Contents
A company’s most valuable asset is its employees. For small businesses, how people manage their time, what they prioritise, and how they focus their attention will ultimately determine the success or failure of the business. Thankfully, time tracking now enables businesses to measure how much time they spend navigating deadlines, attending meetings, and working on tasks. Employee monitoring tools are not popular when they are used solely to track work time. The best time tracking apps boost employee productivity and improve overall efficiency.
Why is Time Tracking Important?
Time tracking software helps you increase productivity by automating how you record the time you spend on different tasks. This tool can also help improve your team’s productivity by revealing areas where people are spending valuable time inefficiently.
Once you can identify these areas, it becomes easier for people to devote their energy and quality time to more important tasks and activities. Additionally, determining peak productivity times can help your employees prioritise their work efficiently. For instance, if you’ve determined that employees are most productive between the hours of 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM, you can schedule cognitive-intensive tasks around those times. There are plenty of other ways time tracking can improve worker efficiency.
Keep reading to learn about four ways that time tracking tools can make your employees more productive.
Identifying Distractions
According to a University of California Irvine study, when someone gets distracted, it can take them nearly half an hour to regain their focus. If this happens to your workers, you will need to employ strategies to manage distractions and improve workplace productivity. There are lots of activities that can reduce a worker’s efficiency. These can include spending a lot of time on email correspondence, attending unnecessary meetings, checking notifications from Slack, and browsing social media.
It is important to keep track of how often employees procrastinate and how much time they spend on unproductive websites. In any workplace, time tracking apps can provide insight into the time wasted on daily interruptions, unnecessary activities, and even unexpected tasks. When you know how often these disruptions and distractions happen in your team, you can devise a better strategy for handling them.
Improve Daily Processes and Workflow
With an integrated time tracking system in place, your small business’s daily operations and processes can be improved. Time trackers expose the activities, tasks, workflows, and tools that hinder your productivity, allowing you to fix them. You can easily monitor everything you spend time on, like email, meetings, project management, task coordination, and administrative work.
When you understand why delays happen across your projects, you can plan ahead and estimate the time to be spent on future projects more accurately. Try to find out where the bottlenecks, routines, habits, and lengthy processes are. What tasks take longer than normal? How often do you check email? Where are you wasting time?
Protect Your Employees Against Burnout
Long working hours can disrupt sleep, trigger anxiety and cause depression, resulting in diminished productivity, a.k.a burnout. In the same way, not taking breaks can negatively affect productivity. Productivity goes hand in hand with rest.
Time tracking apps can quickly reveal where a workload is unevenly distributed throughout the week, so employees can be prepared for days of higher intensity and pressure. You can easily identify which workers need occasional assistance with certain tasks and help them with any difficulties that may come up. Using time tracking tools, you can assess each of your employee’s capacities at a glance, allowing you to see those who are approaching burnout. You can also identify those who are capable of handling challenging work. Indeed, keeping track of how much time you’ve logged in your working week reveals how much downtime you actually get.
Gain Deeper Focus
When we are fully focused, we give our best and are most productive. However, providing an environment that allows for deep focus and uninterrupted work can be challenging. For example, one employee might be able to hit the ground running as early as possible. Another worker might only be able to achieve peak productivity at noon.
Nevertheless, using time trackers gives us a lot of insight into what we do on a daily basis. Employees can identify their peak productivity hours and manage their tasks and energy levels accordingly. As we’ve mentioned, time tracking gives you insight into the times of the day when your employees work best, so you can make plans to schedule their days more efficiently. Tasks that require more concentration can be reserved for the times when an employee knows they’re more focused.
“The opinions expressed by BizWitty Contributors are their own, not those of BizCover and should not be relied upon in place of appropriate professional advice. Please read our full disclaimer."
