When is it a Good Idea to Track Your Employees’ Time?

As an employer, you need to strike the right balance between granting your employees autonomy in managing their time, and ensuring that their time is managed productively, all while avoiding them feeling undue pressure. 

Understanding how your employees are filling their working hours feeds into so many important areas of your business. Whether it’s accurately invoicing your clients, gauging when a department has maximized its workload capacity, or recognizing other pivotal moments, there are many important occasions when taking a closer look at your employees’ time sheets is beneficial.

Here are 5 occasions when tracking your employees’ time is a good idea.

1. When you want to improve your billing structure

Your billing structure relies heavily on how much time your employees need or have to complete a task. It’s not about asking your employees to work faster but understanding the true effort and expertise invested in each project. This approach allows you to showcase the value your team brings to clients, reinforcing a transparent and fair billing system.

Plucking time frames and prices out of the air can lead to frustration from your team — but tracking employee time provides a clearer picture. Constantly battling against unrealistic expectations can lead to simple mistakes, and for the client, when work isn’t completed to the expected standard or on time it doesn’t create a good impression. 

As you look closer at your internal hours, involving your team in this process can be helpful too. Asking them about their work process can help better align time tracking with project requirements and client expectations but also promotes a culture of continuous improvement within your organisation.

2. When you’ve noticed a drop in productivity

Identifying and addressing productivity issues is another key occasion for time tracking. Indicators of low productivity could be changes such as an increase in missed deadlines, an increase in overtime, or a decline in the quantity of work completed. All of this can be a little alarming, but it’s important to avoid blaming your employees and instead figure out the cause.

Examining time-tracking data reveals work patterns and trends. You can identify if there are specific times of the day, week, or month when productivity tends to decline. For example, perhaps your content team regularly gets an influx of briefs in the last week of the month and this is preventing them from completing other tasks. In this case, the solution could be ensuring that briefs are spread out across the month so this department can spread its time equally across various tasks.

Time tracking can also help spot overworked employees by identifying individuals who consistently work long hours and may be at risk of burnout, or comparing the amount of time allocated to a task versus the actual time spent on it. All of these factors can contribute to a drop in productivity. But, tracking this time can provide insight that makes finding the right solutions easier such as introducing flexible working hours or adjusting time allocation for particular tasks.

3. When you’re introducing a new long-term project

Introducing a new long-term project often requires meticulous planning and resource allocation, so it’s a good time to track your employee’s time. Perhaps you’re taking on a new project for an existing client, starting a one-off project, or looking to develop an internal project. Either way, before anything starts, it’s important to assess how much time you have available.

Using a reliable project management tool can be immensely beneficial during this phase. It allows you to visualise your team’s schedule, identify potential bottlenecks, and allocate resources efficiently. This step is essential to prevent overburdening any particular team member and ensure a balanced distribution of tasks.

Of course, every project is different, but with a little planning beforehand, you can avoid many unnecessary problems, such as teams not having enough time allocation, and instead get the most value out of these projects.

4. When you’re considering hiring new employees

Hiring new employees significantly impacts the dynamics of an organization so it requires careful consideration. Incorporating time tracking into your hiring decisions can help you assess the current workload of existing team members, that way you can identify which departments are struggling for resources and could benefit from new team members. 

This insight can also help with hiring internationally or outsourcing employees as time tracking will help integrate new hires with the established work rhythms of the organisation. By identifying the busiest periods of activity and assessing the cyclical nature of tasks, businesses can strategically position new team members to address workflow gaps and enhance overall productivity.

You might even find that you don’t need a new addition to the team. Perhaps too much time is being spent in one area and optimizing this could be your solution instead of hiring someone. Before making any big decisions, such as hiring, consider all factors such as tracked time but also speak to your teams and find out how they’re currently operating. This holistic approach ensures that decisions align with both quantitative data and qualitative insights, fostering a well-informed and effective course of action.

5. When you want to change your internal work structure

Changing your internal work structure — whether it’s through being more flexible with working hours or restructuring teams — requires a solid understanding of how your employees’ time will be affected.

Tracked hours can reveal a lot about your current structure and inform you of the best ways to put changes into action successfully. For example, if you want to add flexible working hours as an employee perk, time tracking will help monitor when employees are most productive and when collaborative efforts are most effective. That way you can create flexible schedules that align with peak productivity periods. 

Furthermore, time tracking can also be very useful when considering team restructuring. By analysing tracked hours, you can gain insights into team dynamics and identify optimal setups for collaboration. If certain teams consistently work well together during specific hours, this information can guide the restructuring process to enhance efficiency and foster stronger teamwork.

Tracking your employees’ time, when necessary, can be a great way of discovering new insights about your business. It provides an understanding of workflow efficiencies, workload distribution, and the alignment of employee efforts with organisational objectives — all important things you need to know for ongoing growth.