In today’s fast-paced business world, time is one of your most valuable resources. Using it well can make or break your company’s success. That’s where time trackers come in. They are simple tools, but they can have a huge impact. A time tracker helps companies manage their time better. It assists in tracking how employees spend their hours and ensuring tasks get done on time. With the right time tracking software, your business can be more productive—while your employees can be happier.
In this guide, we’ll learn about modern time tracking solutions by exploring the benefits they provide.
Things a time tracker can do
Let’s jump straight into our main topic and explore the functionality of time trackers—starting with the obvious one.
Track work hours and idle time
The most obvious functionality of time trackers is to monitor the work hours of employees. Collecting such data can help you maintain the productivity of your team. After all, employees can’t perform well if they’re not working on their tasks.
While work is important, another vital aspect of productivity is breaks. Taking regular breaks can help professionals perform their best. Having too little time to relax, on the other hand, can lead to many negative consequences—like burnout. Time tracking software can help with this by tracking idle time automatically. High-quality apps can even show automatic wellness reminders to your staff. Using tracked time and break data, ensuring your team’s work-life balance is healthy will also be easy.
Track billable hours and payroll
If your business pays any employees on an hourly basis, a time tracker is essential for you. Tracking exactly how much time each professional spent working is key to paying them accurately. This can be especially important if you have more than one rate assigned to any employee. Such cases may happen if you have different rates for various projects within your business.
Even if all your employees are paid a traditional salary, time trackers can still be useful. They can help calculate overtime pay accurately. Around some parts of the world, you should pay extra attention to your overtime calculations because of local laws. Many places require overtime hours to be higher-paying than regular ones. This means that an incorrect calculation can cost your business quite a lot—either in salaries or legal costs.
Monitor employee productivity
While we briefly talked about employee productivity before, high-quality time trackers can track it in more than one way. Besides paying attention to how much time they spend working, you should also track your team’s app & website usage and activity levels. Combined with tracked time data, these will help you ensure your staff is performing to their fullest.
If you’d like to learn more, find out how employee monitoring software can improve team performance.
Manage company projects and tasks
Managing your projects can be vital to ensure the success of your business. This includes managing your tasks correctly. Many high-quality time trackers have project and task management features built in. You should use these to prioritize company tasks correctly, set and track project budgets, and much more.
Enhancing your project management will make it easier to complete tasks on time. Your staff will be able to avoid stressful situations, helping improve their work-life balance.
Enhance employee work-life balance
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is critical for any business. If your team is overworked, they will quickly get burnt out. If you’re not aware, burnout causes lots of negative effects that stifle growth. Burnt out professionals won’t perform nearly as well as they can. They also won’t be committed to their work—they’ll be more likely to look for other opportunities.
Time trackers can help you avoid such issues by making it simple to maintain a healthy work-life balance in your team. High-quality apps like WebWork even offer dedicated features for this. Such functionality will use tracked time data to label employees’ work-life balance accordingly—underworked, healthy, or overworked.
Improve employee retention
As we already discussed, a healthy work-life balance is critical for productivity. It’s especially important for maintaining it over the long term. A healthy balance between work and personal hours will give your staff enough time to complete tasks outside of their jobs. These can include things like spending time with friends and family or running personal errands. As a result, your team will be more satisfied—leading to higher professional engagement, and ultimately, retention rates.
Time tracking software helps with this in various ways. Features like work-life balance tracking and project management will make your talent retention efforts more effective.
Streamline compliance efforts
If your business needs to do any compliance reporting, the data collected by a time tracker can be invaluable. This is especially true for time trackers with lots of monitoring features—app and website usage, activity level, screenshot tracking, and more.
Concluding thoughts
Time tracking apps can be quite versatile. They help teams of all sizes perform their best across the globe. While we covered only 7 things you can do with them, their use cases are pretty much endless. High-quality time trackers help firms stand out from the competition—making one a worthwhile investment for any business owner.