Best Employee Productivity Trackers in 2024 and How to Utilize Them to Master Efficiency 

Productivity— the buzzword around which the hustle culture revolves — is both the means to the end and the end itself of all the business activity. 

As much as it defines the success of a team or an individual, it is both essential and difficult to find the accurate formula to gauge productivity since remote and hybrid work arrangements have revolutionized the corporate landscape. Unless, of course, you are equipped with an efficient employee productivity tracker and the best strategies to utilize it for improved time management.

Before integrating a productivity tracker into your business management system, it is important to put your finger on what you want to track and why. It is the first decisive step for implementing the right software in the right way. Define a clear policy for how and what employee data will be monitored while keeping sight of the key factor: communicating changes to your employees for a smooth transition and confidence building.

If you are mindful of the ethical rules of productivity tracking, it goes a long way in honing your productivity monitoring skills. Utilizing the right tools becomes your secret weapon for boosting team productivity.

TL;DR:

This is what you will take away from this blog:

• The significance and benefits of productivity tracker apps for enhancing efficiency
• The impact of employee productivity tracking on overall team performance
• Common challenges in implementing employee productivity tools, such as ethical considerations and consequent resistance
• Our top picks from different kinds of productivity tracking apps and how they work
• And, the bonus: timegram, a comprehensive time tracking and performance management tool that paves the way for unprecedented efficiency.

Benefits of Using a Productivity Tracker

Increased Awareness of Time Usage

Productivity trackers, like timegram provide a detailed breakdown of time spent on various tasks. The increased awareness enables individuals and team leaders to identify time sinks and make informed decisions about how to allocate their time more effectively.

Identifying Productivity Patterns and Trends

Understanding productivity patterns is crucial for identifying peak performance times and areas where improvement is needed. Productivity trackers offer insightful time tracking data to analyze trends, helping you adapt your schedule for maximum efficiency.

Setting and Achieving Goals

Effective goal-setting lays the groundwork for establishing performance parameters. Productivity trackers assist you in setting realistic goals, tracking progress, and celebrating achievements. A goal-oriented approach enhances motivation and productivity by keeping everyone focused on the team's objectives.

Improving Time Management Skills

The most outstanding advantage of utilizing productivity trackers is that they act as personal time management assistants, offering insights into time spent. This information empowers users to hone their time management skills, leading to increased efficiency and better work-life balance.

Productivity Tracking for Teams

Team productivity is the collective measure of how efficiently a group achieves its objectives and organizational goals. Tracking team productivity helps optimize resources to yield the desired results and successful project culmination.

Defining the productivity parameters unique to your company or team is crucial as a manager. What defines productivity may vary, be it meeting sales targets or delivering services efficiently while keeping all the stakeholders in the loop. Once the employee KPIs are established, like profit/capacity per employee, tracking team effectiveness becomes more than a task – it can become, as we said in the beginning, success itself.

Cracking the Code: Common Challenges in Team Productivity Tracking

The struggle of keeping tabs on team progress brings some challenges. Resistance from team members, ambiguity in metrics, and the difficulty of measuring qualitative contributions can impede the tracking process.

This is where timegram emerges as your saving grace. With a user-friendly platform offering task categorization, performance reviews, and collaboration tools, timegram transforms challenges into opportunities. It fosters transparency, cultivates accountability, and encourages collaborative efficiency, ensuring that the collective effort of a team propels it towards success. 

Managers equipped with performance analytics can address inefficiencies by providing additional training, facilitating rearrangements, or considering employee replacement if unavoidable. Ultimately, understanding the specific needs of your business and being considerate about the individual dynamics of employees are indispensable strategies. It requires a thought process by managers that incorporates workers' concerns in the productivity tracking process.

Employee Productivity Tracking

Tracking employee productivity has to be your pivotal strategy if you are striving to maximize their potential. Also, to zoom in on team productivity, knowing your employees' strengths and weaknesses is essential. However, as discussed earlier, understanding the importance of gauging employee productivity goes beyond mere micromanagement. 

An accurate measure of employee productivity guides organizations toward optimal resource utilization and goal attainment by indicating the efficiency and effectiveness of individual output. HR managers can identify major contributors and reinforce the model for overall team efficiency by regularly tracking employee performance.

