3 Easy Ways to Persuade Your Remote Employees for Time Tracking

With more and more organizations now adopting the remote-first and hybrid work models, business owners are increasingly opting for time tracking solutions to measure the performance of their remote employees effectively. However, time tracking is something that is often misused by management and misunderstood by employees. But it shouldn’t be that way.

In this blog post, we have taken the responsibility to set right the most common misconceptions about remote team time tracking and shared helpful ways to motivate your employees to adopt the time tracking policy.

Why Remote-Friendly Organizations Should Track Employee Time

Let’s take a moment to talk about the importance of tracking time in a remote-first organization. Time tracking, when done right, can help reduce costs, improve operations, and increase employee satisfaction rates.

How? Well, remote time tracking helps:

• Gain insights into the performance of individual employees, making it easier to identify top performers and help other employees improve through constructive feedback. The overall process enables you to identify gaps and unleash the potential of each employee, rather than just overburdening a few hardworking employees.
• Reduce employee burnout by having a bird’s eye view of each individual’s capacity and workload so you can reassign and reallocate tasks accordingly. This ensures a better work-life balance for your team, improving employee satisfaction exponentially.
• Provide increased transparency over performance and deliverables, leading to better accountability and ownership among team members.
• Plan better for on-time project delivery by measuring deliverables and syncing them with your team’s total working capacity. This allows you to create an accurate timeline, ensuring that every project is on track and completed as per the commitment to your customers.
• Perform better, data-driven resource allocation since you have complete visibility over the availability, capacity, and historical performance of each employee in your organization.
• Cut down on wasteful work and optimize business processes by monitoring time spent on emails, meetings, and other low-value internal operations.

Recommended Read: Why Modern Organizations Need Time Tracking Software

Debunking the Misconceptions of Time Tracking Among Employees

Before introducing a remote team time tracking policy within your organization, it’s important to consider how your team will react to this.

Probably the initial reaction will be something like this:

That’s because there are quite a few misconceptions about time tracking among employees. For example, they might assume that it is for micromanaging or monitoring every minute of their computer activity.

But that’s far from the truth.

Therefore, you must clear the air to ensure that introducing time tracking does not strain the employee-manager relationship. Implementing a time tracking software will be much smoother if you address the concerns and queries of employees upfront.

With that said, here are a few misconceptions about remote work time tracking that you should definitely talk about with your team:

Time tracking is not about micromanagement:

Working remotely can be pretty cumbersome for employees. They often feel that their activity is constantly being monitored to find mistakes and micromanage them, which can be stressful and affect productivity.

That is not the case. In fact, it is the opposite. 

Time tracking is about smarter employee management since it helps employers better understand workloads and capacity. As a business owner, time tracking helps overlook multiple remote teams effectively without having to ping them for constant follow-ups and updates.

Time tracking does not invade privacy:

Most employees have concerns about the legality of time tracking and wonder if their employer is even allowed to monitor their online activity. 

And it is pretty normal to think like that as everyone cherishes their privacy. However, the goal should never be to access and monitor everything an employee is doing.

Employers should clarify that the purpose of time tracking is neither to invade their privacy nor to keep an eye on everything they do. Instead, it is to monitor and track only the work-related activities, so the deliverables and productivity can be measured accurately.

This is one of the reasons why privacy-first remote team time tracking solutions, like timegram, are truly employee-friendly solutions. Such applications give complete autonomy to the employees to log only work-related activities and allow omitting all other non-productive activities, like personal browsing, social media, etc., before submitting the timesheets.

And for employers, well, it is truly a treat. Because they only get productive data to analyze, saving them hours and occasional headaches.

Time tracking does not lead to more stress and burnout:

Another negative connotation is that employees must constantly do some activity to be seen as productive.

As an employer, you should clarify that time tracking is not to hold employees accountable for every single minute of the day. Instead, it is for identifying their most productive hours to help them prioritize deliverables and work smarter.

In addition, since most time tracking software requires updating timesheets at a fixed interval, the entire process adds quite a bit of stress to an employee’s day-to-day routine, leading to burnout.

This is where a remote employee time tracking software such as timegram can help. Instead of updating timesheets every hour, it gives employees the flexibility to log their time and activities whenever they want during the day or week.

Also Read: Employee Time Tracking vs. Employee Monitoring: Which Approach is Better and Why?

3 Ways to Persuade Remote Employees for Time Tracking

1.      Ask for feedback

When implementing a new policy for time tracking, it is important that you ask employees: 

“So, what do you think? Got any questions or suggestions to make this program better?” 

This tactic will help roll out the process smoothly because:

1.  Employees will gladly accept the new policy when their feedback is included

2.      Any concerns or misconceptions that they might have in mind will be cleared upfront

3.      Employees will better understand the need for time tracking, know its benefits for them, and ask any questions they might have.

You can collect employee feedback in multiple ways, such as creating an online poll or email survey. You can even hold a town hall to discuss the new policy and brainstorm solutions to the problems or concerns that you and your employees have.

Just ensure that you make yourself approachable to employees and listen to what they have to say. Be open-minded to their suggestions and weigh them against your business interests to see what you can incorporate into your plan.

2.      Make Timesheet Management a Piece of Cake

The key to hassle-free adoption is to make the timesheet management process as seamless as possible for employees. 

As such, the time tracking solution of your choice should:

• Automatically track time and activities in the background 
• Make assigning time to individual tasks a breeze
• Ensure flexible timesheet submissions

These capabilities make time tracking effortless, taking out all those annoying steps involved in timesheet management while enabling employees to focus only on their work. 

So the formula is: 

Effortless timesheet creation = Employees happily accepting the new policy

3.      Show Why it is Great for Employees

Another great way to convince employees to adopt a remote time tracking solution is by helping them understand how it will benefit them.

You should highlight how the remote workers’ time tracking platform will ensure:

• Data-driven performance evaluations, leading to better appraisal and promotion opportunities. Employees can monitor their efforts and adjust accordingly to maximize their performance scores.
• Improved forecasting and benchmarking processes based on historical data from past projects. This enables managers to set accurate deadlines for tasks and projects based on employees’ past performance.  
• Better work-life balance by ensuring that employees are assigned tasks as per their availability, capacity, and past performances.
• Increased transparency across the board, allowing employees to monitor their performance to improve their efforts.
• All of the employee’s tracking data will remain confidential and private and only managers/team leads will have access to it.

timegram - your Privacy-First, Employee-Friendly Time Tracking Solution

Choosing the right remote team time tracking software can be the difference between the success and failure of a remote culture.

With everything we discussed in this blog, timegram is among the only few solutions that can support the level of flexibility and freedom your employees want without compromising on the time tracking accuracy.

In addition to this, it offers a barrage of features including a user-friendly interface, user-controlled activity logging, project management capabilities, time tracking rules and configurations, and a comprehensive dashboard.

timegram offers just about everything you need to improve workforce productivity today.

If you would like to try out timegram, sign up now to get your hands on the product sooner than everyone else!