Time Tracking Software/App? How it works? What are its pros & cons?
What is Time Tracking?
Time tracking refers to tracking working hours of employees and their activities throughout the day. A time tracker ensures you to exactly track your teams’ performance throughout the days. Time tracking or a time tracking software is inclusive of elements like scheduling, billable hours, attendance management, time offs, and more.
The top 3 components of time tracking are:
- Punch in and outs
- Time Approvals
- Detailed Reporting
How does time tracking software work?
In the initial days, time tracking was entirely done by hand. Managers or admins used to handle time management and employee punches by recording them in books. But, with the advent of a time tracking software, all of this is now able to automate.
A software counts punch in, breaks, punch out, leaves, and week offs. These are called timestamps recorded on physical time cards or now in an electronic time tracking software or spreadsheets.
The modern-day time tracking software like WorkStatus uses a unique selfie identification before starting the tracker to enable more precision in the process. A time tracker is needed for an organization because:
- It keeps a record of attendance
- It tracks productivity
- It tracks regular employees activities
- It increases transparency in the workflow
Most businesses face a dilemma if they need time tracking software or they should not allow alien software in their organization? To overcome this, We will not just outline just pros but cons as well in this blog to make your decision wiser.
The Undeniable Benefits of Time Tracking — Pros
In 2015, the services industry in the U.S. was on average losing 50 million hours and $7.4 billion in a day because of uncalculated hours. But, the realization of tracking time daily instead of weekly and monthly helped them recover $52,000 billable hours every day.
Just imagine if this much of money is involved. How much can your business be benefitted? Here are some benefits of tracking employees’ time.
Manages Time Log
A time tracker like WorkStatus logs employees daily activities as soon as they start their day and punch in on the iOS, Android, Mac, and web apps. The time tracker then starts tracking activities with URLs, activity logs, and screenshots to help you monitor tasks.
Later in the day when your employees punch out, the time tracker shares their daily activity reports with the managers in their mailboxes and informs them about their overall productivity throughout the day.
The dashboard saves all the record and gives you the visibility to look into the reports as and how you like. All these reports are downloadable and can be easily shared with the respective members.
Increases Productivity
Every recent study/research shows that people who value or track their time are better at keeping on track. They succeed 98 per cent of the times and make deliveries on time. Tracking time stops employees from wasting hours on distractions and stay more organized. It helps them prioritize tasks and not hang around with multiple tasks at the same time.
While you might hear a lot of employees or candidates listing multi-tasking as their strength. But, on the contrary, multi-tasking can drain 40 percent of an employee’s productivity. Therefore, keeping a check on multi-tasking is important.
It also helps management understand about the activities that are genuinely taking too much of time and making efforts to avoid them.
Constant analysis and implementation of feedback results in improved performance.
Creates More Accountable Resources
It is a human tendency to not accept mistakes and blows them away to someone else’s shoulders. A lot many times organizational conflicts are unable to get resolved because of the inability to unlock the name of the responsible person. But, with software that tracks activities, it becomes easier to find out the faulty chord and get issues resolved. Moreover, when a team works together on a project, it is important to know
- Individual’s tasks
- Timelines
- Hours spent
With constant monitoring employees become more responsible and chances of inaccuracy reduce considerably. Also, when a member is aware of its tasks, activities, and feedback, it gives them an insight on how to improve their work. Awareness brings with it some real accountability that must be inherited in every professional taking up the job. Apart from that, it helps managers as well to acknowledge and appreciate their hardworking employees.
Saves Data on the Cloud
Manual sheets are expensive, tedious, mundane, and error-prone. Filling out manual timesheets require a lot of efforts, constant concentration, and acknowledgement from, both, managers and employees. Whereas, when you introduce and integrate a time tracking software in your organization, all of your processes get streamlined.
It is most beneficial for companies like contractors and consultants that work frequently with freelancers and employees on contractual basis. A time tracker helps the organization to even plan activities and streamline tasks well in time.
Saves Costs
Transparent time management eliminates the chances of fraudulent activities. As discussed earlier, companies were losing hundreds of their billable hours because of poor time management.
Often, employees or management were prone to forgetting their hours and thus missed out on the money.
Integration of a time tracking software eradicates all of this from the business and keeps track of the activities with more precision.
The other Side of Time Tracking — Cons
Each coin has two sides. It is important to look at both without being biased to judge a situation better. With time tracking having so many benefits for organizations and management, people associated with them might feel little pressurized too.
Listed below are some of the issues that you might come across:
More Agitated Employees
A lot of employees might not be comfortable with them being tracked. They might end up feeling invaded. It is one of the most common fear associated with time tracking. Because obviously, no likes getting watched on all the time.
“Your employees sometimes feel like Big Brother is watching.” — Dan Quillen
To clear the mindset you need to communicate the actual point of tracking to employees. Help them understand and align them with organizational goals. Help them understand how a time tracker will eradicate the concept of micromanagement and questioning on time investment from the management. Transparently inform them on what are the inclusions of your time tracking software and how it is going to function.
Of course, the trust-building will take time, but eventually, it will be up and running smoothly.
A Threat of MicroManagement
An employee might feel he will be micro-managed non-stop with the time tracker and more feel like being spied on. While certain minds of managers might want to do this. But, this is certainly not the aim of a time tracking software. A time tracker is made to aid managers in management and make all of this process seamless.
It is made to overlook employees daily activities without constantly questioning them and investing hours taking updates manually. They are made to give managers clear pictures of their employees performance in a glance. They can proactively help their employees do better by sharing precise feedback.
Expense Systems
You might think that a time tracking software would be very expensive. But, you’re certainly mistaken. WorkStatus is an online time tracker that is allowing free signups to all the users for all the services. This feature rich time tracker does not only support basic time tracking, but multiple other features such as GPS tracking and monitoring. All of this at zero cost and nothing can get better than this.
Does Not Track Everything
Not everything can be measured and it is okay! That is not the aim either. An employee might face a creative block or might be brainstorming on other aspects leading to no productivity tracking in the software. But, this is completely fine.
A human has 10 things to do and run a business and they’re completely free to do that. As an organization you need to understand this and integrate it in your policies. Exceptions are necessary and must be provided.
It is important to understand that an employee cannot be productive throughout the day and giving them this freedom is also necessary. Let them work with their pace.
Final Verdict for a Time Tracking Software
With above mentioned pros and cons, deciding to invest in a time tracking software can be a tricky question. But with research and the growing need of tracking time, with so much money involved, tracking time makes complete sense.
With studies and personal experiences of professionals, we spoke to, we can support this. Organizations with time trackers have made exponential growth in a short period of time. Enhancing productivity or gaining more money, it has only benefits to offer and nothing to take away.
Time tracking has proved to save business costs and increase accountability in the organizations. To further yield benefits the automate time trackers eliminate even the smallest costs and efforts associated with manual management.
It is worth it to invest in a time tracker. And more so when you’re getting all the benefits absolutely free.