Benefits of Employee Productivity Tracking

The benefits of implementing employee productivity tracking systems are manifold:

• It provides valuable insights into individual and team performance, aiding managers to make productivity & performance reports for strategic decision-making.
• It cultivates a sense of transparency and fairness, as employees can see their contributions in quantifiable terms.
• It also facilitates goal setting, allowing organizations to set realistic targets based on historical data.
• It provides managers the opportunity to prioritize and improve employee engagement.
• It provides insights into personal efficiency and peak productivity hours for employees, leading to professional development.

Ethical considerations and employee privacy

Considering the common challenges of team productivity tracking, there are also some unique issues when dealing with employee productivity. Striking the right balance between accountability and respecting individual boundaries remains disputed.

The challenge lies in implementing a system that boosts productivity without inducing a sense of surveillance and infringement on privacy. The aim of employee productivity tracking must not be policing but empowerment. When approached thoughtfully, it becomes a powerful tool for fostering a culture of continuous improvement while aligning individual efforts with team progress.

How Does timegram Help in Tracking Employee Productivity Ethically? And What are the Other Options?

While tracking productivity is essential, ethical considerations and employee privacy must be prioritized. Balancing the need for data and respecting individual privacy rights ensures a fair and transparent work environment for business growth.

timegram offers privacy-centric features, allowing employees to track their productivity voluntarily. It respects individual autonomy and encourages self-improvement without compromising personal privacy.

Let’s have a look at how timegram works and some other options for tracking employee productivity:

timegram: Effortless and Ethical Productivity Tracking  

Every second counts in chasing productivity, so our top pick timegram emerges as a game-changer. timegram is a privacy-first, smart time-tracking solution for remote and hybrid teams with project planning and productivity reporting features. It has indeed redefined time tracking for individuals, teams, and organizations. This software promises to revolutionize the way time, projects, and overall efficiency are managed and enhanced without affecting the autonomy and morale of your team.

Automatic time tracking with effortless precision

With timegram, you can capture every billable minute with zero effort. Leaving behind the days of stopwatch stress, timegram ensures perfect accuracy in tracking productivity with its automatic time tracking feature. No more manual entries – just focus on your work while timegram meticulously captures every second of your workday. It's time management at its finest, allowing you to direct your attention where it matters most: focusing on your tasks.

Project & task management

Say goodbye to chaotic workflows. Here is a streamlined approach to managing project milestones and employee performance efficiently. You just have to establish project goals and witness timegram managing tasks and timelines synchronized with your targets. The platform enables you to bid farewell to the chaos, bringing order and efficiency to your project and task management as the most practical team productivity tracker.

Performance insights

timegram takes a deep dive into productivity, ROI, project timeline estimates, & more with holistic reports. It doesn't just capture time; it transforms it into meaningful insights and enables you to make informed decisions based on accurate accounts of time spent by your employees.

Automatic invoicing

Chasing billable hours? That's a thing of the past. 

With timegram, invoices are as automatic as breathing, and billing becomes a breeze. You dont have to worry about billable and non-billable hours anymore. The software automates the invoicing process with just a few clicks within seconds. 

A break from estimation blues

Break free from estimation blues with timegram. Analyze actual vs. forecasted time, spot overruns, and effortlessly predict costs, timelines, and revenue. Estimation becomes an art with timegram. Say goodbye to estimation blues and embrace precision in accounting for every minute of your team’s productivity.

What do people say about timegram? 

According to a recent review, timegram offers, “Unmatched performance tracking for clients and employees!! It's one of the easiest tools I've come across for tracking both employee and project performance. It's a one-stop shop to monitor how our projects are going and get insights into how much the next projects are going to cost, how much time they are going to take , and the revenue generated. A true project estimation gem for sure.” 

— Yunus Jamal from Atompoint.

Operating Systems 

timegram caters to the diverse needs of agencies and is available on macOS, Windows, and Linux. This cross-platform compatibility ensures seamless integration of timegram into your existing workflows, regardless of your operating system preferences.

Pricing

For freelancers, timegram is free forever. Pricing starts at $8 per user per month, including all features!

Other Productivity Tracker Apps

If you are still looking for more options, here are 5 productivity trackers and their main features:

1. My Hours

My Hours is an employee productivity tracker without complicated features, which can be installed as a mobile app. It allows your employees to switch between tasks and simultaneously log their time. It is available on iOS and Web Browsers and compatible with Apple Watch.

The app can color-code projects and tasks and a timeline feature that lets you adjust your previous entries. In case you forget to start the timer, you will receive a reminder. The downside is that since it's a mobile app, it does not automatically sync when you are working on your computer. The time tracking is efficient, but it may lack other features required to improve work efficiency.

