One way managers can monitor their remote employees is by tracking their work time. Aside from keeping track of working hours and managing paychecks, time tracking can help managers deal with performance issues (I’ll explain this later in the article).
However, employees might feel that time tracking is a way to keep them under surveillance. If in an office, managers could feel confident that employees are physically busy, in a remote situation, they need to use digital monitoring tools.
As a result, many employees might not take time tracking seriously or avoid it altogether. Sometimes, they might inaccurately fill in the tracking sheets to get paid more—this is known as time theft.
I’ll explain why employees avoid time tracking and how to deal with this. Here are three main reasons:
1. Time tracking is inaccurate.
Some employees don’t take time tracking seriously because they feel it can’t be accurate enough. Since managers use outdated tools and methods for time tracking, it has turned into guesswork. In this case, it could be considered a total waste of time.
When time tracking relies on guesswork and tracking sheets, there’s so much room for error. Employees may not track their working hours accurately even if they try their best.
For instance, let’s say three team members are responsible for the same task in the product development process. Naturally, one will perform better since people have different skill sets that make them stand out in specific tasks.
Performance nuances between team members are normal to some extent. However, the difference shouldn’t be significant. It’s not easy to judge, but people who take unusually longer hours to do their tasks than others might be inefficient for different reasons.
If there’s a considerable difference in the time spent on a task among employees, it either stems from time theft or a wide performance gap. Time theft refers to employees misinforming managers about their work hours to receive payment for hours they didn’t work.
Either way, it’s a problem.
Luckily, there are some tactics to help you prevent inaccurate tracking.
Update sheets and reports on time
Using paper time tracking sheets is becoming increasingly outdated. Make sure you opt for a digital time-tracking solution. Then, make sure employees update sheets regularly and report to you on time.
You shouldn’t have to request this again and again. Explain the logic of timesheets if your team members are reluctant to update them regularly.
Remember, don’t evaluate from a purely quantitative standpoint, i.e., the number of hours. Underperformers at one task may be overachievers in others.
One great advantage of time tracking is finding out where employees have talent and interest. It’s essential to measure performance so that you can manage your team in a mutually beneficial way.
Use real-time tracking
Without a doubt, real-time tracking is the best way to have accuracy. Real-time tracking apps are intuitive and affordable. And top task management platforms come with this function.
These tools allow you to track time directly in your browser. However, they might work differently on different browsers, so consider comparing how this works on Firefox vs Brave or Chrome vs Safari. When you’re done recording, they automatically record the entry on the timesheet. Also, they offer live reports that are automatically updated. Using this kind of software, you can monitor employee productivity without wasting time or energy.
Educate employees
One common reason for inaccurate tracking is employees’ lack of information. For starters, let new team members know that time tracking is necessary for the health of your project. Make sure they know which activities call for tracking.
For instance, a content creator in an agency may assume that research is not a billable part of the content creation process. However, research contributes heavily to the end result. So it’s essential for insightful content. If it takes time, it’s trackable.
In some cases, people won’t know how to track their hours. Even if your time-tracking app is intuitive, create a ‘how-to’ document on how to use it.
2. Time tracking is time-consuming.
As I mentioned, time tracking takes too much time when done wrong. That’s why employees resist recording their hours on time. They have a point if you think about it. If the process forces you to take a 30-min break from work every day, you won’t like it. You’ll lose focus and might not concentrate again for a while.
It’s even worse if you have outdated methods in place. Say, for instance, you want employees to report hours at the end of every week. To do that, they must track hours for days, record data on some file they own, then transfer the data to your public sheet on the last day.
The problem is they might forget to do all the steps promptly. What’ll they do then? They’ll either give you an approximate number or go back and try to recall how much time they’ve spent on tasks. This will be a massive drawback to efficiency.
How to deal with time-consuming time tracking? Well, the key is making the process easy.
