Monitoring your team’s time use can benefit both the company and its workers in a variety of ways.
But for your employees, the notion of constantly tracking and cost reporting for their time probably carries a lot of negative implications.
Some people believe that time tracking is a technique for micromanaging or strictly enforcing team members’ salaried hours.
Some would view this as an issue of trust, requiring leadership to closely monitor their every move.
Others might believe that keeping track of their time is an attempt to wring every last drop of productivity from them.
You may encounter some resistance from the team if this is your first-time deploying time tracking software.
However, once you Get Harvest integrated with Slack and the results are visible, it’s much easier to see the benefits.
Employees may argue that tracking and estimating their billable time is a tedious activity, requires an excessive amount of time, or is unnecessary for efficient project management.
Employees may dislike the time tracking software you already use because they find it difficult to use.
You can address some of these problems by emphasizing some key advantages of time monitoring for staff members:
- Establishing a balanced workload
- Rapid insight acquisition
- Financial gains for your business and workers
These software integration explanations are the most effective way to convey these three primary advantages. First, let’s establish a balanced workload.
How to Balance Your Workload
The main advantage of time tracking for employees may be balancing the workload. Harvest integration to Slack can assist with the project timeline by:
Stop working too much
The most valuable workers are frequently given the most difficult duties and a heavy workload. Alternatively, there might not be enough members of the team to handle the demand due to the organization’s overabundance of initiatives.
In either case, this backlog of work can make colleagues feel perpetually behind, which is frustrating at work.
Employee turnover can increase, or productivity can decrease as a result of this ongoing stress since employees feel like they are unable to fully catch up.
With the aid of time tracking software, you can easily determine if one individual is a productivity blockage and shift that task to a different person who has a smaller workload in order to avoid overwork.
Time tracking reveals the actual amount of work that team members are doing.
Additionally, a heavy workload creates excellent discussion topics with management to seek balance.
Limit scope expansion
Scope creep is all too common in positions providing professional services. Leaders agree to modest requests in order to build a positive rapport with the client. Over time, all of such little requests could accumulate into a sizable quantity of work.
The capability of the employee is put under stress, which may result in them falling short on other project tasks or spending more time at work than usual. While fostering a positive relationship with your customer, you unintentionally endanger your company’s most important resource: its staff.
With the use of time monitoring software, leaders can easily observe how this scope creep accumulates so they can more easily have unpleasant conversations with clients. It’s crucial to safeguard your employees’ priceless time and effort.
Set up realistic timetables
In many sectors, leaders and project managers make schedule projections without first consulting the workers themselves. You could be surprised to learn that an activity you believe is simple is actually more difficult.
You might have an issue if you and a client or customer have previously agreed upon a timeline. Leadership may have to reevaluate expectations with the client, which may have an effect on the long-term relationship.
The crew is frequently pushed by the leadership to put in more hours to complete the project by the deadline they set.
You may prevent overworking your staff and improve your customer’s experience by allowing the staff to input their estimations at the outset.
Improve your team management.
The greatest managers support their team’s coaching on how to perform well in their roles and advance within the company.
It is harder to develop your personnel and defend higher spending if you don’t know how each member spends their time.
Easier to begin large-scale undertakings
Starting a new, large project is one amongst the most difficult undertakings.
By dividing it into smaller jobs, you may easily make this appear less overwhelming. Making minor milestones makes starting on that challenging job much simpler. Click here for more on project milestones. It also makes forecasting the project’s completion time much simpler.
The beginning of large projects appears to be much more manageable when using software for managing projects that allows for this degree of time prediction and tracking. Workers can lessen the stress associated with feeling overburdened with project work by more easily seeing the extent of an endeavor they can complete each week.
Focus on what is most important
Teams frequently have several competing main priorities. Because individuals may not be able to see all of the shifting components for the entire project, collaborators may not comprehend what the highest priority is.
Here, time tracking can guarantee that everyone is allocating their time to the most vital tasks. Your team won’t work overtime as a result of poorly aligned work assignments if you know what the top priority is and concentrate on that.
Rapid insight acquisition
Let’s move on to the advantages of having rapid insights so that everyone may work more effectively.
Understand how time was spent
For employees, knowing exactly how they spend their time might be quite useful. If your staff spends too much time on unimportant jobs, they won’t have time to work on more important projects that will advance the company. It is effective to have evidence to support that. Leadership might not comprehend the quantity of your time you devote.
Prepare historical data in advance for project cost and scope estimation
From the standpoint of facilitating the beginning of large projects, it was briefly discussed in the previous section. But being able to obtain these insights fast to simplify your job is also a bonus. Making simple tweaks to a pattern from a previous project will save you time and make it easier to estimate the duration and costs than starting from scratch.
Create reports quickly
Putting insights on previous project performance together can be a major job. Without organizing your project’s software, you’ll probably have to compile information from many sources.
And you’ll have to rely on people’s memories if there isn’t a historical record. Recounting project specifics, such as the amount of time dedicated to each activity and project, is prone to error. Everyone is aware that recollection isn’t always a trustworthy predictor of actual measures.
Increase delivery punctuality
The capacity to monitor the project’s advancement in real-time is one of the main advantages of time-tracking as well as estimating software due to the all-inclusive nature of the programs. As a result, management will be alerted immediately if an appointment is going to be missed.
Your project management systems should be able to tell you whether or not there exists a bottleneck holding up the project’s delivery, if additional tasks are taking priority, or if the project’s scope has grown to such an extent that the deadline is in jeopardy. Project managers can make prompt decisions to avoid missed deadlines thanks to these insightful insights.