Pricing

It has a free personal plan, and the monthly pricing starts at $8. Hours Teams Plan costs $6.67 per user per month. 

2. Timemator

Timemator can be your go-to app for simple and neat productivity tracking for Mac and iOS. You have to specify what files, applications, or websites you use for work, and the timer starts automatically for them. 

You can automatically start a timer when you begin working on a project by connecting with apps you use to carry out tasks, or you can also use the manual timer. You can analyze the time spent on specific tasks and then organize them into folders, which help generate reports and view the breakdown of your time allocation.

You can also see reports and billable hours with Timemator. It offers multiple views, such as a daily timeline, weekly timeline, and monthly overview. The downside is that to track everything on your system, you must apply timers to projects later, which can be a hassle for many users.

Pricing

Pricing starts for Mac at $39.99 and iOS at $9.99.

3. Teamwork

Teamwork is a productivity tracking tool that extends its capabilities to enhance employee productivity. Through robust features like advanced reports, client management, and time tracking, it facilitates balanced workloads and efficient recurring revenue management. 

There are some limitations in specific external integrations, affecting functionalities like communication and client relations. Additionally, the time logging may lack intuitiveness, impacting its employee-monitoring potential. Despite these considerations, Teamwork can be a fairly workable solution for teams aiming to streamline project management while fostering overall productivity.

Pricing

The pricing starts at $5.99/month per user, while the Enterprise plan is customised.

4. ActivTrak

ActivTrak distinguishes itself through the robust analytics capabilities of a daily productivity tracker. While it shares standard productivity-tracking features with others, its advanced insights and comprehensive dashboards stand out, enabling more informed decision-making. 

Noteworthy features include a workforce intelligence dashboard for detailed team performance insights, automated time tracking for distributed staff, and impact analysis to assess organizational changes. The advanced reporting feature allows analysis of an individual's task performance, offering valuable insights for team improvement. 

However, the installation and onboarding processes may take longer than other employee-monitoring solutions, and categorizing websites and activities can be time-consuming, potentially delaying initial results.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $10/month per user, while the Professional plan is $17/month per user.

5. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is one of the widely used apps to track productivity. Its extensive features include remote workforce management and automated time tracking. The automated timesheets streamline time tracking and employee scheduling, while self-managed productivity tools cater to individual team members with features like habit tracking and daily stand-up monitoring. 

The geofencing employee tracking functionality offers insights into time spent at various job sites. However, it's essential to note the limitations of this feature, including potential stress for team members due to active and open-time tracking, potentially impacting productivity metrics. 

Additionally, the absence of detailed breakdowns for hours in specific reports may present difficulties in closely overseeing teams and optimizing time management.

Pricing

Hubstaff’s pricing starts at $4.99/month per user. For teams, $10/month per user.

Conclusion: Unlocking Productivity Tracking with timegram

To sum it up, productivity tracking, when approached thoughtfully, revolutionizes how individuals and teams manage their time and tasks. The benefits of ethical employee tracking are far-reaching, from increased awareness and goal achievement to team collaboration and boosting engagement and efficiency. 

Having reviewed the top 5 productivity tracking apps, timegram stands out as a comprehensive ethical solution for managing employee productivity with its automatic time tracking, streamlined project management, insightful reports, and user-friendly invoicing. You can start for free and experience the transformation firsthand. Make every moment count, and elevate your personal and professional success with timegram now! 

FAQs

What is the KPI for employee performance?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as crucial metrics for measuring overall business performance and the contributions of individual employees. These indicators include various aspects, including:

• Quality of work
• Employee capacity
• Profit per employee
• Utilization rate
• Goal achievement
• Time management/efficiency
• Collaboration
• Adaptability and innovation 

By utilizing these KPIs, businesses can effectively quantify their progress, align with organizational objectives, and assess performance at both individual and collective levels. However, remember that you need to specify your business-specific KPIs according to your organisation's particular needs and objectives.

What is a KPI dashboard?

A KPI dashboard visually represents key performance indicators (KPIs) and essential metrics, offering managers valuable insights for informed decision-making. From concise summaries to detailed pages of charts and figures, these dashboards are designed to provide executives with a clear and understandable overview of business performance. Business managers employ productivity trackers with KPI dashboards that leverage digital graphs and charts to track the progress of business objectives.