The need to track employee hours is more of a necessity than a luxury these days. Thanks to the modern work environment employee work hour management has become more complex than ever. These days due to the varied working environments, flexible schedules, and different work models, it’s not that easy anymore. That is only if you don’t know the best ways to monitor employee hours. In this blog, you will learn about the best tools and techniques to keep a log of your employees’ hours.
Why Do You Need to Track Employee Hours?
Why it’s essential to keep track of hours worked? If you haven’t considered this, then now is the right time. Why? Let’s get straight to the point.
Let’s spit some facts. Shall we? A typical workday is 8 hours. However, do you think that your employees are actively working for that long? According to various experts and blog posts, your employees actively work for about 4 hours a day. That’s only a half-day.
Another essential reason to track employee hours is distractions. However, that’s just one of your problems. Most employees complained that they don’t need a whole day to finish their work. Plus, unproductive meeting times and a typical employee’s capacity to work for only 90 minutes straight are important concerns.
The bottom line is that you can’t identify your teams’ work patterns and maximize productivity without a tool or method to track work hours. I hope that clarifies why it’s essential to monitor your employees’ work hours.
Read Also – Top 10 Best Payroll Software in India 2024
Top 10 Ways to Track Employee Hours in 2024
Now we know why it’s essential to track employee hours. However, how can we accurately do it? Another important thing to remember is that you can’t cause obstructions in the work while doing so. With that, here are the best 10 simple and essential ways to keep tabs on your employees’ time.
1. Manual Time Tracking
This one is the simplest and oldest way to keep track of hours worked and is still used by some small businesses. The idea is for your employees to write their total office hours on paper timesheets, attendance registers, and/or punch cards. However, the only drawback of this method is that it can be tampered with.
2. Spreadsheets
Using spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is a slightly better way to track work hours. Employees can either type in their work hours or use premade templates to save time. Employees can tamper with this method as well. However, since it’s digital, catching defaulters red-handed is easier.
3. Shift Tracking
One way to keep track of hours worked is to keep tabs on your employees’ shift schedules. This method works for both fixed and flexible hours. Plus, there are various ways to keep a log of employee shifts including time-noting on mobile applications.
4. Timesheets
One of the oldest and most preferred ways to track employee hours for payroll or any other reason is using timesheets. Generally, there are 2 categories of timesheets that you can use. These are manual and automated timesheets. However, we prefer the latter for obvious reasons. Want to save more time on work-hour monitoring? Use timesheet templates.
5. Track Attendance
Another way to track employee hours is by monitoring attendance. This way you will know the presence of your employees in your office and can also calculate overtime. There are several ways to track attendance. However, most organizations use biometric systems these days as it’s tamper-proof. For more evidence on employee whereabouts, say hello to the good old CCTVs.
6. Integrated Payroll and HR Systems
One of the best ways to track employee hours for payroll is to use integrated payroll and HR systems. These come with built-in time trackers. Overall, it’s one of the smoothest and simplest ways to obstruction-free time-tracking.
7. Hours Tracking via Location
The best way to keep track of hours worked for your on-field and remote employees is by monitoring their locations via GPS. However, it’s also good for monitoring your in-office employees. For example, you can easily identify employees who are taking way more breaks than necessary through GPS.
8. Use Time Clocks
There are many categories of time clocks you can use to track employee hours. From simple clocks to biometric and other digital clocking machines. Overall, many organizations prefer these because they are accurate, simple to use, and tamper-proof.
9. Cloud-Based Time Tracking
One of the best ways to track employee hours for payroll is to use cloud-based solutions. Additionally, you will get data security and other cloud features. Plus, you also save costs. We recommend this method to freelancers and also businesses running on a low budget.
10. Use Time Tracking Software
All of the methods we mentioned above focus on only a single aspect. However, using time-tracking software is an all-around way to monitor your employees. Not only will you have an accurate log of employee attendance but also track idle hours, work hours, absenteeism, employee availability, work-time utilization, and a lot more.
