Whether you’re running a project-based business or not, you still must ensure your employees are productive and that your processes are as optimized as possible. In order to do that, you must track what’s happening in your company, and one of the ways to do it is by using a task time tracker.
To help you see why the usage of such software will be beneficial for your business, we’ve compiled a list of things you can do with it.
Identify Strengths
You probably already know which one of your employees can handle which task the best. But do you know how much time each of them takes to complete it? When looking at the quality of work, you must also look at the speed. Faster isn’t always better, but you might have two employees who deliver the same quality in different time frames.
This information is useful when it comes to urgent fixes and tasks with short turnaround time. You can just give the task to those employees who are the best at it, and who have the most time on their hands at the moment.
Pinpoint Weaknesses
While it’s important to know your team’s strengths, it’s even more important to know where their weaknesses are.
Task time tracker allows you to identify if employees are struggling with certain types of tasks. One company noticed that employees spend a lot of time using Google Translate, so they organized language courses for everyone. This way, they were able to save 15 minutes per day per employee.
Setting Deadlines
In general, deadlines are one of the key pieces of successful task delegation, but they are also crucial for task completion. Deadlines that are too long allow employees to procrastinate and leave everything for the last minute. On the other hand, short, unrealistic deadlines lead to stress and satisfaction.
By tracking time on tasks, you’ll know how long each of them takes (including the distractions), so you can create accurate, realistic deadlines for your employees.
Managing Clients Expectations
When you start working with a client, you always promise you’ll finish a task in a certain timeframe. If you don’t, you could lose that client, and your reputation could go down the drain.
Which is why you should rely on the data from your tracker. Before you even accept the new project, go to your dashboard, check how busy your team is right now, but go back and check historical data from previous projects. The chances are you’ve already handled a similar assignment, so it will be easier for you to provide an accurate project estimate.
Additionally, there are some software options that will allow you to give clients access to their projects’ data. This way, you can minimize client communications down to essentials, as they’ll be able to track project progress themselves.
Tracking Improvement
Everyone who uses a task time tracker has the ultimate goal of increasing productivity or improving overall performance.
Use the software to measure and analyze each employee, but also your organization as a whole. You can set weekly or monthly goals for each time (e.g., improve productivity by 10%) and even reward teams who manage to achieve them on a continuous basis.
Wrap Up
You can’t deny the fact that technology helped us evolve our businesses in so many ways, so we should try and find new ways it can help us. Task tracking tools are certainly just one of many ways we can improve, but it’s still worth trying it out.
