If you started tracking the time within your organization, chances are good that you’ve discovered several facts about work and productivity you haven’t noticed or realized before. The main challenge, however, lies not in finding them out but drawing correct conclusions about what you do wrong and how you can fix it.
Here’re 5 quite unexpected facts to learn from online employee time tracking if you want to help your team work even more productively and stay happy about their jobs.
#1. Distractions are bad, but some of them work better than others
It takes people around 20 mins to fully get back to the task once it was interrupted. Distractions are often the only reason for not getting things done in time. However, it turns out that some of them are less damaging than the others. The only way to tell the difference is to track your time.
How exactly does this work? A lot of people say that it is precisely the background distractions that impact the time spent on the task. Needless to say, an office is full of noises and distractions at every single minute of the day. The result is hardly unexpected: deadlines are not met and productivity lowers.
Once you or your employees start tracking the time, it becomes instantly clear what slows the work down most and least of all. For example, you can find out that listening to music slows you down in a lesser extent than listening to office conversations or that allowing yourself several minutes on social media before starting the task helps you stay focused for the rest of the day.
#2. Working longer hours is rarely effective
Working longer hours doesn’t mean more things done. In fact, the number of worked hours is important but the amount of performed tasks is even more important. Maybe employees can work twice faster if they eliminate distractions. Time tracking will show where exactly the time goes during the day and so you can optimize the schedules and plans for your team.
Another great thing about online employee time tracking is that burnouts can be avoided. Better time management, better planning and scheduling as well as accurately tracking the time will help people work smarter without testing their limits.
#3. The most disliked tasks take less time than you think
At work, there will always be activities which you like and dislike. People tend to procrastinate with unfavorite tasks and often assign way more time for them than is really needed.
However, if they track their time they could find out an unexpected fact: least favorite tasks don’t take so much time and there’s actually nothing about them to become so annoyed. Just track your time to see how long your most disliked activities take and you’ll see it’s not so awful. You can then assign less time for them.
#4. Real breaks are irreplaceable
If employees don’t take real breaks, they start taking unintended ones: checking out emails, browsing random sites, switching between the tasks too frequently, etc. This results in pure waste of time. Instead of taking some time to rest and recharge they stay at the workplace creating an illusion of work while in fact they just exhaust themselves. They could go for a lunch, get back to work 30 mins later and do everything much faster.
Online employee time tracking will help define the most comfortable routine and adjust work to everyone’s needs. This way the team will maintain high productivity throughout the day and perform everything in time.
Final thoughts – online employee time tracking helps you grow and improve
As obvious as this may sound, there’s always something about your work you can improve. Without precisely measuring the most important things concerning the work (like time and productivity) you’ve got no way of knowing what exactly you can improve. In fact, you may not even realize there’s something tricky underway. Online employee time trackingthe time will give you an insight into what exactly and so you can act effectively.
