Benefits of an Office Team Timesheet

The Hassle With a Traditional Office Team Timesheet

As a manager, you know how important it is for your company to track the hours for your workforce. This is especially true if this is used for payroll processing or invoicing for billable hours.

However, in a lot of organizations, despite having a policy about doing time tracking, it is not done or is highly inaccurate.

The reason often is that users do not see the point with reporting their work hours or find it a huge hassle. The reason is that the employee timesheet in these cases comes in the form of a system or simply a spreadsheet, where users need to enter their time manually and remember what they did, when they did it and on which project or activity.

The result is that if you use a system where you need to enter time manually, it very often becomes a huge burden on your staff, and they spend too much time doing this, instead of focusing on tasks that provide more direct value for the company.

In this way you end up with employees who are not happy and also time reports which are inaccurate and can thus not really be used for anything productive.

So what to do?

Luckily there is a way to get around this, so that your employees will be happy reporting their hours and in a way that will be really easy and fast for them.

The Solution

So you are looking for a solution that will be easy for your employees to use and which will also provide you with the data you need to take good business decisions, which will enhance the success of your organization.

If your organization is like most other professional organizations, you are using the Microsoft Outlook calendar for managing your appointments. You should therefor find time tracking software that will integrate seamlessly with this, and use your Outlook calendar appointments as the basis for your time tracking, no matter if it is for billable hours, internal activities or just time off. This will make it possible for you and your team to track your hours efficiently and in an intuitive way, since you are already familiar with the interface from the Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

Your office team timesheet solution should also include the option of having supervisors approve submitted hours, and send reminders if somebody has forgotten to report all their hours required.

It should also provide you with strong reports and data sharing options, so that you can for example export data to Excel or CSV files.

This will all help with the visibility required to move your organization in the right direction to become even more successful.

How Your Timesheet Will Benefit Your Office Team

For your team to really embrace the solution, it is paramount that they see why you are reporting time and also how it benefits them personally.

You should therefor include your staff in the process as soon as possible and show them the benefits of it.

It is important that you really underline that your office team timesheet is not there to control your employees but to help them succeed.

Show your staff how easy it is to report time based on their Microsoft Outlook Calendar appointments compared to more traditional approaches that would have them manually enter their time in a separate system.

Also show them how they can easily see how they spend their time, via the reporting function. This function should be able to be set up in a way, so that you can decide if employees should be able to see the time for the whole company or just their own time.

In all cases it can have a huge impact when you are able to see right on your screen exactly how time has been spent, without any guesswork.

If you are getting a free trial on the time reporting solution before implementing it for the entire organization, it can also be a good idea to engage a few key employees at this early stage as well, so that they can also help, when more people get on board.

That being said, if you find a solution based on your Outlook calendar, almost no training is necessary, which is also great for everybody.

Next Steps

After having read this article you know that more traditional approaches to time tracking may not always be beneficial to your company, when you consider user resistance as well as the inaccurate results you may get.

You should therefor find a solution that is based on your Microsoft Outlook Calendar appointments, so that you can use these as basis for your time tracking.

You should also have powerful reporting capabilities, and the ability to share data with other systems, including just Excel.

Furthermore you should engage your users early and clearly communicate the benefits of the solution, and then you should of course implement the system, so you can reap the benefits as soon as possible.