Time is more than just money — it’s a critical factor in your company’s success. When employees use their time wisely, the entire organization benefits. Which is why monitoring employee productivity by tracking time spent on tasks is an important skill for all managers to master.
In this manager’s guide, we cover:
- Why time tracking is so important
- The benefits of time tracking
- Options for tracking employees’ time
- Best practices for time tracking
Ready to get started? Let’s dive right in.
Why is it important to track time spent on tasks at work?
The more time-efficient employees are, the more productive your teams will be. But how do you know if they’re working as productively as possible? Yep, you guessed it — with time tracking data.
Time trackers are managers’ secret weapon in the battle against wasted time. The more you know about how your employees spend their work hours, the easier it is to identify and eliminate activities that hurt productivity. And that’s no small feat.
One comprehensive study found the average employee is productive for less than 3 hours in a typical eight-hour workday. The rest of the time goes to calls, meetings, messaging, checking social media, making coffee and chatting with colleagues.
While many of these are legitimate workplace activities — and in some instances, essential for camaraderie — they don’t warrant 25 hours a week. And the bigger the company, the more costly the implications: Large organizations waste approximately $100 million a year on unnecessary meetings alone.
Tracking employees’ time helps you minimize distractions, create more space for focus time, fine-tune policies, and most importantly, optimize your time costs — all in ways that support employee well-being.
Benefits of tracking the time employees spend on tasks
The good news is that time tracking doesn’t have to feel like a chore. The latest time tracking tools make it easy to see how employees spend their days, opening the door to numerous benefits such as:
- More efficient project management: An essential part of project time management, tracking individual team members’ time makes it easier to keep everyone on track.
- Higher quality work: Helping employees make the most of their time doesn’t just reduce your operational costs. It also impacts the quality of work — especially if your time tracking reports reveal opportunities for more focus time.
- Better use of budgets: Regularly reviewing how employees spend their work hours allows you to catch unnecessary distractions early, making it easier to prevent project scope creep and cut down on wasted time.
- More accurate pricing: Accurate time tracking shows you how much time employees spend on each client or customer task, allowing you to more accurately price and bill for services.
- Greater work-life balance: Tracking employees’ time is a great way to reveal the early signs of burnout, such as excessively long work weeks and unbalanced workloads.
5 ways to track time spent on tasks at work
What’s the best way to track employee time? Let’s look at the most popular options.
1. Time tracking software
This is the easiest, most accurate option. Automated time tracking software offers a convenient and efficient way to monitor employee time. Tools like ActivTrak also generate detailed reports, allowing you to see how productive time varies by location, team and other factors. The key is to find a tool that tracks time spent on actual tasks — not just when employees clock in and out. The best software leverages user activity monitoring to automatically log employee activity on various company apps, without the need for manual entries.
2. Manual time tracking
Alternatively, some companies use tools to manually track time. With manual time tracking tools like Harvest, each employee is responsible for entering the amount of time — usually in 15-minute increments — they’ve dedicated to different tasks and projects. Although a valid option, these apps are less reliable than automatic time tracking software. This is especially true if you allow employees to wait until the end of each week to submit their hours, which often results in inaccurate estimates and best guesses.
3. Project management tools
Though it’s not always the obvious choice, most project management software offers options for logging time. However, well-established solutions like JIRA and Asana rely on manual entries. And in some instances, the process for project time tracking is complex. For example, Trello advises customers to open a card, pick a date, choose a team member and add a description of work before they can even start logging hours — which is then done manually. While these options may work well for select projects, the amount of manual analysis makes them difficult to maintain for long-term employee tracking.
4. Calendars
Though less common, calendars are another way to track employee time. While this option might not capture every activity, it’s a quick way to see how much time is spent on meetings. If your employees use time blocking — a time management method that divides each work day into blocks of time dedicated to specific tasks and projects — calendars will also give you a more accurate overall picture. But again, this option relies on cumbersome manual entries and can be misleading if say, an employee blocks off an hour for a meeting or project that ends up only taking 20 minutes.
5. Employee feedback
Although they’re not typically used as time tracking tools, employee feedback apps like 15five and Lattice offer yet another option. Use them to send short weekly surveys asking employees how much time they spend on different activities, then review the findings to gain a general understanding of how people spend their time at work. This is the least accurate option, but it does provide a starting point if you’re already paying for these tools.
Best practices for employee time tracking
No matter how you choose to track employee time, follow these best practices to make the most of it.
Make time tracking a daily habit
Whether you use automated software or ask employees to enter hours manually, log time spent on tasks by the end of each work day. This helps ensure accurate data, and makes it easy to review reports on a weekly basis.
Check time data regularly
When your calendar is full and your to-do list is long, the last thing you want to do is review time tracking reports. But the busier the days get, the more critical this becomes. Regularly review your time tracking data to look for variations from week to week. For example, if meetings that once filled 15 hours a week suddenly swell to 30, you’ll know to investigate further.
If you use automated time tracking software, review reports at the end of each week. If employees track time manually, set a calendar reminder to export and review entries at regular intervals.
Look for trends and outliers
When reviewing your reports, don’t just focus on the granular details. Instead, watch for bigger picture trends, such as spikes or dips in time dedicated to specific tasks. These are often indicators of bigger productivity problems such as underutilization, unbalanced workloads and burnout.
Automate insights
If possible, use software that turns your time tracking data into actionable insights. For example, ActivTrak’s virtual productivity coach analyzes your employee activity data for you, providing recommendations for improving productivity, distributing workloads and more.
Use ActivTrak to automatically track time spent on tasks at work
Ready to start tracking your employees' time? ActivTrak’s free time tracking tool is packed with features that allow you to put the entire process on autopilot. Use it to:
- Understand work durations and trends for both remote and in-office employees
- See activity over time, rather than just at the start and end of the day
- Spot patterns that indicate unbalanced workloads
- See if employees spend more time on email and instant messaging than other high-value activities
Create your free account today to start using all of these features right away — plus many more.
