Many businesses have recognized time tracking as a vital business practice. It allows managers and higher-ups to understand how their teams are working, track project progress with a single glance, and follow different important metrics.
However, many business owners who aren’t tracking time yet are hesitant to start doing so. They often believe that implementing the practice will hurt the company’s morale. This is especially true when small companies are concerned. That is why we’re here to show you how to implement this useful practice into your employees’ daily workflow with as little fuss as possible.
Table of Contents
Choose the Best Tracking Method
There are many time tracking solutions. They are diverse in features and complexity and vary from simple paper timesheets to sophisticated systems that monitor user activity.
As you can imagine, your choice of time tracking techniques will depend on the size of your business and your industry. Here are some other factors of a time tracking method to consider:
- The age and computer skills of your employees
- The additional features of the method
- Whether you want to monitor the work closely or let your employees track their time on their own
- The quality of the reports the system gives you
Communicate
The truth is that you won’t be able to control the reactions your employees have to the new practice. However, you should still try to explain the benefits of using a time tracking platform to your whole team.
Make sure the entire organization understands you’re not implementing time tracking to spy on your employees or punish them, but to help everyone be more productive while reducing stress and overtime.
Start with Yourself
Before implementing the system you have chosen within the entire company, you should give it a test run yourself. This way you will be able to predict and find solutions to any technical questions. You will also have the opportunity to see how your own productivity rises and you recognize the ways you can improve your productivity.
Then you can inform your team about the change and show the results time tracking has brought you. This way you will avoid the common problem of your staff thinking you are starting to track time to spy on them.
Begin small
This step is recommended for larger businesses that have multiple sectors. If this is your case, consider starting with a single team. This way you will be able to see the possible problems your employees will face while using the platform. Then you’ll be able to fix the issues on a small scale instead of stopping and restarting the process on the company level.
Train Your Employees
Once you figure out how you want to track employee time you will have to explain how the system works. You will have to invest some time, energy, and resources into this training if you want it to work. We recommend creating a handbook with all necessary guidelines after your first training. This way you won’t have to go into detail about time tracking for enterprises within your onboarding process in the future.
The training should give each employee all necessary information about using the system. Still, don’t be surprised if your team takes some time to adjust – this is a new process for them, after all.
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Stay True to Your Word
Remember how we said your employees should know you’re not going to punish them? We advise you to stay true to your word. This way your team will be able to focus on improving their results – being more productive and working with less stress. This is a much better tactic than keeping everyone on their toes. Thus, if you notice someone is lagging significantly first try to help them and make sure they’re not behind on purpose before taking any corrective measures.
Let your Team Notice the Results
You want to continuously increase the interest in your time tracking system and make sure everyone is using it properly. Hence, you should record the improvements that happened after you’ve started using it and make them public. This means giving credit where it’s due and praising or rewarding the employees who finish their reports in time and improve their results the most.
