First published on Friday, Oct 23, 2020
Last updated on Friday, Oct 23, 2020
Keeping track of time can elude the best of us. Whether your team is working from home or they’re back in the office, it's difficult to stay on top of your team members’ hours.
Ensuring that you get employees to clock in properly and keep track of their hours means that you’ll have no wasted work. Nor will you be paying your employees for nothing.
This is where employee time tracking software comes in.
These apps include time tracking software that saves time with managing teams. These tracking apps can also help calculate labour costs, hourly rates. Along with other options that Excel timesheets might struggle with.
Benefits of a weekly hour tracker
Weekly hour trackers don’t just do what it says on the tin. Sure, they’ll help you check team members’ workload and working hours, but what else can they do to help?
Good question, as some of the best options can provide many more features than just creating time sheets.
For employees, hours trackers can feel invasive or insulting. Some may feel like having their work monitored demeans the trust between them and their managers.
However, there are some benefits that staff hours trackers provide.
Certain hour tracking apps can help with:
- An easy way to organise shifts & rotas
- Show team members’ locations
- Provide easy-to-use 'check-in' features
- Keeps track of sick days & late days
- Also tracks holidays
- Help to transition from remote working to office life
These features help to keep everyone in the loop and give everyone the confidence that each team member is working hard.
Hours trackers can help with individual performance issues.
It can feel unfair to some if only certain members of the team are often late. Using staff hours trackers let you address issues with offending employees one on one.
After all, no one likes to see emails sent to an entire team about lateness when everyone knows the sole offender.
How work time can be improved by hours tracking apps
Among other benefits, keeping an accurate clocking-in system helps each member of the team stick to their working hours.
Is someone clocking in late every Monday? Hours tracking apps helps to raise this issue. This way, you can talk to the employee about how to improve their Monday commute.
Is an employee taking too much time on a specific task? A work hour tracker allows you to discuss this with the team member. You can discuss rearranging their work week so that another member of the team covers the task in question, while they help with something else.
An hours tracking app can help with these issues, and many more.
Some apps focus on having working hours automatically calculated. Others provide monthly timesheet templates to work from.
These can grant you a lot of assistance, depending on the type of business you work in or the industry you’re a part of.
For example, running a large team that spans across different floors or entire offices. Keeping on top of their workload may require automatically calculated hours.
Another example, being in charge of a small team that focuses on answering phones or attempting to sell over the phone. A time clock app helps keep employee’s working hours at a time that allows maximum customer interaction.
This would include hours that range from 9 to 5 and exclude any time outside of this window. It’s unlikely they’ll be able to get in touch with potential customers during these hours.
This example also shows that by using time tracking, you can monitor how long phone calls usually take. This is invaluable for working on methods to implement feedback, such as reducing call times and freeing your employees to take more calls.
Hours tracker app vs hours tracker on Excel
So, you’ve decided to look for a work hour tracker for your team members. That’s great, but now you need to ask yourself the question:
What kind of staff hours tracker do you opt for?
Naturally, there are different options for ways to track employee hours. Whether you choose an hours tracker for a PC, an hours tracker on Excel or an hour tracker online, you should decide what you need from a tracker.
To some degree, Excel timesheets can track employee hours. However, work hour trackers usually provide a variety of additional benefits. These benefits go beyond the primary feature of tracking time, helping HR departments as a whole.
Of course, these tracker apps may require you to stick to a paid plan. However, will frequently provide features and benefits that are much more useful than free staff hours trackers, which easily justify the cost.
