Unless you’ve only recently arrived on planet Earth, you’ve probably heard the expression ‘time is money’, and if you’re responsible for the operation of a business or if you’re a business owner, you probably have a sense for how truthful and poignant that statement really is.
Businesses generally track time in three primary ways. They track time for payroll, they track time for billing, and they track time to manage costs. Either way, your business fortunes are tied directly to how well you track time in your organization because if your business is good at tracking time, you’ll earn more and have lower costs.
Seasoned business owners know that implementing a new or updated time tracking solution isn’t easy. Employees don’t like the idea of being scrutinized or learning a new software, and some managers don’t like the extra work required to get their reluctant teams onboard with a new software or a new process.
These problems aren’t new, and if you search on time tracking challenges at work, you’ll get the standard list of usual suspects:
- Time theft where extra time is added to a timesheet.
- Manual time tracking requires manual calculations and are prone to error.
- Tracking hours of multiple jobs and tasks can be difficult to manage.
- Procrastination and distractions limit productivity but aren’t necessarily reflected in time totals.
- Low employee motivation can lead to incorrect or incomplete data.
- Compliance and legal requirements can be onerous to properly observe.
- Employee resistance to new technology can make implementing a new system more challenging.
In my experience as the CEO of Timesheets.com, however, the single biggest challenge to getting your time tracking house in order rests with the business owner or general manager. Yes, I’m looking at you, bossman!
Frankly, the financial case for time tracking is easy to make. All you need to do is estimate how much untracked time isn’t billed for, or in the case of time tracking for payroll, how much unworked time ends up on employee timesheets, and then figure out the dollar amount. When you compare that to the cost of a good time tracking system like Timesheets.com, you’ll quickly realize how much you have to gain by fixing your problem.
I’ll just give one quick example. An hourly employee that clocks in at 7:02 but writes down 7:00AM (averaging 2 minutes per punch) receives more than a week of extra pay by the end of the year!
But knowing you need better time tracking and actually implementing it are two entirely different things. This is where managers just need to step up. While the list of time tracking challenges above are indeed obstacles to overcome, the real challenge rests with motivating busy managers to dedicate the time and patience required to alter one of their fundamental business processes. This also often means agreeing to spend money on a new monthly bill (even if the cost savings justify the expense).
There are many reasons a manager might drag their feet. They might not want to upset or seem like they are micromanaging key people, or perhaps they have technical concerns about implementing a new process with existing systems. In nearly all cases, however, these obstacles can be overcome by a determined and well informed administrator, even with the most resistant employees. It can be done!
Stay tuned for a follow up post where I go into more detail of the challenges managers face and how to address them. If you want to track time and the benefits that come with it, it just takes a little elbow grease but the rewards are almost always worth it.
If you’re interested in tracking time, but aren’t sure how to start or need expert help addressing these issue, let us know! We have a lot of experience tackling these kinds of challenges and can help.
