Wasted time is a loss of money for your business. One way to protect your business is to effectively track time, organize your workflow, and manage your projects effectively. In this article, we show the best effective methods to use employee Time Tracking Software for your business.
This approach will help you build an appropriate revenue model or revenue engine for your business. Having the right time tracking software optimized for your workflow is much better to have than maintaining an employee time tracking spreadsheet.
According to a study conducted by Voucher Cloud, an average UK office worker spends 44 minutes a day checking social media during office working hours.
The best ways to use time tracking software help you to precisely measure project progress and identify how you can help your team members to become more productive and efficient. An employee time tracking software will also provide you with tools such as project management reports and the project tracker. You can use this approach to set project completion targets and integrate the tools with accounting and payroll systems.
Effective Methods of Time Tracking Software
Let’s See Highly Effective Best Methods to Use Time Tracking Software for Innovative Companies.
Start with a Pilot Program
Before you start implementing employee time tracking software for all your team members, consider having a pilot program in one team or department. You will be able to collect feedback and identify the best ways to use time tracking software more efficiently. You’ll be able to know what to change and what to keep.
While doing the pilot program, communicate to your team that the approach will be implemented in the entire organization if it goes well with selected team members. Once you make them realize the value and importance of their participation and their efforts, they will engage even more and provide better feedback. As the number of users will be smaller initially, you will be able to make changes much quicker.
Communicate the Benefits to Your Team
If you force or order your employees to start using the best time tracking software, they will feel suspicious. They might think that they are being monitored and time tracking is to keep an eye on them. You should make it clear that time tracking doesn’t represent a lack of trust. Instead, it intends to make the work process more productive, and efficient.
It will lead to a streamlined and accurate tracking of billable hours to make sure employees are paid correctly and swiftly. Once they understand the benefits and positives of employee monitoring software, they will confidently and happily contribute.
Track Non-billable Activities
There are multiple benefits to tracking non-billable activities. It will help you identify and forecast the capacity issues. Once you are aware of the capacity of your team members, you will not overpromise and underdeliver.
This will help remove stress and overload on team members. Besides, tracking non-billable activities such as research, operations, and communication will help you to arrive at accurate total project costs and better estimate the hourly rate.
Let’s Take an Example
You estimated that the project would take 110 working hours to complete. “(This is the time you expected as per the actual productive hours)”. At the end of the project, you will feel that you have spent an additional 11 hours on feedback and client communication. You charged the client for 110 hours, but you spent a total of 121 hours. Spending extra hours will hurt your hourly rates.
With productivity monitoring software, you can accurately monitor hours to avoid going below or beyond your estimates.
Organize Team Members’ Time Around Projects
You can implement this method after you have implemented the time tracking for enough time, let’s say 1-3 months. At that time, you will have tracking data, charts, and reports. You should use that data and reports to gather insights and aim towards organizing the time of your team members more productively.
There are multiple ways to organize the time of your team members around the project. One of the methods is to categorize or tag project activities and label them. You can also break activities like coding, and designing into multiple sub-tasks such as updating the database and designing the homepage.
This is a great way to categorize, analyze project activities, and organize your team members’ time. This is a scalable approach so it can be applied to any project. It’s also important to understand what is employee engagement and its importance so you can spend more of your time engaging your employees instead of crunching numbers.
Set Hourly Rates and Assign a Value
When multiple members are working on different projects, it becomes difficult to manually calculate hourly costs and revenue. The manual approach makes it difficult to arrive at the day’s total cost and revenue. To make this process work for you, assign rates to project tasks and activities.
Once the team members see a monetary value attached to the project activities, they will know how much time to allocate or spend on that activity or task. You can apply this approach for billable and non-billable tasks where your organization is investing less productive time on non-billable tasks. You will see the real results and benefits once you generate reports at the end of the project.
Time Tracking Helps You Arrive at a Better Revenue Model
Running a business is quite expensive. You should optimize your cost to profit ratio as much as possible to make your business grow. Using time tracking software allows you to measure outcomes and efficiency. You will be able to optimize your time and serve the clients in a better way, even if you aren’t billing them.
Once you measure and analyze where and how the team is investing their time and efforts, you’ll be able to better manage the priorities, make accurate estimates to clients and communicate deadlines upfront.
We recommend you only choose Time Tracking Software that offers you a trial period. Read all the above time tracking software methods. Once you get familiar and feel that the software is enhancing your workflow then you can go for a full version for your entire team. DeskTrack offers a 15-day free trial so you can explore the tool’s features at no cost.
