Each company strives to optimize its business processes and automate in-house systems in order to increase productivity. Keeping track of employee performance is quite a widespread practice today. It's especially in high demand for companies billing their customers on an hourly basis. Nevertheless, enterprises with different business models can take advantage of it, too.

 We live in times when work from home is booming. The number of telecommuters is increasing every single day. To get things done, they have to stick to the work schedule and record their working time remotely. Under such circumstances, employee time tracking becomes a necessity. If you want to keep track of working hours within your company in a smart way, the following quick tips will give you a general idea.

1. Go for Simplicity

The process of tracking the working time needs to be super easy. It’s the first and foremost requirement to remember. So be sure to pick a simple tool for tracking performance. Depending on your needs, you can also create a spreadsheet or develop a customized in-house solution. Eventually, it doesn’t matter what time tracking mechanism you'll choose. It's just supposed to be easy-to-understand so that all members of your team could track their time spent on projects correctly.

 2. Make the Process Well-Organized

Let's imagine your colleagues send their time tracking notes whenever they want to. Poor project managers! They will have to spend at least one working day to review all this scattered stuff. It means they won’t be able to perform their own tasks properly, and your company will suffer losses. The automation of time tracking process will help you solve this problem once and for all. Use a time tracking tool designed for this purpose. It’s good to know that all the information is collected in a single system, where you can find it in a split second.

 3. Categorize and Unify

This hint is closely linked to the previous one. Logic and clear systems work best. So get ready to split all projects into separate blocks according to their priority. Categorize similar tasks so that they are easy to find. Make an arrangement with your team on logging bank holidays, sick days, overtime, staff meetings, etc. Define the minimum logging time everyone is comfortable with. It can be 5, 10 or 20 minutes. All these actions are required to ensure accurate results and avoid misunderstanding in the future.

 4. Don’t Forget to Backup

Sooner or later everyone makes mistakes. Unfortunately, some of them can be critical. For example, you can accidentally delete an e-mail and lose all time tracking data. Be smart. Backup all valuable documents. This simple step will do a great service for you. Also, keep in mind to export time reports and save them elsewhere. So you can always go back to them should the need arise. Remember that information is extremely vulnerable. Lock all sensitive files. Give a few people the rights to read or edit them.

 5. Do It Fast

The working days are busy enough as they are. Logging daily performance should not be a time-consuming process. 10 minutes should be more than enough. Your team needs to keep track of time quickly not to be distracted from assignments that are more important. Supervisors, in their turn, need to schedule a limited time to analyze documents. In order not to get lost in countless e-mails, agree on conducting a monthly review. So the data discussed remains fresh and timely.

 6. Trust Your Team

Most employees feel pressure while filling in the timesheets. This is due to the pursuit of excellence. 8 hours seem like a magic number everyone desires to indicate in their file. But is it really possible? We are only humans, not robots. A 6-7-hour working day would be a good result. So there's no reason to panic. What's more, we can't read each other's mind, for better or for worse. Nevertheless, we can always discuss the urgent issues with colleagues. Nourishing the trust within the company should be a top priority for you.

7. Work With the Data Obtained

Use time reports wisely. They shed light on how well and smoothly your team has been working. You see which business processes should be optimized. You can also define the weaknesses to be improved. That’s why performing a monthly review is a must. Pay close attention to the projects that generate the biggest share of income. Did your colleagues exceed the sufficient time for their delivery? Discuss the most time-consuming assignments with your team and find out what has caused the delay.

As a business owner, you know firsthand that effective time management is a key to productivity. Select a straightforward and handy tool for tracking your team performance so that you don’t need to keep a constant eye on your employees yourself. Use the tips above, look up some detailed reviews, decide what fits your needs, and to do it the right way!