Tips for Making Time Tracking Less of a Chore
TLDR;
- Think of tracking your time as a tool that makes your business more successful and profitable.
- Include employees in selecting the best time tracking platform for your business. This will ensure successful implementation of time tracking into daily work rituals.
- Choose a time tracking platform that makes it easier to track time, not harder.
- Be mindful that you can’t track everything (e.g., client satisfaction & trust, work quality and value). These things are just as important as tracking your time.
Good Time Tracking
Firstly, make sure you select a good time tracking platform. It needs to be easy, fast and have a great user experience. Take this step even further by involving your team in choosing (or switching) which time tracking software to go with. By doing this you’re going to be able make the switch to ‘tracking your time’ that much easier.
Informed Employees
Informed employees are motivated employees. Certain time tracking software (e.g., Hourly) even provide visual time tracking. By keeping employees up to date on how they are tracking for the week means they know when they are likely to hit targets or if they are slacking behind on a project.
Log in a Timely Manner
Encourage employees to log their time in a timely manner. AffinityLive discovered that the U.S economy is currently loosing 50 million billable hours or 7.4 billion a day in lost productivity, due to not tracking time correctly. This loss in revenue can have a lasting impact on future success and profitability. You might not even realise how many billable hours you are actually losing.
Integration is Key
Tracking time is going to improve your employees efficiency and productivity. However, integrating it into your teams current work flow is an integral aspect in ensuring interruptions don’t occur. Time tracking is less likely to happen if your team has to constantly switch between programs to get work done. Let your team track time from tools they already interact with. This basically means it’s going to be easier on your employees in implementing time tracking into their daily work rituals.
Small Tips
- Let people know when time sheet review or invoicing is happening. That way they know a deadline is near — “better make sure my time-tracking is up-to-date!”
- Admin users have the ability in Hourly to see when users aren’t tracking their time or have missing time data. This is a little red dot that appears above their avatars/users head. This may encourage employees to track time in a more timely manner if they know others can see it.
In The End…
One thing to keep in mind is that also time tracking is important, be careful about motivating people solely on billable hours. Why, well time tracking isn’t able to measure everything (yet). What kinds of things can’t it measure? Client satisfaction & trust, work quality, work development, learning and value. These things are still very integral for growing successful business. But that doesn't mean you can’t do both! If you think time tracking is for you, why not check out Hourly? It’s free for 30 days!
