The second part of my article, will focus on the challenges small business encounter when tracking their employees’s time. This time, our focus, is more on the employees, and the challenges businesses find when they try to implement time tracking and management solutions like Timestead, from a human resource point of view. You can read the first part of this article here
Human resources and the challenges of tracking time for employees.
“Employees add flexibility to your business and more time for you to grow your business, but that availability of extra resources, if not kept under control, might turn up to be a hindrance rather than an advantage.”
Employees help, yet they bring along with them challenges, especially when you are used to working on your own. Before it was just you! You had full control on the business, and everything that went on in your business was a known fact to you. Add a couple of employees to the equation, more customers and unless communication channels are properly established and most importantly time is tracked, you start losing control, and with it vital business information and most importantly, revenue. This is where Timestead comes into play.
“At times employees perceive tracking as some sort of control. Not everyone likes to track his work. Some look at it as a form of mistrust, others fear being compared to other team members. At the end the more the team grows the more emotions play a big part. Many times, for some businesses, it might proof hard to explain why it is important to track time, especially when no one in the team is used to tracking it.”
We all agree that the more the team grows, the more tracking becomes vital. With certain businesses it is impossible not to track, especially if they bill for time, but there might be a large difference between manual and electronic time tracking. It is important that management explains, why tracking of time is imperative, what is checked, and how this data is used. The clearer and cleaner the approach, the better. Involving the employees themselves in the gauging of said information, also helps add credibility to the process. If employees learn to evaluate said data themselves, it helps them use that data to improve their performance, or correct issues. Timestead facilitates this process because every employee has access to his / her dashboard, allowing them to view their progress and understand what data is collated in real time.
“Change is scary, and when shifting from a manual to a digital system you might find that some employees, (especially the less techie ones) might provide some level of resistance.”
When thinking about how to best create an application to help us track time, my main concern was always ease of use. I was not keen myself to embark in the use of an application that made my life messy. I could therefore relate with my employees. Timestead provides almost a seamless experience and filling a job sheet is painless.
“It’s already hard enough to manage your calendar, imagine managing all your employee’s calendars.”
Many businesses struggle with Google calendars, Outlook calendars, diaries or other forms of appointment management systems. This, makes managing a team tricky, especially when coordinating appointments and customers. Timestead allows managers to manage everyone’s calendars from one central location.
The third part of my Article, will focus on the savings that tracking time with Timestead brings for any business, but predominantly, being this article based on my experience with my business, I will continue conveying my experiences on how Timestead, helped me increase my savings, reduce admin time drastically, and improve the information I had about my business. This resulted in a huge boost in time, efficiency, and brought my business to a totally different level when compared to where I was before when I was not using it.
Easy to say that without it, it used to take me a week to invoice for a month’s worth of work. When I started using Timestead, this was reduced to a couple of hours, it also allowed me to produce more detailed invoices than I ever did. If you can relate with our challenges, why not try our time / job sheet management software Timestead for free for 30 days? You will not be disappointed.