5 Ways Time Tracking Software Benefits Your Business

Being able to keep track of the time that your employees spend at work is important. But time tracking software can do a lot more than just show you when an employee arrived at the office and when they left. If you’re not familiar with all of the different ways that time tracking software can benefit your business, you’re probably missing out on something that you may need. 

Take a look at how you can use time tracking software to improve and protect your business. 

Make Remote Work More Tenable

More and more businesses were trending toward offering more opportunities to work from home even before the COVID-19 crisis forced businesses to send their workers home to work. Outside the context of a pandemic, there are a number of benefits for a business to allow remote work, from attracting top recruits who are looking for more flexible working situations to cutting costs by not having to maintain office space for every single employee. 

But of course, you need some way manage remote employees effectively, including keeping track of the hours that your remote employees are working from home, especially if they’re hourly employees. Time tracking software makes this much simpler and opens up more possibilities for companies that want to incorporate remote work into their business plan. 

Give More Accurate Quotes and Estimates

Time tracking software can do much more than just tell you when your workers begin and end their workdays. It can also tell you exactly how much time each employee spends working on each task. There are benefits to this both from an employee-management perspective and from a client-management perspective. 

The obvious benefit from an employee-management perspective is that you’ll be able to tell when an employee is finishing a task too quickly or too slowly. This, combined with looking at the employee’s actual output, can help you pinpoint who is wasting time or needs additional training to keep up with the work, and who might be ready for a new challenge or who might need to be encouraged to slow down to avoid mistakes. 

But from a client-management perspective, it can also help you give clients more accurate quotes and estimates for the work that they’re hiring your company to do. If you know how long it will take to do the tasks that the client needs to be done, you can more accurately calculate how much it will cost to do them. This knowledge can allow you to keep your pricing competitive while being realistic about the value of your company’s labor and not undervaluing your work. 

Check in on the Status of a Job at Any Time

In many companies, any given project is broken down into different parts, and these parts become tasks assigned to different people, and perhaps even different departments. This can make it difficult for you to keep track of what the status and timeline is of the job at any given time. 

It can be difficult to keep all the different parts of the job in focus so that they can all be brought together for the finished project, or so that you can give a client a status update when they request one. 

But with time tracking software that keeps track of what your workers are doing and when it’s easy to see the current status of a given job at a glance. This way, you’ll know if one part of the job needs more resources or workers and if you’re on track to finish at the projected time. It will also help you keep clients who like frequent updates satisfied that you’re on top of the whole thing. 

Cut Down on Cyberloafing and Time Theft

The more your company grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all of your employees and what they’re doing during the workday. The less able you are to keep track of productivity, the more likely it is that you’re losing time without knowing it. 

• Do you have employees who are ignoring their work while scrolling through Facebook or using their company devices to use online dating apps? 
• Is there an employee who has a friend clock them back in after lunch so that they can take a much longer lunch than their timecards show? 

Employee tracking software can help you put a stop to this kind of time loss at work. You’d be able to use the software to see when an employee was on social media or a personal website instead of a work-related website, or when they were clocked in but not actively performing any kind of work or other activity, suggesting that they may not actually be at work, despite being clocked in. 

Often, employees who do these things don’t think of it as cheating the company out of time that they’re paying for. A warning or re-training could be enough to convince them to change their ways. But first, you have to know that the behavior is happening, and time tracking software can help with that. 

Improve Your Scheduling and Assignment Strategy

Do you ever notice that some of your workers are always busy and struggling to meet their deadlines, while others have lots of downtime? Some of this can come down to variations in employee skill and work speed. But it can also happen due to the uneven distribution of tasks and assignments. 

Employees who complete their work quickly and without errors might need a heavier workload to keep them busy. On the other hand, slower workers may be overburdened with too many assignments or may need additional training and supervision in order to catch up to their colleagues. 

Either way, time tracking software can give you a better picture of how the workload is distributed and whether changes need to be made to your scheduling or assignment protocol, as well as showing you which workers are the standouts and which may be struggling. 

If you’re interested in these and other benefits of employee time tracking software, you might want to take a closer look.  We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have. Schedule a call with InterGuard today!