Business Productivity
How Managers Can Use Time Tracking Data to Improve Their Team’s Productivity
AUTHOR: Rajat H.
Productivity for their team is always on the top of managers. Productivity can mean a higher output, increased bottomline, and efficient processes that help you get more stuff done. Your team’s productivity can be improved by using the right time tracking software. What has often been a task that requires constant updates and focus, can now be a seamless and quick task with a top-tier tool. These tools by tracking where each team member spends their time can help uncover insights that managers can use to make their teams more efficient and productive.
In this article, we look at some of the ways in which time tracking data can help managers to improve the productivity of their team.
Understand Distractions
Time tracking software will give you and your employees detailed reports of how time is spent. This can help managers identify whether the time is spent on unproductive tasks or not useful websites/apps. These can be anything from pointless meetings, cumbersome processes and routine admin tasks. This is valuable information to address things that repeatedly throw the team off track. Managers can use this data to reduce unproductive meetings or take care of interruptions that take too much of their team’s time.
Identify Bloated Processes
Managers often assume that the processes in their team are streamlines, but more often than not, time tracking data springs up surprises. Having a time tracking tool allows managers to develop a better understanding of everyone’s time and work. This helps managers to identify potential bottlenecks, bloated workflows and frustrating roadblocks. Leveraging this data managers can take necessary steps to improve the overall performance and automate rote tasks.
Find the Most Productive Hours
Different team members are productive at different hours of the day, and it is impossible for a manager to know that. Not anymore. With time tracking data, managers can now learn whether an employee is more productive in the morning after their cup of coffee or during the evening. Time tracking can help managers find their team’s most productive hours and manage their tasks and energy levels accordingly. For example, work that requires deeper focus can be reserved for when an employee knows they’re most focused.
Uncover areas of improvement
Time tracking data helps managers to see ust how many hours it’s taking their employees to accomplish specific tasks. Assignments that are done longer than expected often indicate the need for improvement. As they determine which tasks are taking too much time, managers, together with employees, can then come up with corrective actions or remedies to fill the gaps effectively. Managers can do coaching to help the employees in areas where they’re struggling by connecting them with in-house or external experts, providing supplementary knowledge resources, and more.
Avoid Burnout
Burnouts come at a serious cost for any team, and when left unchecked, can do serious damage to the productivity of the team. Their rate of absences will increase, the employees will lose their morale, and they will likely make more mistakes than they would have if they weren’t overworked. With time-tracking software, managers can monitor how effectively their employees are using their hours. They can gauge quickly if there are uneven task distributions that cause varying amounts of pressure among the staff throughout the week. Managers can even find out if their staff has been working overtime frequently or consecutively over a considerable period, which can lead to overfatigue, stress, lack of sleep, and other bad outcomes.
Allow Flexible Schedules
By implementing flexible work schedules and offering remote work options, managers can empower employees to choose their own hours while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. A hybrid workplace also helps teams cut back on the cost of maintaining an office and hire talent from all over the world. Managers can set specific benchmarks for remote workers, e.g., minimum working hours per week or month. Or managers can take a quality-over-quantity approach to encourage high-quality work.
Productivity in a Remote World
The importance of time tracking data to improve productivity becomes more acute in a remote setting. COVID-19 forced the hand of businesses as they needed to adopt work from home strategies in order to sustain productivity in light of the global pandemic. Traditionally, companies have abstained from the remote work concept due to concerns over loss in productivity and overall efficiencies for the company. Simply put, they need to know that their employees are working while they are remote.
But as we all know, distractions are abundant when at home, as we can be tempted by television and video games, or can find the need to run personal errands while on company time. Additionally, since the members are remote, it becomes difficult for managers to identify whether employees are stuck somewhere or spending too much time on unimportant tasks or need some help to ensure their work and productivity are not disrupted.
Luckily for those having remote team members, time tracking data comes in very handy to ensure managers are able to stay on top of their team’s work and provide the right intervention to ensure their teams are at their productive best.
How to Get Time Tracking Data
There are several time tracking tools available in the market. One of the most prominent ones is Time Doctor. Time Doctor enables managers to track their employees’ time so that they can clearly see what’s done throughout the day. Time Doctor creates a summary of the time spent on each project, client, and task. Managers can view how much time employees spend working at the computer vs. away and how long their breaks last.
Daily and weekly summary email reports make it easy to analyze patterns. These help managers to diagnose and treat unproductive tasks and time-wasting habits. The result? Improved productivity.
Conclusion
Introducing a time tracking solution into your team workflow can offer numerous benefits, including greater productivity, increased profitability, greater transparency, more realistic timelines, and better project management. You’d be able to double or triple your output. You can avoid having to hire more people. And you’d be able to finish your projects way earlier than your deadlines (among other things). No matter from which angle you look at it, you stand to gain from growing your team’s productivity.
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