4 upgrades your business needs to improve time tracking, and 3 practices to reflect on

Time really is money – assuming you’re tracking it correctly and efficiently. Few have even the slightest idea of how much inefficient time monitoring really costs their businesses. But there’s increasing awareness of how people perceive their time, and how others’ perceptions of it impact their productivity – and, in the grand scheme of things, a business’s bottom line. Employees who feel their time is being wasted at work, whether by a manager, teammate, client, etc., develop frustration that interferes with their ability to carry out their tasks. In such situations, they’re more likely to engage in counterproductive behaviors, practices that include reducing effort, neglecting tasks, or even deliberately slowing down work, as Temple University stresses.

Is your business already leveraging the following time-tracking solutions? Or is it time to explore ways to improve efficiency? What if you’re approaching this undertaking in ways that upset your employees? The coming sections explore the digital tools your business needs to fine-tune time tracking and the practices you should or should not avoid, so keep reading.

1. Timesheet software for tracking and reporting employee working hours

Timesheet software like Timesheet Portal is the straightforward way to track, manage, and record how much employees work. With this digital tool, employees can log their time using a wide range of features, including timers, individual entries, digital time logging, and more, enhancing payroll time tracking. Users can also submit docs, expense lists, and time-off request forms directly from their mobile devices. As a manager, you’ll gain insight into which areas consume the most of your employees’ time – whether it’s core work, incidents, modification requests, or individual vs. shared projects.

Additional perks include online timesheets, overtime records, real-time profitability insights, and the ability to assess and manage contracts and projects in real time, enabling more informed operational decisions. Timesheet Portal serves over 1K businesses worldwide, making it a trusted solution for streamlining time tracking and improving workforce productivity. So, if you’re looking to upgrade your time-tracking management (while leveraging more built-in features), you have come across a keeper.

2. Kanban-style boards with task time tracking

Nothing sticks to the retina better than smartly delimitated, colorful columns that outline things like a project’s developmental phase. Kanban-style boards are widely used project management tools that help employees track tasks and measure progress, with cards for each task and columns for stages like “done”, “to do”, “in the making”, etc. This visual workflow makes it easy to see where every team member stands, at any given time. So, when a new deadline suddenly appears, you can instantly identify who’s best positioned to take it on – as an example of application.

Seeing work-related data on a kanban board prevents bottlenecks and helps employees move work fluidly. If you want more control over your tasks and projects, a kanban board like the one offered by Kanbantool can provide the tools you need.

3. Collaboration and messaging platforms

How fast and efficiently teams interact can make or break a business. You want to ensure that your newly recruited team members never stress about being unable to reach out to the team’s HR when they need to. And that those who bring revenue, such as your salespeople, can always ask for support from the project manager – and the list goes on.

Fortunately, the era when you’d be limited to outdated apps like Skype and Teams is long gone. Why would you keep struggling with Teams’ constant lags, delayed notifications, and limited integrations? Messages arrive late – that is, if they do. File sharing is slow. The interface is cluttered. All these annoyances add up, consume time, and drag productivity down – reason why they’re absent in top communication platforms like Slack, where the interface, integrations, and overall user experience are on point. These are perhaps weighty reasons why, as the platform mentions, 8 in 10 of the top 100 U.S. companies by revenue use Slack Connect.

4. Mobile and remote time tracking

Businesses with remote or field-based employees have more on their plates when it comes to time and activity monitoring. If this is your case, you need to monitor attendance in real time, create reports effortlessly, and review working hours, to name a few. The right platforms, such as Jibble, offer simple yet powerful time-tracking solutions. This mobile-first tool lets staff clock in and out on their smartphones, with GPS verification for accurate location tracking.

Tracking productivity and improving accountability has never been easier – or more necessary.

5. Practices you need to reconsider

Too much monitoring can either be a sign that you don’t trust your team, or the easy way to lose your very team’s trust. It’s a double-edged sword you don’t want to play with. This is why you want to avoid unhealthy practices, picking up on or avoiding practices like the following:

1. Don’t use screenshot-making apps, for they invade employee intimacy and can lead to serious integrity issues. Be wary of the projects your employees can access – they don’t need access to docs they don’t need. Also, questions will pop into your employees’ heads the moment you bring up themes like work time tracking in discussion. Make sure you're prepared to answer them; maybe create a FAQ doc that addresses the main questions they may have to eliminate confusion or doubt.

2. Use reliable time-tracking software that notifies users when they approach deadlines or when their timesheets are unfinished. Forgetting to log hours is a normal consequence when employees have other, more important stuff to deal with.

3. Lastly, you should ensure that someone is actually leveraging the data gathered with tools like time-tracking apps. Estimating how efficient your employees are in a given time frame, or what steals their focus, is difficult when you only have numbers and graphics, but a skilled employee assigned to spot patterns and behaviors will be faster at it.

Bottomline

Remember that tracking time isn’t about controlling your employees – it’s often about helping staff finish tasks and projects more easily, thus more profitably. Tools like Timesheet Portal and Slack enhance activities such as payroll monitoring, real-time profitability analytics, communication, and more. At the same time, you need to be careful not to overuse such practices, as they can make employees feel overwhelmed, controlled, reproached, and so on. By combining the right tools and strategies, you can streamline operations and reap lasting benefits for years to come.