How to Enable Transparent Time Tracking for your Employees

Anurag•March 12, 2021

As a project manager, are you still chasing your team for project time tracking?

Every employer knows that time management is very important for productivity. But it always depends on the employees to make it transparent.

What isn’t tracked can’t be measured or improved!

As per the report of statistica, an untracked working environment could cost $7 million in a day in the USA.

And why do they not want to time-track? They say..

it will be time-consuming
gathered information are not useful
they think management is spying
their poor performance will be highlighted
their work cannot be sufficiently measured
and many more excuses

Painful isn’t it?

Still, we can motivate the employees to track time and can enable its benefits for personal and professional growth.

Let’s start with;

What is Time Tracking?

Simply put, time tracking is a mechanism that project managers and employers use to track the work of their team members for multiple purposes. Like billing, payroll, operations, etc.

Organizations deploy time management software to simplify the overall process. These software help employees to be more organized and efficient and increase overall productivity.

Time tracking software have proven to help save both time and money

How to plug these tools into your working culture?

Clarify the Benefits:

Speak to your team and let them know why they need it. Here you as a project manager or employer need to be with your team to specify your purpose and benefits behind time tracking

Explain time tracking is for their best interest, like;

ensures work is allocated equally
protects against work burnout
helps to track overtime
also explains the extra work capacity
helps to identify the inefficient workflow and bottlenecks
highlights the work distractions
helps identify tasks that consume more time
transparency over project progress
helps for effective task scheduling

Integrate with Each Workflow:

By integrating time tracking within your project workflow will prevent manual error prone reporting and efforts.

Additionally, incorporating time management into team workflows makes task management more visible.

Still, you have to make it easier to do by integrating the right tool.

The time management module may not provide the expected result until both employees and the employers do not ensure their mutual respect.

Sometimes the team members feel that the time tracking is hurting their privacy.

But this is not the real fact.

Employees should feel comfortable offering to track their time so the project manager can cultivate an open and hassle-free working culture.

Be Open and Transparent with your Employees

When the time management is processed, there will be a learning curve. So the organizations must ensure proper training to get people involved in it and increase adoption.

Once a time tracking culture is established, the business gets precious data that they can use to improve business processes and workflows.

Then encourage team members to share feedback about time tracking.

What can make it better
don’t forget to time track per task
talk about how to optimize workflows
ask about how value-based pricing is better than hourly billing

It is important to witness the benefits of the time tracking culture by your employees. Once they start seeing a rise in their efficiency, they will act accordingly.

Showing you think about their comfort and wellbeing means they will adopt time tracking in no time at all.

Why Time Tracking Matters

Honestly, motivating the employees is a tough job.

But giving them a thorough idea of how they and the organization can benefit will do a world of good. Building trust and gaining confidence in the initiative is crucial.

This way, each team member will look forward to maintaining it, instead of considering it as a compulsory evil.

By using the right tool, companies can correlate valuable data, competence, and employee output to optimize their operations and refine their vision consistently.

For straightforward time management, Orangescrum allows companies and workers to be fruitful at exceptional levels.