides them with insight on how they can improve their work. Greater awareness brings with it greater accountability and the intention to shift into a more productive state. Increased accountability gives people a greater sense of responsibility for their work. Click To Tweet In addition to allowing employees to show what they have spent their time on, effective time tracking also allows managers to praise and recognize employees that are doing a good job. This helps employee morale and contributes to a more productive company. 3. Increased transparency Effective employee time tracking gives managers a clearer understanding of the work process. If certain tasks consistently take up too much time, they may need to be reviewed and optimized. Transparency provides the necessary data to improve operations on an almost daily basis instead of creating sudden and dramatic disruptions. The transparency provided by tracking software also helps managers and supervisors get a grasp on work cycles and trends. This helps them plan projects more accurately and set aside resources and manpower more efficiently. Transparency can help you grow your business. Read our post on transparency and startup growth to find out how. Another positive outcome of such transparency is the reduction of distrust across teams. Without information regarding others’ productivity or time management, employees can make flawed assumptions about the rest of the team. This is particularly true for distributed teams. A recent survey found that 62% of remote workers fear they aren’t perceived as hard-working due to their absence from the office. Good time tracking systems provide objective data about the performance of employees. This helps supervisors get a clear picture of their employees’ productivity and assess them accordingly. On the employee side, such systems relieve fears and create greater trust between them and supervisors. 4. Saving on timesheets Filling out manual timesheets is expensive. Filling out, combining, and analyzing traditional timesheets requires a lot of time, both from employees and admin staff who need to reconcile errors in timesheets and constantly remind employees to fill them out. Introducing a time tracking system streamlines this process. This is particularly important and useful for companies that work with contractors, such as freelancers or non-salaried workers. Such employees usually prefer to have a clear grasp of how they are doing in terms of workload and time spent on tasks. A time tracking system can further help them plan their time in advance in order to take up more projects or make up for the time when they will be away. 5. Decreased costs Better timekeeping leads to the elimination of leaked hours. Companies lose hundreds of billable hours every year to poor time tracking on things like email and meetings. Why? Because people forget about them. With time tracking, that’s not an issue. Employees spend more time on meaningful tasks, get more done, and keep better track of what they’re doing. All of that means a positive return on investment for your company. Boost your team’s productivity Identify your most efficient team members, boost team productivity, and get more done. It’s measurable. Our customers have seen it. And it consistently helps all sorts of businesses be more productive and profitable. Read more about time theft here. The Downsides of Time Tracking To get an idea of whether time tracking is right for you, we need to look at some of the drawbacks. With poor implementation, time tracking can be a major stressor. When time is given greater significance and value, people may end up being less patient and feeling pressured. But these drawbacks can be overcome. Here are some issues you might face and some ideas on how to overcome them: 1. Decreased employee morale Tracking employees’ time carries the risk of having them feel like they are being spied on. This is one of the most common fears that employees have when a time tracking system is implemented. No one likes to feel like they’re always being watched. Your employees sometimes feel like Big Brother is watching. —Dan Quillen Managers, supervisors, and executives need to clearly communicate the point of tracking time and tasks. It’s not to spy on employees. It’s to get a better idea of what employees are accomplishing, reduce micromanaging, and increase transparency. Managers should be clear about when and how they’ll implement tracking, what data they’ll see, and how they’ll use it. Of course, a degree of trust is built over time, once the system is up and running. But managers can do a great deal by managing expectations in advance. 2. Potential for micromanagement Employees often fear they will be micromanaged non-stop once they start tracking their time. And while certain managers may be tempted to do this, the point of tracking time is to spend less time on managing employees. These systems let managers supervise more efficiently without nitpicking or observing every detail of the work process. Time tracking allows managers to get a clear picture of an employee’s performance at a glance. And based on that, managers can dig into the details if they feel an employee is lagging behind, experiencing difficulties, or simply slacking. Such systems allow for greater precision of feedback, which should not be mistaken for micromanagement. Good feedback practices are especially important for remote teams. See our best tips on giving feedback to remote employees here. 3. Complex systems can be expensive The cost of an employee time tracking system is a legitimate concern. Complex systems that allow automatic tracking and payroll or provide activity metrics and in-depth information can be expensive. But you don’t need to implement time tracking for the whole company right away. Scalable solutions allow you to start with just a few of your employees. When you begin seeing positive ROI on your investment within a few weeks’ time, you can consider adopting the system more widely. You can also opt for more affordable options; our own time tracking system starts at $5 per user per month. Time tracking for more productive teams 4. Tracking can take up additional time and money The irony of some time tracking efforts is that they end up costing both time and money. They may not be implemented properly, overlap with other systems, or require too much manual work from employees. The point of tracking employee time is to be more efficient and productive. If the introduction of a system decreases these measures, something is off. Or, as one Agile consultant put it: “A good heuristic is that for any measurement you should be able to indicate the real cost of collecting it, the use(s) that the information is being put to, and the value resulting from those uses.” To satisfy these requirements, you’ll need a time tracking solution that is automatedprovides you with clear metrics and datagenerates comprehensive reports about employee activity By choosing a system that has all these features built-in, and that can integrate with any other systems you use, you’ll save time and money. 