How to Motivate Your Employees to Track Time

Getting your team to use online timekeeping software  isn’t easy. Telling them they need to track time is easy, but actually getting them to do it (and do it consistently) is a major challenge.

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To motivate your employees to use track my hours app, you need to address their concerns, make the process super simple, and encourage them to form the habit.

Why People Resist Time Tracking

Number one reason why most people resist time tracking is the fact it’s extremely tiring and unproductive. The irony is that in order to track the time you spend on different tasks and activities you need to waste your time on filling timesheets and other paperwork. 

But, it’s all for the greater good. Even you, as a manager need to track let’s say your revenue. And you’ll waste time by doing it, but at the end of the day, you’ll get valuable information about your business. 

Time tracking is the same. It takes time, there’s no way around it. But spending time on collecting this data isn't a terrible price to pay if you end up with valuable information. It’s a fair trade-off: you’re sacrificing a bit of productivity today in order to gain useful insight which will help your business in the long run.

And to be honest, there’s no way to make time tracking a fun activity. It is how it is and everyone is aware of that. And that’s another reason why your employees don’t like it. Apart from being unproductive and tiring, it’s boring as well. People don’t get much joy of it and try to finish it as fast as possible. 

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What Can You Do About It

So, the ball is now in your court. You know why time tracking is important and all the benefits of it. You need to transfer that knowledge to your employees and explain to them why is it so important to be consistent and shift your feelings towards it. 

Explain Why

Explain to them why do they need to time track. It differs from business to business, but on some occasions, time tracking literally puts food on the table (think of situations where employees are paid by the hour or when clients are charged by hour).

Also, tell them why time tracking is important to them personally. With the help of it, they’ll get an insight about how they work, how much time they spend on different tasks and sub activities on certain project. Later on, they’ll be able to reorganize their workload if they find out they’ve been spending too much time on irrelevant tasks. 

Monitoring

People need to understand that you don’t want to monitor who does what personally. You’ll have to communicate to your team that time tracking is not about spying on people, controlling who spends too much time on breaks, or setting unrealistic goals. Instead, it's all about finding out how your employees spend their time and trying to optimize this by figuring out ways to spend it more productively.

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The last thing you want is to make people feel bad.

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In order to establish trust, give trust. Let people decide if they want to track time using a timer or enter time manually at the end of the day. By letting people self-report the hours worked, you put them in control. By giving people control, you remove the anxiety and distrust.

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Make It Easy

The easier it is for your employees to track time, the more they’ll love it. And the perfect way to do that is to implement desktop time tracking software. It’s convenient, user friendly and very effective. It won’t consume as much time as filling the timesheets manually.

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What’s sweet about online hour tracker is the fact that it usually does everything on its own and it requires minimum involvement  from your employees. In most cases, they just turn their PC and click when they start working on a new task. And can forget about it. The app will work in the background and gather all the information needed. 

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Don’t Use It Against Them

If they acquired how important time tracking really is and started to utilize app to record work hours, the next step is to assure them that their data is in a safe place and won’t ever be used against them. You should emphasize that the data gathered is only for the wellbeing of themselves and the business where they work at. 

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Conclusion

Time tracking can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. If you do everything correctly, your employees won’t even notice it and they won’t spend much time on boring paperwork. And, look into employee clock in software. Make life easier for both you and your employees.

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