7 Ways Time Tracking Improves Teamwork & Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is critical to companies worldwide since one of the main goals of every business is to keep its employees happy and satisfied with their professional life. However, even competitive salaries and extensive benefits won’t keep your employees engaged for many years at a time.

Therefore, companies and organizations must also pay attention to other aspects since a lot more goes into successful employee engagement. For example, good time management strategies can make a world of difference regarding teamwork and employee engagement.

If you’re unsure how time tracking can help your business, you’re in the right place. Keep reading to learn more about it.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the connection employees feel toward the organization, the team, and their work. Engaged employees have a strong sense of duty for their company and pride in their job position, so they work harder, stay employed longer, and motivate other workers to do the same.

A company’s employee engagement affects almost every aspect of its operations, not just the employee’s perception of work. Employee engagement can determine a company’s revenue, profitability, turnover, customer experience, and much more, so you can start using some of these employee engagement tools to help you rich your goals quicker.

The way our leaders engage employees is changing as we move into a new post-covid era. The future of leadership will involve disruptive change, and maintaining an engaged workforce is quickly becoming one of the key challenges employers face today.

There are different levels of employee engagement, so employees can be classified into one of these four main categories:

1. Employees with high engagement

All companies aim to make their workers highly engaged. That’s because people with this type of engagement love their job, feel a strong connection with the company and their team, are motivated to work, and don’t mind putting in extra effort when needed. Moreover, highly engaged employees drive other workers around them to do the same.

2. Employees with moderate engagement

Moderately engaged employees like working for the company, but they’re aware of the improvement opportunities that probably exist within a company. Employees with moderate engagement complete all their duties but are less likely to ask for additional responsibilities. That said, there is something holding employees with moderate engagement back from becoming fully engaged.

3. Employees with poor engagement

Poorly engaged employees only do what’s required of them or even less than that. In most cases, barely engaged employees struggle with motivation, so they often feel indifferent toward their workplace and team members. They can also put your company at risk with a high turnover rate.

Moreover, they can hinder a business’s overall productivity by slacking off at work, browsing the internet for other high-paying online jobs, or doing—at best—a mediocre job.

4. Employees with no engagement

Employees with no engagement are completely disengaged workers who lack motivation for the job and have a negative opinion of the organization.

They usually feel a strong disconnection from the company’s goals and missions, so they aren’t committed to their responsibilities. Lack of engagement among employees poses a serious threat to companies as they usually produce low-quality work. Their negative attitudes and perceptions can impact the productivity of other employees.

Let’s take customer service representatives that feel disconnected and lack engagement at work. Their poor performance can result in a lack of customer service, which can negatively impact them, their customers, and your overall brand.

What is a time tracker, and how does it work?

Time tracking is a practice used by many companies worldwide designed to monitor and document the working hours of every employee. To do that, companies need to invest in special tools called time trackers to gather data on when team members start and finish their work.

Although each time tracker tool has some unique features, they all share the same primary function – to track employees’ working hours. In most cases, time trackers achieve this by requiring their users to clock in and out when starting and ending their workday. Time trackers can also track breaks and unplanned pauses during working hours.

With time trackers, companies can develop excellent time management strategies and ensure their team management tactics are optimized and effective.

7 ways time tracking improves teamwork and employee engagement

Organizations can transform how they function by introducing time-tracking tools and methods. Whether you want to manage employees in a small business or a large corporation, time management strategies can improve teamwork and employee engagement. Here are seven different ways to do that.

1. Improve resource allocation

Resource allocation is all about scheduling how different resources will be used within a company. Resource allocation doesn’t only imply the allocation of the equipment, material, and supply use but also the allocation of the workforce. In fact, staff members are probably the most important resource of every business.

Managing your project resourcing helps ensure an equal workload between your team members. Furthermore, it contributes to accurate and financially beneficial outsourcing and better offshore hiring decisions, especially when it comes to product development, and the success of the whole process depends on these funds.

Since time tracking improves employee allocation, you’ll better understand which employees should work on projects and for how long. That way, you can maximize productivity, boost team morale, and cut costs.

For instance, allocating your customer support resources can significantly affect the success and reliability of this department. Use customer service benchmarking to get a greater insight into some important metrics you and your team should keep an eye on. This method allows you to see concrete numbers and comparisons and keeps your employees accountable.

2. Facilitate team collaboration

When a company uses time-tracking tools and team management techniques, it’s much simpler to facilitate team collaboration among employees. If each individual has their own role towards the same goal, it reduces their chances of being overwhelmed with overlapping tasks.