5. Tracking intangible benefits is hard Not everything can be tracked and measured. Brainstorming is an example of something that’s hard to analyze in that way. Sometimes it takes hours of toiling to reach a breakthrough and resolve an issue in a matter of minutes. From a time tracking perspective, all of this may look like wasted time. That’s the worry, anyway. But time tracking doesn’t just aim to measure basic productivity metrics, like keys pushed or mouse clicks. What it provides is greater transparency about how efforts are distributed throughout the day. That lets managers see how effort is turning into results. And a good employee time tracking system allows employees to add notes to their activities to provide context. Screenshots might make it look like an employee wasn’t doing anything, but a note that they were brainstorming or researching clears up these issues quickly. The bottom line on employee time tracking With all of these pros and cons, it can be difficult to determine whether employee time tracking seems like a good decision for your company. But the research and our own growing record of case studies make it clear: it makes perfect business sense. One of our customers saved over $22,000 a year by tracking employee time. It helped another make huge productivity gains and close more deals. We use it ourselves, and if that’s not the best testimonial we can give, I don’t know what is. Time tracking has advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, the #bottomline proves its worth. Click To Tweet Across the board, time tracking has shown to reduce costs that arise from loss of productivity, lack of transparency, and inessential activities. Automated time tracking eliminates costs associated with traditional time tracking methods and excessive and cumbersome paperwork. And once time tracking is established and accepted within the company, changes in employee attitudes towards work also begin to happen. If you liked this article, you should also check out How We Save $30,000 a Year on Contractor PayrollHow Timesheets Can Save Your Business MoneyBest Online Collaboration Tools That Productive Teams Around the World Use Has employee time tracking helped your company? How have you overcome the difficulties of using a time tracking system? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section! Subscribe to the Hubstaff blog for more posts like this Power up your workdayReach your goals faster with time tracking and work management. Most popular Employee Productivity Productivity vs. Efficiency: What’s the Difference? Productivity and efficiency are terms we often use interchangeably when speaking about performance. But when you look at productiv... Project Management Trello vs. Asana: Which Project Management Software Can Boost Your Workflows? Trello vs. Asana: both are outstanding project management tools, but some differences set them apart. With so many software option... Outsourcing 12 Easy Ways to Send Money to India India and other countries have a large pool of talented virtual assistants who can help your business succeed while charging a rea... Employee Productivity Implementing and Normalizing No-Meeting Days for More Successful Teams Are you considering a no-meetings day at your company? It’s a good idea. As you’re reading this, there’s probably a meeting... Category: Time Tracking All articles Time Tracking 11 Best Chrome Time Tracker Extensions to Master Your Productivity If a full time tracking suite is out of your price range, there are plenty of Google Chrome time tracking apps available. If you’re looking for basic time tracking features, you... Time Tracking The 5 Best TopTracker Alternatives for Your Remote Team TopTracker is a time tracking app created by the team behind Toptal, which lets freelancers track the amount of time they spend working on client projects. With features like timed... Time Tracking 5 Amazing Alternatives to Hours Time Tracking Time tracking apps are becoming essential for the field workforce and those who work on-the-go. We’ve come up a list of 5 cool alternatives to Hours Time Track... Management Save Money and Time by Using Employee Timesheets Every founder wants the same thing: to know that their employees are all working effectively and productively each day for the benefit of their business. But as your company grows,... Save time and money in one click Hubstaff streamlines time tracking, productivity, team management, invoicing, and more. Try it free Free 14 day trial. No credit card required.
Employee Productivity Productivity vs. Efficiency: What’s the Difference? Productivity and efficiency are terms we often use interchangeably when speaking about performance. But when you look at productiv...
Project Management Trello vs. Asana: Which Project Management Software Can Boost Your Workflows? Trello vs. Asana: both are outstanding project management tools, but some differences set them apart. With so many software option...
Outsourcing 12 Easy Ways to Send Money to India India and other countries have a large pool of talented virtual assistants who can help your business succeed while charging a rea...
Employee Productivity Implementing and Normalizing No-Meeting Days for More Successful Teams Are you considering a no-meetings day at your company? It’s a good idea. As you’re reading this, there’s probably a meeting...
Time Tracking 11 Best Chrome Time Tracker Extensions to Master Your Productivity If a full time tracking suite is out of your price range, there are plenty of Google Chrome time tracking apps available. If you’re looking for basic time tracking features, you...
Time Tracking The 5 Best TopTracker Alternatives for Your Remote Team TopTracker is a time tracking app created by the team behind Toptal, which lets freelancers track the amount of time they spend working on client projects. With features like timed...
Time Tracking 5 Amazing Alternatives to Hours Time Tracking Time tracking apps are becoming essential for the field workforce and those who work on-the-go. We’ve come up a list of 5 cool alternatives to Hours Time Track...
Management Save Money and Time by Using Employee Timesheets Every founder wants the same thing: to know that their employees are all working effectively and productively each day for the benefit of their business. But as your company grows,...