What is a Staff Hours Tracker?
Software to track employee hours or time-tracking software is a tool package with features and functionalities to simplify keeping a log of your employees’ time. As we mentioned above, you can keep an accurate log of your employees’ attendance, idle hours, work hours, absenteeism, employee availability, and work-time utilization.
Furthermore, what we like about this track employee hours software is the seamless integrations that add more functionality and streamline workflows. For example, the most popular integrations include project management and payroll.
Benefits of using a Staff Hours Tracker
There are several other benefits of using an employee hours tracker. All of these are insightful and let you optimize workflows and take charge of your teams. Overall, using software for tracking time is the best way to make data-driven decisions and boost productivity without employee burnout. However, wait, there’s more.
1. Better Understand Team and Personal Growth
One good reason to monitor, log, or track employee hours is to personally understand your team. This way you and your employees will better understand, which work skills need improvement and where they excel. This can be highly inspiring and help each employee achieve high levels of personal growth.
2. Hiring and Retention Insights
What can be the best way to know whether your team is underutilized or overutilized? Logging their work hours via a staff hours tracker, of course. This is the best way we use to identify if the team size is optimal for the workload. Plus identifying employee engagement and the need to overboard new members becomes simple.
3. Quicker Issue Identification
When you are overseeing not one but many aspects of a team working on a project, you can easily miss obstructions. We are not blaming you for that. However, if you track employee hours on various activities, identifying issues on big time gaps is simplified.
4. Make Informed Time Estimates
If you keep track of hours worked, you also get the advantage of better time estimate calculation. How? When you know the actual time spent on a task, you will know to take that as a completion estimate for similar work blocks in the future.
Top 10 Software to Track Employee Hours in 2024
So now that we know that using time-tracking software is the best way to track employee hours why not discuss the top 10 time-tracking tools? Maybe you will find the best-fit solution as per your requirements on our list.
- DeskTrack
- Toggl
- Time Doctor
- Harvest
- Hubstaff
- Clockify
- QuickBooks Time
- RescueTime
- Everhour
- ClickTime
1. DeskTrack
DeskTrack is hands down the best software to track employee hours. However, this is not the only reason why it’s popular in more than 100 countries. This customizable software solution for tracking time is an integration of the latest project management, productivity monitoring, and employee monitoring features for on-field, remote, and in-office team monitoring.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Best overall | $5.99/user/month | 5/5 |
2. Toggl
What we love about this tool to track employee hours is its simplicity and intuitive reporting features. We recommend this one for freelancers and small-scale, and large-scale organizations. The price is also not bad for what you get including a user-friendly interface, detailed reporting, integrations, and a good mobile app.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Monitoring with a user-friendly interface | $10/user/month | 4.7/5 |
3. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a good staff hours tracking tool to track employee hours for payroll on our list. This time-tracking software is the best for remote teams and businesses seeking insightful details into their team’s productivity. Plus, it also offers good automated time-tracking, URL monitoring, app tracking, screenshot monitoring, and payroll integration.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Automated time-tracking | $7/user/month | 4.5/5 |
4. Harvest
Harvest is yet another good application to track employee hours. It’s an ideal time and expense management tool, which we recommend to businesses wanting to streamline their billing processes. The top features we like include simple time tracking, invoicing, project management, and integrations.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Invoicing | $12/user/month | 4.6/5 |
5. Hubstaff
Hubstaff is software to track employee hours, built for your remote teams. The software offers advanced features including GPS and productivity tracking. Furthermore, we also like its time-tracking, activity monitoring, and payroll integration capabilities.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| GPS monitoring | $7/user/month | 4.6/5 |
6. Clockify
What we like about Clockify is that it charges you no price to track employee hours. However, it’s still good software with powerful features including reports and integrations. Furthermore, it provides you with the most customizable, easy-to-use, interactive, and functional timesheets.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Unlimited free time-tracking | free | 4.7/5 |
7. QuickBooks Time
When you use QuickBooks Time to track work hours, you are leaving your employees’ screens to one of the most capable and robust feature-rich time-tracking software. Due to the most seamless accounting integrations, it is a good choice for detailed payroll management. Plus, you also get good GPS monitoring and scheduling features.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Scheduling | $8/user/month + $8 (base price) | 4.7/5 |
8. RescueTime
When you get RescueTime, you not only get a tool to track employee hours but also monitor employee productivity. The concept behind this software is to monitor the digital habits of your employees and generate insightful reports. The top features we like include goal setting and distraction blocking.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Distraction blocking | $9/user/month | 4.6/5 |
9. Everhour
One of the best software to keep track of hours worked is Everhour. As the name suggests, it monitors every hour your employees spend on their desktops. Furthermore, what we like about it is the seamless integration with project management tools.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Budgeting | $8.50/user/month | 4.7/5 |
10. ClickTime
ClickTime on our list is one of the best and most comprehensive time-tracking and resource-management tools. Using it to track employee hours means that you get exceptional features including resource planning, budgeting, and reporting.