In a team, clarifying who is in charge of specific duties is imperative, which results in better communication and collaboration. Since the primary goal of time tracking is to keep an eye on the working hours of staff members, activities such as team collaboration, communication, and project management become significantly easier.

Once employees have a solid foundation for team collaboration, improvements in teamwork, innovative thinking, and equal participation are immediately visible.

3. Work distribution

As mentioned above, time tracking plays a vital role in the equal distribution of the workload. Distributing duties and responsibilities among employees is one of the most challenging things, even though it might seem simple at first glance. Luckily, even this obligation becomes relatively easy with time-tracking tools by your side.

Time tracking can ensure you distribute work activities equally among employees. You’ll have a deeper insight into the time required for specific tasks and the time available among your employees.

4. Track progress

Professional progress is often connected to the amount of time people spend working. Even though there are some exceptions, the general rule is pretty simple – the more time people spend working, the more likely they are to progress.

That’s mainly because time spent working allows employees to learn new things and master their skills, which affects their progress and performance.

Therefore, time tracking allows companies to track their employees’ progress and time spent working, which can greatly help.

5. Identify obstacles

Yet another purpose of time tracking is identifying obstacles that might threaten the staff members’ performance or job satisfaction. Employees who face too many obstacles while trying to complete their responsibilities will quickly get frustrated, and their engagement will gradually fade.

However, once a company introduces time tracking, it immediately gathers information about the obstacles you can find in different areas of the company. After collecting valuable information, finding different solutions to solve these obstacles is significantly easier.

6. Boost time management

This one is pretty obvious and straightforward. Time tracking enables executives and managers to gather details about their time management practices and detect issues that might have been preventing them from creating a more optimized schedule.

Nevertheless, with time tracking, companies can improve teamwork and employee engagement by focusing on their time management practices. Other results, such as improved employee retention and satisfaction, will follow when time management is improved.

7. Prevent bottlenecks

Bottlenecks are common in numerous companies, especially those that work in production. Bottlenecks can be a reason for countless problems and limitations within a company, which is why it’s necessary to take all the possible steps to prevent bottlenecks or at least minimize their effects.

When a company has an established time-tracking system, struggling with bottlenecks becomes a thing of the past. Businesses can immediately see when some workflows are falling behind, or others are piling up, so they can implement process improvement strategies to prevent any major system failures.

What are the benefits of optimizing employee engagement?

Time tracking optimizes employee engagement drastically, regardless of your company’s industry. Some main benefits of optimized employee engagement and improved teamwork are the following:

1. Higher job satisfaction

When employee engagement is optimized, the company workers are much happier with their professional life. Higher job satisfaction improves productivity, motivation, and attendance. Satisfied employees are willing to put in extra effort and complete additional tasks that might not even be a part of their job description.

Some industries are champions in job satisfaction indexes, while others struggle even to enter the race. For instance, according to a survey by PayScale, an average cyber security engineer gave a job satisfaction of 3.83 out of 5, which is about 10% over the average of 51% among US workers. Furthermore, swiftly developing yet young fields like cyber security jobs require staff members who believe in what they do and are motivated to outperform expectations.

2. Better employee retention

Optimized employee engagement also leads to better employee retention. Companies that take care of their employee engagement typically don’t have problems with a high turnover rate because their workers are more likely to keep their existing jobs than look for new ones.

Since employee retention is something more and more companies struggle with, improved employee engagement might be the perfect solution to keep more of your existing employees a part of your company.

3. Improved team performance

Engaged employees are more motivated to communicate with other team members and collaborate with them to develop better solutions and ideas. As such, employee engagement directly affects team performance in a company and improves professional relationships among staff members.

Businesses with excellent team performance experience countless benefits, such as impressive effectiveness, good work dynamics, and lower costs.

4. Increase in revenue

Finally, optimized employee engagement also has one of the most important advantages for a business – an increase in revenue. From lower costs to higher incomes, an increase in revenue is almost inevitable when employees are engaged in their work.

When a business gets a higher revenue influx, it’s much easier to plan future company developments and think of the best ways to proceed with financial investments.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say time tracking equips companies and organizations with countless opportunities and benefits. Nevertheless, what makes time tracking truly special is its effect on teamwork and employee engagement.

With a good time-tracking solution by your side, you can rest assured your employees will be much happier with their work and motivated to do more for the company. Naturally, other benefits will quickly follow.