For businesses big and small, time is literally gold. Making sure that every hour and minute is productive remains a pressing challenge, even in the new normal. More importantly, achieving work-life balance has also imposed another set of scheduling and time tracking standards.
Time tracking has become more of a balancing act between chasing productivity and keeping your team’s well-being instead of creating a rigid structure. To help you find the delicate intersection between the two, here are four time tracking strategies you can try for your business.
1. Learn to Delegate Tasks:
To achieve a healthy workplace environment, managers should ensure that every employee doesn’t take on too many tasks. It usually falls on the leaders and managers to delegate tasks considering each member’s roles, skills, and capabilities.
With the massive shift toward remote and hybrid work arrangements, businesses have started relying on cloud-based solutions to help manage teams. You can use automated dashboards that make it easy to track every task assigned to a team member at a glance without having to call regular meetings or send emails for updates. Online task management tools like Trello or Asana allow you to see the status of every task or project at a glance. You can also set alarms to notify you automatically.
By guiding your team members through delegation with development tracking software tools, you also minimize micromanagement and encourage employees to explore alternatives and work independently.
2. Set Priorities:
Time management largely depends on setting priorities. As far as businesses go, there’s always something else to do regardless of how hard you work. By being smart about what tasks to do first, you ensure that your team continues to make an impact as you progress through the never ending tasks.
In setting priorities, it is essential to prepare a plan that you can cascade to all team members. Regardless of the industry, it is common to have multiple tasks assigned to an employee at any given time. However, it is crucial to recognize that humans are not designed for multitasking, which is a counterproductive workplace practice. Set priorities for you and your team and achieve each target in the correct order. Letting them focus on one task at a time improves the quality of the output and reduces the risks of errors.
In setting priorities, you can also implement time management and tracking strategies. For example, teams are dedicating time blocks for specific tasks. This approach benefits technology and development-based organizations as it allows specialized professionals to focus on their work uninterrupted.
3. Automate Business Processes:
Automation increases efficiency, reduces lead time and error risks, and ultimately takes routine tasks off your hands. By adopting the right tools, you can make employee time tracking easier or remotely address human resource management issues. Furthermore, the pandemic has highlighted the value of cloud-based services in place of traditional solutions.
Another advantage of automation is that you can stay on top of any movement in your team anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, your employees can enjoy flexibility as they can access their files and projects from their home computers or even through their mobile devices.
Most online platforms contain a feature that indicates the timestamp for every action taken. For example, Trello represents a specific task through individual cards. Every time someone joins a card and makes an action or changes its status, all team members on the same board can freely check the progress and changes made to that specific card.
Also, AI-driven solutions like customer relationship management tools make it easier for your employees to reduce lead time and document all interactions with your customers. Business accounts for social media and automated chatbots allow you to connect with your customers virtually. These are all traceable through individual timestamps detailing the exact time the bots sent every inquiry and response.
4. Adopt Location Tracking Technologies:
For specific industries that require work on-site, particular technologies help you track the location and duration of team members in their specific area. If you’re managing employees in the service and transport sectors, monitoring technologies could help maintain accurate and practical time tracking.
An example of location tracking technology that automatically tracks time is the use of sensors for trucking companies. Trucks that carry shipments are installed with a GPS tracker, an RFID tag, or both. For GPS trackers, the vehicle's location is transmitted in real-time back to the company headquarters. Meanwhile, RFID tags are updated every time they pass through their corresponding terminals, acting like a digital ledger that notifies relevant parties whenever a vehicle has reached the target destination.
Aside from offering real-time location, these technologies also provide truckers convenience since they no longer have to keep manual time logs for every trip. With these sensors installed, it’s also more accessible for the on-site workers to call for help if something untoward happens at work.
Final Word
Time tracking strategies are essential for companies in the middle of this rapidly-changing landscape. They allow decision-makers to gain insights into the time needed to complete tasks, which inform decisions on timeline and productivity. More importantly, using the right time tracking strategy for your business allows your employees to get fairly compensated for their work hours and helps them focus on more critical tasks.