Many businesses nowadays are using time tracking to monitor their employees activities and how they spend their time. For the most part they aren’t doing it to ‘spy’ on employees, but because it is a useful tool to improve productivity.
Here are a few of the ways time tracking can affect productivity levels:
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Accountability
When employees know that Controlio or other time tracking software is being used to track how they spend their time, they are more likely to focus on the task at hand. After all, it can monitor their work hours, whether they’re active or idle, and what apps they use or websites they visit – so if they aren’t focused or waste time it will be logged.
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Measure Productivity
The insights from time tracking software provide the means to measure productivity. By letting you know how much time employees spend working on tasks, you can determine how much of their time is spend productively and how much isn’t.
Some software such as Controlio will automatically calculate a productivity score for each employee. This score can be used as a way to keep an eye on productivity trends, reward the most productive employees, or even support employees whose productivity is declining.
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Make Data-Driven Decisions
Time-tracking provides a ton of raw data that you can use to make better decisions. For example, you could use the data from employee monitoring to check if any employees are overloaded with tasks, and redistribute them more fairly.
Similarly, time tracking data will let you know if employees are multitasking, which is proven to drain up to 40% of our productivity. If they are, you can arrange a meeting with them and encourage them to focus on one task at a time.
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Improve Time Management
By taking advantage of Controlio’s ability to give employees access to their own data, you can help them to improve their time management skills. Its insights into how time is spent can be useful to employees as it can show them how time is being wasted, or spent on low-impact tasks. That in turn can help them prioritize more effectively and get more done in less time.
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Encourage Regular Breaks
Taking regular beaks is important to prevent burnout. Time-tracking is the perfect way to check that employees are taking breaks every hour or two, and help ensure they get the rest they need to prevent them from becoming exhausted.
Conclusion
As you can see, time tracking can have a very large and very positive impact on productivity – but that’s assuming its implemented the right way. If it isn’t and employees feel they’re being ‘spied on’ – productivity could drop instead.
Because of that you need to be transparent about the use of time tracking, only monitor the areas that are necessary, and use it as a tool to empower employees rather than restrict or penalize them. Make sure your employees know you aren’t trying to ‘spy’ on them, but instead want to help make work better.
