Pros & Cons of Time Tracking Your Team
Why manager shouldn’t necessarily implement time-tracking
Your team recently may have gone remote, and with that, you may be concerned as a business owner that your employees are doing their work.
Without seeing them in the office, that concept of accountability feels drained from your team dynamic. Are they working in the right manner and are they delivering what they need to? Should I time-track them or not?
⏱ What is time tracking?
Time tracking is what it says on the tin. Tracking each employee's time spent on projects, tasks, and clients. You can easily implement this through one of two methods fairly easily.
- Project Management Tools — Many project management tools like ClickUp, Wrike & TeamGantt — all have time tracking abilities built-in.
- Time Tracking Tools — Tools like Timely, Hours, Toggl are all resources that allow you and your team to calculate and track data.
Typically, time tracking tools are more accurate and provide you with reporting, timesheets, client/project data and employees with more control.
🙌🏼 Pros
- Increased Transparency — Many employees like to track their work. It helps them to stay transparent whilst remote and even accountable for what they did during a period of time.
- Client Reporting — This can help to make billing clients more effective and offering a report to share with a client after a month or all ongoing work has been completed.
- Reduced Multi-Tasking — As you use time tracking tools, there’s no way to set multi-tasks inside a specific time period. So, mono-tasking (one task at a time) is promoted. This is a more effective way to work.
😢 Negatives
- Too Much Pressure — Many employees new to this might fine too much pressure on filling their time productively if they manage to complete their entire daily workload — they may be forced into more workload.
- Fairly Costly — Downloading a time tracking tool can add up, if you have more than 10 employees, the monthly billing can begin to mount up towards the $100+ per month mark, on top of existing tools.
- Micro-Management — Time tracking tools could push managers into managing every working second of the team and putting too much load onto teams.
This is a team decision. Speak to your employees, ask them about this. Could this be solved in a daily 1:1 round-up of work completed? Or will the tool provide value for all parties? Communication is the best policy.
