How Remote Team Time Tracking Ensures Better Performance

All of us have grown up learning about the values and importance of time. That time is the key to success and wasting it can cause you to fall behind. 

Your work life ingrains this sense of time within you, and no matter how much you wish for Hermione Granger's time turner, time still manages to slip past. The best you can do is manage it efficiently to make the most out of it.

Measuring time has become critical in how most businesses run the modern hybrid working setup. Since employees only remain connected virtually, it becomes daunting for managers to keep track of their performance. This happens because of the performance blur, leading to suspicion that employees might be enjoying the “work-from-home flexibility” a little bit too much. 

And if you start seeing missed project deadlines, absentees in meetings, and similar problems, you should give implementing a time tracking solution an adequate consideration. Therefore, in a post-COVID hybrid working setting, a remote team time tracking solution has become the need of the hour, providing you the space to plan projects, allocate resources, and manage employees better.

Why Do I Even Need Time Tracking for My Remote Team?

Going remote is both exciting and intimidating at the same time for managers and employees. You get to enjoy the comfort of working from your home, but at the same time, make sure the workflow remains as seamless as it was while working from the office; time trackers can help you with that. 

Let’s go a little in-depth about how these tools can benefit you and your remote teams:

Performance Invisibility

You know that a few of your employees are just like Amy Santiago – focused, love to work, and deliver everything dot on time. Total star performer material, you could say.

But what about the Hitchcocks and Scullys in your team? When your team is working remotely, managers suffer from performance invisibility where they don’t know which employee is completing their hours and who is just slacking off. This could lead to low quality work and potential delays in project completion, affecting your rapport with clients. 

Globally Dispersed Teams

Going remote means your team members are working from various neighborhoods, cities, states, and even countries. When the organization workflow moves virtual, it can lead to miscommunication due to lack of coordination, especially when people are in different time zones. 

Even a few hours of difference can mean some of your employees are not available for urgent tasks or meetings. And keeping track of who is available and when is a hassle, unless you have a system that provides this information accurately. 

With the work schedule of your employees readily available, it becomes easier to set up meetings and set project deadlines. In this way, remote time trackers can significantly help increase communication and coordination between you and your employees.

Employee Burnout

As a manager, do you keep track of every team member’s workload? 

When teams go remote, managers tend to lose track of tasks assigned to each employee because they are too focused on project completion and forget about team capacity. Without knowing the work of an individual employee, you could end up over- or under-assigning tasks, leading to an imbalance of work division. This can dramatically impact productivity and can often lead to burnout. 

Recommended reading: Employee Burnout Here is How Effective Resource Planning Can Help

OR worse, you might get anxiety over the fact that some employees might not have enough work, giving them the golden opportunity to slack off work. 

A remote time tracking solution with task planning capabilities can provide insights into team capacity and ensure a healthy, doable workload.

Difficulty in Project Planning

Managers plan projects in advance to ensure that tasks are completed on time, and that all the employees have sufficient work on their plates. But with employee productivity insights blurred, you can’t be too sure how much time it took for your team to complete a project. 

These critical insights enable you to estimate project timelines and optimize your task management process. It also helps in planning the projects in the pipeline to further improve team efficiency. 

With remote time tracking, you can easily tap into these insights to streamline your project planning process and keep your clients happy as a clam with on-time deliveries. 

How Remote Time Tracking Improves Performance?

Now that you know the pains the absence of a time tracking solution can cause, let’s see how it can make your life, as a manager or business owner, easier. 

Helps you in planning future projects 

Who wouldn’t you like to get the perfect blend of harmony and flow in a parameter-less working model? 

Time tracking solutions enable you to keep each project and its subtasks in check. You can view how your team is progressing towards deadlines and compare estimated timelines with the actual outputs to identify the time lost. Then leverage this data to re-allocate tasks, pace the projects, and meet the deadlines accordingly. 

Enhances individual and team productivity

Remote work is the new normal and most of us have already accepted it. While it is bliss from your team (they get to work in their PJs), it can sometimes lean towards unproductivity as your employees become a little too comfy at home. 

Recommended reading: Remote Working Culture: Productivity Killer or Enhancer? 

You can change that by using the right time tracking tool. 

Time trackers track your team’s desktop activity, which employees can review at the end of the day to see where and how they spent their time. They can use this data to analyze how much time they wasted on watching unboxing videos of the new iPhone 14 against the time they spent on work-related activities.

This bifurcation allows them to manage their time more concisely and focus on their primary work-related tasks better, thus increasing their overall productivity.

Promotes a trust-based relationship between you and your team

The concept of remote work can trigger anxiety for most managers, thinking that their employees may not remain as productive as they were at the office. In fact, a lot of them have turned to tools like bosswares to put employees under heavy surveillance, (which has actually backfired), leading to a broken bond between managers and their teams. 

Modern time trackers keep the trust intact  by taking away all the unnecessary surveillance tactics out and giving a better way to measure productivity. They allow employees to only log hours of work-related tasks before sharing them with you, giving you purely productive data showcasing their true efforts . 

By respecting the privacy of your team while providing you data about the time they spent on their tasks, time trackers build back that trust, keeping you and your team happy. And research has already shown how happy employees are the most productive team members. 

Increases transparency

Modern time trackers are excellent in keeping your team’s performance transparent while respecting their privacy. By the day end, you have a clear picture of:

• How much time employees are spending on each task
• The pace at which your projects are progressing against their estimated timelines
• Whether employees are pacing their work according to the deadline or not

By having this data and more on a holistic visual dashboard, you know precisely where the lags are or which employee is underperforming and how many of them are meeting their capacities.

Transparency is also being hailed on digital as a key contributor to employee happiness as it sets a stage for better recognition, especially for employees who’re giving it their all.

What to Look for in a Remote Time Tracking Solution?

Since the pandemic dawned, remote working has become a norm, and with that norm came the time tracking tools; every  modern organization needs them to ensure that productivity doesn’t plummet while your team works from home. 

Now, there are several tools available on the market but you need to be mindful of the time tracker you choose (some of them cross the ethical boundaries of employee privacy, which can backfire). To find the right remote time tracking solution, you need to know how you want to utilize it in the first place. As a manager, you want to:

• Track individual and team performances
• Gather work-related insights for planning
• Allocate projects and manage tasks 
• Ensure the privacy of your remote team
• Cut down time spent on logging and cleaning timesheets
• Compare actual output of your team with their estimated capacities 

These are just some essential features you should look for in a time tracker. But it wouldn’t hurt if you also get a visual dashboard with consolidated information about your teams and projects, would it? If you want to take things up a notch, you can also opt for a time tracker that allows you to:  

• Develop business-specific KPIs 
• Use gamification to ignite a healthy competition between team members
• Calculate billable hours and transform them into accurate invoices

timegram’s Got You Covered!

timegram is a time tracking and resource allocation tool that operates with a zero-surveillance policy. It packs all the right features you need to manage your team and boost their productivity. From employees’ perspective, it allows them to monitor their progress, identify areas where they’re lacking, and take steps to improve performance. 

timegram also respects your team’s privacy by allowing them to only share work-related Highlights (digital timesheets) with you.

In short, it’s the perfect time tracking alternative for you! 

Learn more about timegram's features.

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