The benefits of time tracking and time management are so many that they are now a common business practice for monitoring and optimizing (remote) employee productivity.
Remote employee time tracking offers valuable insights into how they spend their time during work hours, helps managers and team leads facilitate better resource management, and enhances employee accountability and transparency among remote teams.
However, the only way to reap the many benefits of time tracking is to approach the entire remote employee time tracking process with a modicum of caution, as you have to balance employee productivity with the trust they have in you and your company.
For those reasons, we’ve created this article to explore some of the dos and don’ts when it comes to implementing remote employee time tracking into your business.
Not implementing remote time tracking correctly can negatively affect your team’s motivation, morale, and job satisfaction, all of which are important factors in reducing employee turnover.
So, what are the things you should and shouldn't do to reduce the chances of turnover, even before you implement time tracking into your business?
One of the most common mistakes when implementing a time-tracking solution is to do it abruptly without notifying your employees. This is a no-go, as it can cause confusion, dissatisfaction, and even mutiny among your team, reducing their morale and motivation. It’s a surefire way to make employees hate time tracking, even before you put it into practice.
So, what should you do?
Rather than simply informing your remote employees about the immediate implementation of time-tracking software, it might be a good idea to involve them in the entire conversation from the get-go. Start by explaining the benefits of time tracking, as well as the particulars of how to use the time-tracking method you’ve decided on.
The more time you invest in preparing your employees and talking to them about time tracking, the more likely they’ll understand the process and even start to like it.
Here are some of the things you can discuss with them before you implement any sort of remote employee time-tracking solution:
Talk with your team about the digital time-tracking solution you’re looking to use. Explain to them all the benefits of that particular software and ask for opinions and feedback. Once you decide on the tool, ensure that all your remote employees receive adequate training and support on using the new time-tracking tool, even before officially implementing it into your company.
A lot of time-tracking software companies offer free trials, which gives you and your team ample time to learn how to use a particular tool and see if it’s the right fit for your business.
As clearly as possible, explain to your remote employees the reason and importance of both time tracking and time management. Talk with them about how time tracking can help with project management, allocating resources, analyzing productivity, and more.
Highlight that you are not interested in micromanagement but are focused on utilizing remote employee time tracking to create a more autonomous workforce with better and more optimized workflows, productivity, and efficacy.
Have clear standards in place on how you will use remote employee time tracking in your company, the type of data you’ll collect, and how you’ll use that data (e.g., for internal purposes only or billing and other client-related processes). Whatever the case, try to be as transparent as possible when explaining all of this to your remote employees.
One of the common mistakes employers make in implementing remote employee time tracking is not properly addressing privacy issues with their employees.
These are normal concerns that regularly pop up in remote work environments. As a decision maker, your job, in this case, will be to talk to your remote employees about their privacy, the measures you’ve taken to protect it, and similar. This will help reinforce the trust between employees and their managers, further promoting better team morale, motivation, and cohesion.
A common pitfall many remote team managers tend to fall into is using time-tracking tools to micromanage their remote employees. This is absolutely wrong, as one of the main goals of time-tracking is to create more autonomous employees, fully-capable of making their own decisions without needing someone to constantly look over their shoulders and check their work.
In some cases, team leads can end up abusing the potential of time-tracking software to monitor every minutia of their remote employees’ work day. Others might start using additional tools with screen recording or key-tracking features to impose a “Big Brother” type of surveillance system. Don’t do that. What you should do instead is:
Focus on managing your remote employees to promote employee accountability. Use time-tracking tools to create a positive work culture where every remote worker will feel responsible and accountable for the deliverables they produce.
When using a time-tracking solution, your job as a manager/employer is to empower your employees and allow them to keep track of their productivity and efficacy. The ultimate goal is to develop a remote team fully cognizant of their performance and willing to work on improving it (if necessary) or maintaining it (if they've reached the required performance level).
Setting clear objectives and expectations regarding what sort of tasks or activities your employees should track is most definitely in the dos column. Once these standards are created and implemented, your remote employees will always know what’s expected from them. Additionally, these expectations can be used as a point of reference when measuring individual or team performance.
One of the core reasons behind implementing time-tracking software is to gather data about remote employees’ productivity, efficacy, and general performance levels. But, collecting all of that data is useless if you don’t assess it to generate honest and objective feedback.
The best way to share this feedback with your employees is to establish remote-friendly communication channels. This platform would also be a great place for your employees to share their thoughts and provide input and suggestions about the entire time tracking process and the tools you’re using.
Try to encourage your remote team members to share their experiences, concerns, or ideas on how you can improve the whole process. Review and analyze the information you’ve gathered on a regular basis so that you can refine the process up to a point where both you and your employees are satisfied with it.
Some managers might see this as an unreasonable step that can void the entire slough of benefits time tracking brings about. Others view this as the most reasonable step when talking about remote employee time tracking.
What you ultimately decide to do is fully your decision, but we would be remiss not to mention at least a couple of advantages of sharing the performance data with your remote employees:
Creating a clear remote work policy can help avoid various problems when managing remote teams. Problems such as:
For those and some other reasons, it’s important to set a remote work policy to regulate remote work within your business/company.
The entire process of time tracking should be made as easy and quick as possible. If your remote employees have to invest a substantial amount of time in time tracking, chances are they won’t do it at all or do it in a way that’s faulty and/or incomplete.
So, whatever tool or solution you pick for this purpose, make sure it’s easy to use and doesn’t take up a lot of time.