Make it easy
Some companies ask employees to enter data into multiple systems. Employees first go to their project management tool and find the relevant task. Sometimes they can’t find the task in the first place when the dashboard is too complicated.
Then they’re expected to log their hours to the internal system as it is necessary for performance monitoring and planning.
After that, employees record billable hours in an excel sheet needed for the billing process calculations.The problem, aside from having to go through several systems, is that each asks for different data. For instance, when a task is not billable, you can’t enter it on the excel sheet. So a calculation becomes necessary for each entry.
Clear out all the unnecessary steps. Avoid using multiple manual systems and sheets. Make sure employees can enter data in one place. Paymo is a reliable project management software with handy time-tracking features.
Use automatic time tracking.
Adopt the necessary technologies so your team members can record their work automatically. However, ensure the tool’s safety and privacy policies comply with GDPR. Keeping individuals’ data without anonymization might be illegal in your jurisdiction.
Paymo’s automatic tracker helps you link relevant work activities to subsequent tasks and projects. Just let Paymo Track run in the background and revise it at the end of the work day:
3. Time tracking feels like surveillance.
Employees might feel they’re under surveillance when tracking their time. Some employers use employee monitoring software to keep track of their employees’ monitors. However, this is not the way to use automatic tracking tools.
The focus should be on the outcome. Overall, your goal should be improving team productivity. Instead of micromanaging your employees, you should show them that you can improve team productivity without using extra resources.
Neal Taparia, who runs the card gaming platform Solitaired, explains that rigorous time tracking curbs motivation:
“Our employees want autonomy to figure out issues and solve problems on their own. That’s how they grow. Focusing too much on tracking software can erode that trust and faith you put into your team, and ultimately hurts their performance and desire to go above and beyond.”
Some companies opt for invasive employee monitoring. For example, screenshots help you gain the ability to view what employees are working on in real time. But there is mounting evidence that screenshots negatively affect employee trust in management, including this 3-week experiment, in which employee behavior was minutely monitored: keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and screenshots snapped every 10 minutes. Yikes!
Other time-tracking software features such as geofencing (a virtual set of boundaries automatically clocking the employee in and out) and geo-tracking (monitoring employees’ real-time physical location) have garnered popularity, especially in light of the pandemic. Although the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, such detailed monitoring raises legal concerns of privacy violation, as US law firm Williams Mullen stated.
What now?
Have trust in employees
Don’t micromanage. It’s as easy as that. Use time-tracking technologies, but avoid exploitative tools that don’t respect team members’ privacy. Employees should understand the benefits of time tracking or attendance tracking software.
Employees don’t want to track their time when they feel micromanaged. There’s a sense of distrust, and employees feel intimidated if constantly evaluated by their immediate superior or whoever has access to their time entries. In turn, employees feel like they are less valued (and valuable). They become frustrated with their work environment.
This inevitably leads to burnout or turnover intention, i.e., the desire to quit your job. Read more about the dangers of micromanaging.
If you explain the importance of time tracking and make it easy for employees, they’ll see its value. They’ll find out about areas that need improvement. When they come up with improvement ideas, pay attention to their requests.
Say, for instance, your marketing team has a consensus on the inefficiency of a process. Hear their suggestions, develop your own, and execute the most logical solution. This is precisely why you’re tracking time – to find inefficiencies and improve your processes.
Promote a results-driven company culture
Although it failed to continue, Best Buy’s successful attempt to switch to a result-driven company culture is instructive. Between 2005 and 2007, the company invested in a culture change that turned out incredibly nurturing.
They found out that employees should have some freedom regarding decisions about their working environment. When there’s a shared understanding of a project’s guiding principles and goals, the rest can be left to the employee. When, how, or from where they’ll be working should be up to themselves only.
What is a time-tracking tool and how does it help?
Time-tracking tools smooth out the time-tracking process. In essence, they make it easy for employees to record their work hours and give you a review of their activity.
