8 Compelling Reasons Why Businesses Should Track Their Employees’ Time

If you’re like most business owners, then you’ve probably had your fair share of these problems:

• You can’t bill your clients accurately, because you can’t ascertain how much hours worth of work your team used up for a specific client’s project.
  
• You’re getting tons of payroll processing problems when it comes to computing the number of hours your team has worked on.
• You can’t coach your team properly because you are oblivious about your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Your teams’ productivity is on its all-time low.
• Your teams are almost always out of focus on their work.

Addressing these challenges can be quite frustrating. And if you leave them unchecked, you might find yourself closing your business one day because of these exact reasons.

If you are in fact facing any (or all) of these challenges, then allow me to share with you one very simple solution that can help you rid of all of these problems.

What solution am I talking about, you might ask?

Time tracking softwares.

Allow me to share with you some of the most critical reasons why business should start using a time tracking software.

1) Businesses can bill their clients accurately.

It becomes almost impossible for any business to bill their clients accurately, if they aren’t tracking the hours spent by their employees when working for a specific client.

This is an all too common problem that most startups face. This is especially true when the business startup is outsourcing their work to freelancers from other countries, to reduce their overhead cost, and to experience the plethora of benefits that outsourcing tasks can bring to a business.

While there are several tools in the web that you can use to track your employee’s’ working hours, I’m an avid fan of using this time tracking software because of how intuitive and easy to use it is.

Using a time tracking software also allows me to take control of the number of hours that each of my employees can use for a specific client.

This then enables me to bill my client accurately based on what their allotted budget is, and how much work they want done.

2) It helps employees’ avoid interruptions.

Most time tracking tools have features that allow the business owners to view the websites (or other tools) that their employees are using when the time tracking tool is on.

Once the business owners relay this information to their employees, the employees become more conscious about how they spend their working hours. They tend to become more conscious about the pages that they will open, making sure that it is related to the project they are working on.

This in turn, will help them avoid interruptions as they are reminded that the pages they are opening are being tracked.

3) Companies can better manage their budgets.

When you have several people working on different projects, losing track of how your expenses are coming along versus what your actual budget is per project can easily happen. It’s exactly because of this that you’ll see a lot of people writing about guides on how to stay on track with their budget. With time tracking, you are able to assign each employee the number of hours they are to work on for a certain project or client.

4) Improve your employees’ productivity.

Having a huge boost in productivity is one of the many benefits that you can enjoy when using a time tracking software.
Because your employees are aware of how screenshots are being taken and recorded, they will tend to focus on working on the actual projects, versus getting distracted and doing non-work-related tasks. Of course, as a result, your team’s productivity will increase.

5) Helps you track your employees’ output.

Tracking your employees’ output plays a crucial role when it comes to optimizing your business process.

As you track their output, you will gain insight as to whether or not you are letting the right person work on the right tasks.

When your employees’ output is below average, it can be an indication that he isn’t a good fit for his task. It could be that his aptitude is bent towards a different skill set.

When you are able to uncover these things, you can act on the problem with the best solution possible. Whether you end up reshuffling your team, training them again, or maybe letting go some of them, you will atleast have a good enough basis for your decision.

6) The time trackers’ analytics can be used to give employees feedback and uncover areas that needs improvement.

Monitoring your employees’ performances can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have enough time to check each of their output. Through time trackers’ analytics, you’ll be able to provide your team valuable comments and feedback about how they perform, the quality of their overall output, as well as their efficiency in completing their projects.

7) It helps businesses determine which of their employees are the highest-performing ones.

Because time tracking softwares can help you determine the number of hours your employees have spent on their tasks, and what he or she has accomplished within the time window, you’ll have a good grasp of which of them are getting the job done, and which ones aren’t.

These are just some of the key metrics you can use to determine who among your employees are producing the most amount of results, in the least amount of time.

Once you’ve determined this, you can help grow your team by rewarding your top performing employees, and training your least performing ones.

8) The tool helps the businesses manage their projects’ timelines.

It is but normal for businesses to map out a timeline on how their projects will progress – even before starting them. This is a part of the business’ goal setting phase, and to determine whether or not a project is feasible.

When your employees start working, you can peg the number of hours that they have used on a specific task, against your project’s predetermined timeline to make sure that you and your team are right on track.

When your team is falling behind, you can then coach them or make the necessary actions so your team can cope up with the timeline.

Conclusion

The more you learn about the time tracking tools, the more you’ll realize how crucial they are to growing your business. They are without a doubt invaluable when it comes to helping you take your business to the next level.

If you have questions, comments, or ideas that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below.

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