The 6 most important rules of employee time tracking

15 of February, 2021

Employee time tracking provides you with a lot of useful data about the way your staff works. You can then analyse it to makes changes in your workforce management in order to increase productivity. But time tracking can be tricky to implement correctly. Here are a few pointers to keep your workers happy and get the best results out of employee time tracking:

Lead by example

Employees’ discontent will grow if time tracking applies only to them and not to the managers and leaders. So get rid of double standards and put every member of your organisation under the same regime. Implementing a new time tracking system will go way smoother if everyone has to abide by the same policies. Besides, how can managers train their employees to correctly track their working time if they don’t do it themselves?

Make it quick and easy

Employee time tracking shouldn’t be so tedious that your staff spends much of their precious time on it. After all, the goal is to increase your workers’ efficiency. Fortunately, there are nowadays many time tracking apps that make it extremely easy to manage your employees’ working time, no matter the size of your workforce. Among the best time tracking software, you will find Sesame. Sesame’s time tracking features allow your employees to clock in and out with a single click from their computers or mobile phones, and record the time spent on each task through a user-friendly interface. You won’t find an app that is easier to use!

Clarify what should be tracked and what shouldn’t

Not every little thing should be tracked, or your company risks developing totalitarian tendencies. A good rule of thumb is that if something takes more than 15 minutes to complete, then you should track it. So according to this rule, employees shouldn’t need track their bathroom breaks, but a 30-minute lunch break should be recorded. This way, employees will not fret about clocking in and out of a task every time they leave their desks.

Cultivate a mutual trust

The biggest risk of employee monitoring is losing trust in your employees, and them getting resentful about it. Now that you have the ability to monitor every second of your employees’ workday, why not use it? Because no professional, responsible adult (which your employees are if you hired the right people) likes to be treated like a wayward child that cannot be trusted. Keeping the trust alive is key to maintaining a good level of employee happiness and a low turnover rate.

Use your time tracking data

If you chose Sesame as a time tracking and planning app, then you have access to Sesame’s detailed reports and statistics about overtime, absence and lateness and even the profitability of projects. Make sure to use all this data to identify areas to improve, review your goals and make the appropriate changes to your workforce management.

Be wary of linking time to performance

Time and performance are certainly linked, but only loosely. Just because an employee takes more time than the average to complete a task doesn’t that they work badly. Maybe they pay more attention to detail and thus produce a result of better quality. Also take into account employees with disabilities that impact the speed at which they can work. Always remember those human factors when analysing your company’s time data.