Choose a tool that comes with a desktop widget. These tools let you use the web timer to record time spent on your tasks. Once you select a project and a particular task, just hit the time tracker to start recording, and it saves the details of your recording. Some employees will prefer to work outside the web app.
Top time tracking tools out there also provide reports so you can make informed decisions next time you’re planning. Together with a clear view of time entry cards on the dashboard, you’ll be able to monitor project health and measure efficiency.
On top of all, you can easily share time reports with teammates and clients.This transparency guarantees that you’re charging fairly and that the project progress is traceable—the perfect way to build trust between you and your clients.
If you can, pick an all-in-one online work management software such as Paymo. A work management tool with a time-tracking feature will enable a fast and accurate data flow.
When employees use the time tracking feature, they can access all the data from the task management module. This way, you can better analyze data, monitor progress, and focus on resource planning.
How to implement time tracking as a team
Here’s a quick walkthrough of the adoption phases.
Pre-adoption phase:
- Be straightforward with your team. Communicate all the benefits of time tracking and some of its pitfalls, and be transparent about what you hope to get out of it. Your goal is to reduce micromanagement and increase productivity.
- Be clear about how and when time tracking takes place. Don’t do it every once in a while. Otherwise, it will look shady (privacy invasion, micromanagement, etc.). Make sure the team understands the process and purpose of time tracking.
- Pilot test it for 1 month (shorter than that, they probably won’t be able to see the results). Set the start and end date of the pilot and schedule a retrospective for subsequent feedback, time tracking merits and drawbacks, personal experience, etc. Having this in mind, your employees will be more intentional about it.
- Assign a team leader or project manager to check time entries at the end of the week. This will help with future project estimations and keep each team member accountable.
Adoption phase:
- Run a demo of the time-tracking software you want to employ. Don’t assume everybody knows how to use it. Have them run the demo, watch tutorials, and ask any questions they might have. Teach them tips and tricks and refer them to the software’s knowledge base.
How time tracking works in Paymo
- Make time tracking a habit from Day 1. Be enthusiastic about its adoption and let your team know that time tracking is a part of your company’s work culture. Consistency is essential if they want the pilot program to work.
Review phase:
- Run a retrospective with your team. Ask for their feedback and thoughts. Don’t aim for perfection – 70% tracked time is an achievable goal in a pilot program. If they managed that, the pilot would be successful.
More than a way to manage paychecks
In this article, I offered three reasons employees might avoid time tracking.
- They might feel it’s a waste of time because it could never be done accurately.
- It might seem unnecessarily time-consuming.
- Employees could see it as a form of surveillance.
Read this extensive article on the best time-tracking software that could help your business or project and overall work productivity. In the second part of the article under The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, you’ll find other insights along with strategies to implement time-tracking on a team level.
Employees might not be okay with the idea of being evaluated by the number of hours they put into their work. But the truth is apart from regulating the work hours of employees and calculating their paychecks, time tracking has other benefits for them.
For example, figuring out project profitability by contrasting work hours versus project scope.
Another example is when working on a retainer, you get to keep track of your billable hours, so your client is kept in the loop.
Longer than usual hours spent on a particular task might be a sign of some nuisance. Technical difficulties, misunderstandings, overestimating, incompetence, etc., could be some reasons. Even in some project-based jobs, the hours spent on a project could determine the employee’s work conditions.
Keeping track of your team’s working hours could make identifying and dealing with the nuisances easier. The aim is to support employees rather than impose unreasonable quality standards on them.
Hopefully, the tactics offered here could help you make accurate time tracking a part of your employees’ routine.
First published on November 18, 2022.
Mostafa Dastras
Author
Mostafa Dastras has written for some companies such as HubSpot, WordStream, SmartInsights, LeadPages, and MarketingProfs. Over the past years, his clients have primarily relied on him for increasing organic traffic and generating leads through outreach campaigns. Visit his blog, liveabusinesslife.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn.