| Best for | Pricing | Rating |
| Resource planning | $10/user/month | 4.5/5 |
Read Also – Top 10 Employee Shift Scheduling Software for Businesses in 2024
Why is DeskTrack the Best Software to Track Employee Hours?
DeskTrack is more than just a simple time-tracking software. This integrated system provides you with the best and most intuitive features for project management, employee monitoring, productivity tracking, and work-hour monitoring into one platform for hassle-free monitoring.
However, what makes this tool to track employee hours the best across 100+ nations,8K+ top companies, and 100K+ users? Other than the fact that it is the best-fit solution for remote, in-office, and on-field teams, there are a few reasons why we picked it as the best time-tracking application.
- It provides automated timesheets and task timers for focus and efficiency boosts.
- Simple idle and working hours calculation.
- Real-time monitoring of employee activities.
- Accurate and insightful work-time utilization reports.
Conclusion
With that, we conclude our blog with details to track employee hours. To summarize, monitoring employee hours is a necessity for organizations these days. It is due to many reasons including the fact that your employees don’t need a full day to complete their work. Thus knowing the best ways to know the insights into their work-time utilization patterns is essential for identifying growth-driving decisions. With that, the most advantageous method is using time-tracking software. One of which includes a better understanding of teams. However, you only need to choose the best-fit solution. We recommend DeskTrack as the same.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why do you Need to Track Employee Hours?
Tracking and logging employee hours is essential for various reasons. Let’s see a few of them below.
- Know your employees’ active working time.
- Identify work gaps.
- Identify the total break and idle time.
- Make decisions based on work-time utilization metrics.
- Identify useful insights into your teams’ workings.
What are the Various Methods to Track Work Hours?
Monitoring and logging the work hours of your employees is essential. This is so you know the insights into their work patterns and devise the best solutions for improving employee productivity, growth, and success. With that, you can use some of these best tried and tested methods in your organization.
- Manual time-tracking
- Timesheets
- Use time clocks
- Use spreadsheets
- Use cloud-based solutions
- Track employee shifts
- Track Attendance
- Integrated Payroll and HR Systems
- Hours Tracking via Location
- Use time-tracking software
What are the Benefits of Using Software to Track Employee Hours?
There are various methods of monitoring employee hours. However, the best method is to use software to track employee hours. Here are the advantages of the same.
- Better understanding of the team and personal growth.
- Hiring and retention insights.
- Quicker issue identification.
- Make informed time estimates.
Which are the Best Software Solutions to Track Employee Hours?
There are various methods to monitor employee hours. However, using software for the same is the best way to do it. With that, here are some of the best software to track employee hours.
- DeskTrack
- Everhour
- QuickBooks Time
- Clockify
- ClickTime
- RescueTime
- Harvest
- Hubstaff
- Time Doctor
- Toggl
