Time is one asset that seems infinitely available free of cost but yet is invaluable as every second of it is once in a lifetime offer.
Time and Attendance no longer seems to be the only focus of workplaces. Everyone knows the importance of time management. If you want to build a more productive, effective and efficient workplace, how you track, monitor and manage time is what really matters.
These days there are many employee time tracking softwares that helps track time. Typically they then use this data to gain insights. The management would based on these insights optimize procedures and their performance measures.
Why Productive teams track time?
Apart from stricter disciplines like project management , time tracking may not have been so much in vogue in many places. Tracking has been limited to knowing the work hours of an employee.
It has been observed that the actual productivity of an average employee is much lower than 8hrs of work. Any employer is aware of the significance of capitalizing on each minute of labor time. This becomes more important with new practices like work from home becoming the latest trend in work practices.
Time tracking actually helps to identify productivity in terms of best productive times, more productive people and practices. False or incorrect clock-ins and early clock-outs result in lost time and money in terms of soaring wages, overtime and absenteeism. On many occasions, Time gets wasted and productivity lost because of employees not sticking to the task at hand and it would be good to identify such occurrences for patterns and reasons why it happens. Getting incorrect bills for hours put in by contractors. There may be many more of such reasons.
How can time tracking change your business?
A successful business needs many ingredients. The quality of people, systems in place, good management. But all these factors are a waste if time is not utilized as well. What you get from every asset of your business is their time – be it people or resources.
Planning majorly becomes how well these times can be used and utilized. What are the working time for each of the resources, what projects get done, how are the project and task are planned, how is the project profitability?
All these one ways or the other boils down to time. Tracking time, analyzing and optimizing can therefore completely transform the way business gets. Time tracking can this be the tool to control 3 Ps – Productivity, Performance & Profitability!!!
Workflow and Processes
Projects going over budget and schedules getting dragged are common occurrences. Time tracking can help you to analyze and pinpoint exactly what went wrong. The issues could be a wide range like understaffing, skills mismatch, process bottlenecks including poor management.
Obviously clear deadlines, clarity of tasks at hand, tracking progress are needed to ensure that the analysis done holds.
Right Sizing Team
To ensure work gets done optimally, it is important to ensure the teams are sized optimally for the task. This will ensure that each team member is utilized appropriately and more efficiently.
Right Priorities
Multitasking definitely is inevitable despite all the cons. Likewise working on multiple priorities is also inevitable. It would be good to know for the managers if people are spending their times on right priorities.
Monitor Subcontractors
Subcontract workers are useful especially to do work that is specialized as well as one which is less frequently undertaken. If there is an automated way to keep track of their times, there would be fewer billing issues.
Improved Attendance, Reduced Absenteeism
Commonly employees sneak a few minutes here or there, leaving early or having extended breaks. At individual level it is not a big deal but when this happens at a larger scale the impact is huge. If we can accurately tell where the employees are spending their time and are accurately measuring time, there will be both improvement in the attendance as well as a reduction in the number of absentees.
In a large organization keeping track individually is almost impossible. A time tracker monitors late comers, taking breaks or are absent. The system would be able to provide calculations of working hours, overtime, and leave balances, so that your payroll will become effortless.
Better Budgeting and Billing
Whenever one needs to be billing on hourly rates it becomes important to track accurately. In places where one department bills it becomes a contentious issue. Typically engagements start with a budget and as soon as this gets consumed, the person getting billed becomes unhappy. The choice now becomes either take the loss or make your customer unhappy.
Cliche Time Tracking
There are many solutions available in this space ranging from simple mobile apps to complex web app. The functionalities range from a time tracking app which simply does your time logs where one has to add time entries and description to what was done. Others are more complex which help create projects, track projects and also help keep a tab on the project budget. Some softwares go beyond in the pursuit of employee monitoring and even keep a track of what the employee works on their workstation by keeping a history and some even taking screenshots.
Value Added Time Tracking
One unique solution from Quicsolv offers a value added employee time tracking. This employee tracking and monitoring system works on a BLE technology. It provides real time tracking using RTLS. This solution goes way beyond employee time tracking. Additionally, it does so seamlessly making it the least disruptive. The real value add would be obvious that this system can even do asset tracking for your inventory!!
