How to introduce time tracking to your employees
Time tracking is a powerful tool that can help you control your business processes and steer the company in the right direction. If you wish to introduce time tracking to your employees, it is crucial to have the right approach. Time tracking can turn into a touchy subject and make people uncomfortable, so make sure you do it the right way.
Be clear about your intentions
The number one reason why employees might feel unhappy about introducing time tracking is if they think you are trying to catch their errors. While, on some level, that is correct, it is not what time tracking is about.
As a business owner, you have the full right to track any employee process. However, make sure to let them know it is all about improving the business. The most efficient approach is to have a meeting and clarify the benefits and purposes of time tracking. You can also open the floor to questions and remove any doubt or worry they might have. An honest conversation is all you need.
Another critical component is to explain that time tracking is not only there to benefit the business. While you can use time tracking to improve your business within a year, it is also a valuable tool to help employees be more relaxed and more productive. You can classify the benefits of time tracking into two categories:
- business benefits;
- employee benefits
Let’s talk about both.
Business benefits of time tracking
Introduce time tracking in business processes will help you identify:
- workflow inefficiencies;
- a broken process that needs improvement;
- small tasks that create manual work that requires a lot of time;
- how much time every process needs;
- an efficient way to schedule work and create a project timeline
Furthermore, through more efficient time tracking, you will improve all of your business processes and open your company to a network of potential partners who value punctuality.
Employee benefits of time tracking
When you introduce time tracking to your employees, it is important that they realize their own benefit of the process. First, time tracking will help protect your team from burnout. Employees are often overwhelmed with work, and this is an excellent approach to understand how much time is put into their work. If one employee has more work than the other, you can allocate work assignments correctly.
One of the main reasons why you need to introduce time tracking to your employees is to protect them from burnout.
Another benefit of time tracking is that it will show the capacity of your employees. It will help those who excel to become visible. It will also tell you if you have an employee who is struggling with taking care of their assignments. Make sure to explain that this process is not meant for assigning guilt to those who cannot follow the schedule. It is here to evaluate everyone’s performance and help those who struggle to find a way and improve their efficiency and productivity.
Through time tracking, you can also track overtime hours. This is very important because you might have people who cannot handle the deadlines and are scared to tell you that, so they work overtime to complete something.
Clearly state what the time tracking does not mean
This step is critical. As we mentioned at the beginning, your employees might have thoughts about the reason for time tracking implementation. Explain that you will not use the time tracking to hinder any employee’s well-being, invade their privacy, or reveal their inefficiency and the lack of productivity. They need to understand that this software isn’t there to harm them in any way.
Time tracking should not be complicated and tedious
Since we established that the purpose of time tracking is to allocate work so that no one is overwhelmed, it is crucial to understand that this process needs to be simple. If you introduce a complex way of time tracking, it will only create more work for your people. The design needs to be easy to use, employee-friendly, and work in the background.
Time tracking should never be manual work. You want to automate it so that it does not become a distraction for employees. Try 14Dayz for free and convince yourself of all the benefits.
Time tracking will also help in company relocation
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of companies introduced remote work. Many businesses had to downsize to a smaller office space to avoid additional expenses and stabilize their financial capacity.
If your company is moving to a different location, let your employees know that the time tracking will keep business operations stable even when relocating. Time management is crucial in this case; there should not be any delays that could hinder daily work.
Introduce the implementation plan and talk about the testing phase
Before the entire process becomes alive and functional, it is crucial to do the testing. Once you introduce time tracking to your employees and make sure everyone is familiar with the purpose behind it, discuss the testing phase.
You will need a designated person who will act as the project owner. Furthermore, it is best to select a few individuals who will do the testing. Ask if there are any volunteers, and if not, you can pick a few people.
Time tracking implementation is not a process you want to rush. Take time to test it properly.
During testing, it is essential to note all the good and bad sides of it and decide whether the solution is satisfying or not.
If the testing phase goes without any problems, the last step before going live is to provide training sessions to all the employees. This can be either done in person or via an online guide. Ask your vendor if they can train the employees because they usually have a developed system on how to do it quickly and efficiently.
That’s the right way to introduce time tracking to your employees
With the help of this guide, you should be able to introduce time tracking to your employees without any problems. The key is to be transparent about every aspect of the process and let your employees participate in the implementation. The more they are familiar with it, the better. Together, you can push the company forward and take business operations to a higher level.