Tips for Effectively Tracking Employee Time and Productivity

In an age where an increasing number of companies are conducting work remotely or leaders aren’t able to have direct oversight on a daily basis, it’s more important than ever to have organized and effective ways of tracking employee time and productivity to propel the organization forward in a positive direction. With these tips, tracking your team’s progress, time, and efforts can become an easy, painless process.  

Outline Your Expectations and Policies

For successful time and work tracking, discussing your expectations and company policies with your employees is a great first step. This serves as the foundation to building trust and positive relationships with your team as well as clearly outlines specific tasks and requirements that are expected of them in their role. The more proactive you are, the better the results and team culture.

Use an Easy Tracking System

When it comes to tracking your employees’ time, choosing a system that provides a simple platform, is easy to learn, and can be used on any device is preferred. Electing a timesheet app that is used on a mobile device or smartphone can be the ideal system. This ensures that your team will have minimal problems tracking their time and can even increase job satisfaction by offering a positive, fast experience so they’re able to get to work and go home on time.

Consistently Use the Same System

Once you have decided on a time tracking system, it’s important to make it the exclusive method in which you will record your team’s work hours. This will reduce confusion and ensure that every employee is paid correctly for their time spent on the job. Using the same system regularly will also give your employees time to not only learn the platform, but also become competent in its usage, making navigation easy and efficient.

Establish Objectives and Goals

Another key aspect to tracking your team’s work is looking at the productivity and outputs of their assignments. This can help you not only measure the time they spend at work, but also how they spend their time, ensuring that the hours they are being paid for contribute to the overall goals and objectives of the department or organization. To do this effectively, it is suggested to first have each employee set goals that are connected to a completion timeline. This way, they are able to easily track milestones, tasks within goals, and work being done toward meeting their goals. It can also be advantageous to measure short-term and long-term objectives, with short-term being more task-driven and long-term measurements based on overall performance. This can maintain employee motivation by giving them a sense of accomplishment on a more regular basis.  

Check In With Employees on a Regular Basis

Having regular check-ins, touch-bases, or meetings with your employees can have a multitude of positive effects on tracking time and productivity. When employees know they are being held accountable for their work on a consistent basis, they are more motivated to meet their deadlines, milestones, and produce results. Reviewing work in progress is also a great way to not only spot-check the quality of their work, but have a candid discussion with your team as well, assessing what is going well and what barriers they may be facing where you can offer assistance or support.

Avoid Micromanagement

As a supervisor, boss, or leader, when you don’t have a full visual on your employees on a daily basis, it can be easy to fall into the negative behavior of micromanagement. However, trying to check in on every small detail or analyze every minute of how an employee spends their work time, can cause a significant decrease in morale, job satisfaction, productivity, and overall team culture. While it’s important to have oversight of your team, allowing them the freedom to work at their own pace and level of skill will, most of the time, get quicker results and build trust among your employees.

Using these simple tips, you’ll not only be able to effectively track employee work time and productivity, but also build a high-functioning team in the process.