COMMUNICATE THE BENEFIT OF TIME TRACKING

Trust is crucial for successful cooperation. Forcing your employees to track their time without any explanation will breed a culture of suspicion, and can lead to people cheating with their time logs.

To avoid this, make sure everyone in your team understands what you need time tracking data for and how it benefits your employees, your company or your clients. Honest and clear communication goes a long way in establishing trust and if you do it right, you might not even need the following tips.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE CLEAR GUIDELINES

If you want time tracking to work in a meaningful way, you will need a system. Your reports will be rendered useless if people don’t track their time under the correct projects, or if they use the wrong tasks or labels. Before your team starts tracking, explain to all involved what is the proper way to track their time.

As with the first point, explaining why something has to be done in a specific way will make adopting the system easier.

HELP EVERY EMPLOYEE WITH BASIC SET-UP

With Project Timer, basic setup is extremely simple and requires hardly any guidance. But keep in mind that if you want your employees to use time tracking, it’s important that they feel you’re meeting them half way.

Also, keep in mind that the fewer obsticles you have between the user and the system, the more likely they are to adopt it successfully. If people don’t understand something, they are not going to use it.

SHARE THE REPORTS ON THE OFFICE TV

Unless the time logs need to be kept private, sharing the reports with your team is a great way to build trust.

If you have a TV screen on the office wall, use it to display the team’s tracking data. This way people can see the impact of their work in real time – they might even think about new, more efficient ways of doing things.

The only thing to keep in mind here, is to not use the data for public shaming if you’re unhappy with somebody’s work habits. Remember that trust is difficult to build, and easy to break.

FOLLOW-UP AND ASK FOR FEEDBACK

Keep checking in with your employees to see how they’re adapting to time tracking. If they have any problems, concerns or suggestions, use that feedback to improve your system.

This is also a great opportunity to show your team that their opinions and input is valued by the management. Also, when you start analysing the tracking data, include your employees in the process. Together you’ll have a better chance of discovering things that could be done differently.

OFFER REWARDS FOR ACCURATE TRACKING

Using rewards is a powerful way to modify people’s behaviour.

People are more likely to adopt a new habit when they feel their progress is tied to specific rewards. If you don’t have the resources to pay people bonuses based on their time logs, you can use other sorts of benefits – like days off or small gifts.

Another potentially effective tactic is to turn time tracking into a competition. For example by posting people’s timesheets on the office wall for everyone to see can lead to more disciplined tracking as the employees seek to out-perform their colleagues and friends.