Many beginner entrepreneurs believe that in order to start a business all that you need is your idea and the money necessary to be invested to give you the initial “push”. However, as soon as your business gets going, you realize those are insufficient, and there are much more things needed in order to prosper in what you’re doing.
Experienced businessmen, though each with a different formula of success, agree in the following point: the most valuable company assets are those that cannot be bought, like people, knowledge and time.
As the saying goes, “A team is only as strong as its weakest link”. Therefore, company leaders with the solid business background know too well how essential it is to hire the right people. And it’s not about the diploma of the famous university, and even not about the current skills level. They give much greater importance to the person’s potential – the ability to learn and be taught, the desire to develop and succeed and striving to excel. Frequently, team members with far from striking resumes make better employees than those with impressive credentials.
If you’ve got the right people doing the job, you can always help them improve by promoting self-education and organizing courses to teach what is necessary. This will cost you little in terms of money or time spent, but surely bounce back in the form of business going in leaps.
“It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time” – Steve Jobs believed so, and he clearly did everything possible to use this resource wisely, which we now witness in the astonishing success of his company.
However, if it is just the company leader who sticks to this principle, it’s hard to predict the outcome. It’s important that all staff members learn to spend their time at work most efficiently and avoid wasting it. As a business owner, it is your task to help them in this matter. Fortunately, it is quite attainable with the use of the right tools.
Improving Employee Time Management Skills with Time Tracker
If you track employee hours in your firm, you can monitor how all of your team members manage their time and spend just a few minutes a day on the software reports.
The tool, like Yaware.TimeTracker gathers the information about all activities taking place on the computer, but doesn’t violate employee privacy. Basically, here’s what data it provides:
- the exact time when the work was started and finished (time tracker is automatically launched and switched off along with the computer);
- the detailed categorized list of all websites, apps and software used and timing for each of them;
- the number, duration and reason (optional) of all breaks.
Using the time tracker data for company improvement
The time tracker service organizes all data into reports that take minutes to view, but provide a full picture of the work in your company. Using the gathered information, you not only make conclusions as to the quality of work of your employees. It signals about certain discipline or productivity issues and reveals hidden “treasures” among staff members, who might be worth a reward. Let’s look at some of the cases in details.
1. An employee spends much time using work-related resources, works overtime, the use of non-work related resources is minimal, but nevertheless he/she doesn’t meet deadlines or constantly has a heap of tasks to do.
Probably this person has difficulties with performing his/her duties due to the lack of knowledge or skills. It might be a good idea to help him/her with getting the needed skills. Another possible reason is the worker being overloaded and overworked, so he/she simply cannot cope with all the assignments. Probably it would be wise to distribute some of his/her work duties among other employees or hire a new person to help.
2. An employee takes a lot of breaks/uses unproductive resources like social networks, but their productivity is above average and all deadlines are met in time.
Don’t rush to punish this team member for “wasting time”. Frequent breaks can be the secret of their productivity, so if you have nothing to reproach this person about, simply let it go.
3. An employee meets all deadlines in time, and performs all tasks successfully, but at the same time his Yaware stats show a big amount of unproductive time.
In all probability, this person’s workload is too small, or he/she has a big potential, which is suppressed by the current position. However, if he/she never complains about having nothing to do, you’d better take a closer look at this team member.
There are hundreds of possible situations and it’s only up to you, as a company principal, to make the decisions. However, if you track employee hours with Yaware.TimeTracker it will be more effective and take less time, so try it out to make sure – after the sign up, you get it free for 14 days, no credit card required, all inclusive.
