The Biggest Cons of Employee Tracking App and How to Neutralize Them

Sure, employee tracking app has a lot of benefits to offer to your company. You’ve probably had a chance to read about how it can be used to optimize your business processes and increase employees’ productivity, how it provides accurate reports on billable hours and makes attendance and overtime tracking effortless.

But enough about the pros.

Hardly anything is perfect as it comes. Employee tracking app unfortunately isn’t an exception. It, too, has a couple of minor flaws and drawbacks.

However, all of the disadvantages and potential side effects of using office time clock software that we’re going to mention can in fact be eliminated. The trick, as you’ll soon find out, is using the employee time software in the right way.

Inconvenience

Here’s how traditional employee time entry software works when it comes to measuring the time your employees spend on a particular project: When employees start working on that project, they click a button within employee tracking app that says ‘Start’ and when they finish with it for the time being, they click ‘Stop’.

It sounds simple enough, but this can be extremely inconvenient for employees. Imagine someone working on 4 different projects at the same time and trying to multitask. They waste so much time just clicking the buttons. Or image that your designer just got a surge of inspiration for a project - instead of embracing this creative flow, they have to first remember to click the button in their job time tracking software! And of course, there’s also forgetfulness.

Solution? Automatic time mapping!

Some employee time recording systems like Insightful have the technology that automatically records time and assigns it to specific projects based on file names. No need for your employees for click anything, the program just works silently in the background and all of the inconvenience is gone.

Perceived Lack of Trust

This is a very common complaint among employees upon finding out that their work time will be tracked - Is it because my boss doesn’t trust me?

It’s not about any employee tracking app in particular or even about any feature. There’s just something about your decision to keep track of time by external means that makes employees doubt whether you trust them enough to do their jobs.

The only way to deal with this misconception is to properly introduce employees to the time tracking and scheduling software. This needs to include way more than a simple ‘Your office time will be tracked from now on’.

You have to explain why you’ll be monitoring employees’ performance, how the system works, what your expectations are, which metrics you’ll be looking at, as well as how time keeping management is going to help their performance (and even reduce stress). Once they understand your motives, they’ll see that distrust isn’t a part of it.

Privacy Intrusion

Another possible manifestation of failing to understand the motives behind your implementing an employee time app could be thinking that your goal is to spy on your employees’ private conversations, social media and whatever other activities they do during break time. This can be an especially big concern for remote workers who might be using their computers outside working hours too.

Apart from explaining all the ins and outs of your motivation to use the time tracker as we’ve mentioned earlier, you should also think about creating a tracking policy that your employees will have access to and that you’ll stick to at all times.

This could include things like not tracking anything outside working hours, not taking screenshots when employees are accessing private media, etc. And once again, make sure it’s not just for show and follow the rules.

Overwhelming Amount of Data

Sometimes, the best features create the biggest problems. Employee tracking app can offer you a lot of different data for every single one of your employees, not just time on tasks but also apps used, attendance, overtime, unproductive time and so on.

If you have a large company, this can quickly become overwhelming. You have so much data for so many employees that you can’t even manage to take a look at all of it, much less use it in an effective goal-achieving way. Not to mention that if you rush and don’t do it the right way, the data can even be misleading.

There’s a solution to this as well - data aggregation. Almost any employee timekeeping system gives you multiple options to group data and compile aggregated reports. This can be on a team, department or even company level. When you get this neat big picture and take your time to carefully analyze everything, the amount of data is much less scary and much more useful.

Objectification

Having all this data and knowing how to use it is going to be a great asset to you. But with this comes the danger of relying on employee tracking app a bit too much. We’re not just talking about eliminating keycards because your daily time log app is so convenient for attendance tracking. No, we’re talking about getting to the point of looking at the numbers so much that you forget your employees’ faces.

And they will pick up on this quickly and probably before you do. If they believe that they’re just a number to you, they’re motivation will go down because they think that you don’t consider them valuable any more.

Don’t let yourself get to this point. Always look at employee time management app data alongside the quality of work and the initiative that employees are taking. Only this holistic view can provide the real and complete picture of employees’ performance. And let them know that you see each of them as a valuable asset by giving them personalized feedback and evaluations.

Conclusion

Employee time monitoring software has a lot of pros, but now you were able to see that even the best time tracking applications come with some cons. Luckily, you can eliminate those by being well-informed and taking necessary precautions. Hopefully, this article has shown you that fixing the problems isn’t hard and that the perfect solution to track the time is just a few important considerations away.

‍