Easy Time Tracking of Employees in Outlook
Most people today know how important employee time tracking is to ensure the success of your business or organization.
It is an essential element for knowing how time is spent and being able to act accordingly.
Unfortunately, there are also challenges associated with hour registration if you do not choose the right solution, but in turn, great gains if you choose the right one.
In this article, we will look at the challenges of traditional time tracking, how to make time reporting easy, get employee support, and make it a success.
Read on…
Challenges with traditional time registration
If you have tried a traditional approach to hours recording, you know how much of a hassle it can be. In most cases, it requires you to switch to another system just to enter your time. Often you have already written down what you have done somewhere, so also having to enter it manually in another system is both a hassle as well as time consuming.
Furthermore, you have to remember what you did and when you did it, and this can be hard to remember when standing with one foot out the door on your way to go on weekend.
In many places, employees have already entered their appointments in their calendar, so to make their time entry, they have to go over their calendar and copy info from here to another system. It is time consuming and there is also a great risk of missing appointments. This hassle then often results in the time reporting not being done at all, and if it does, it often requires a supervisor or manager to remind employees.
It’s annoying and frustrating for everyone.
So how do you make it easy?
How to make time tracking of employees easy
When choosing a solution, whether it is software for timesheets or something else, it is often a good thing to build it on something your employees already know.
It is also important to find a solution that supports your organization’s structure and way of working so that it works as a strength for you.
Most professional companies and organizations use the Microsoft Outlook calendar to manage appointments and time, so build on that. Find a time tracking solution that utilizes the Outlook Calendar. With the right solution, you can use your appointments as the basis for your timesheet reporting. When you create an appointment, you simply add the relevant organization, project and activity and that is it. It’s incredibly easy for your employees. They no longer have to go into several different systems or sit and copy info from the calendar to another system.
Moreover, the time tracking is actually getting done and it will certainly be more accurate as well.
Get support from your employees
In order to get the support of your employees to introduce such a solution, it is important that you involve them from the start. Talk to them about the fact that timekeeping of employees is not about breathing down their necks and keeping an eye on them not cheating with their hours. It is to strengthen their work and the organization as a whole.
Show them the benefits it gives them both individually and also for the entire organization.
Show them how they can go in and pull reports themselves and see how their time is being spent. That way they can see how much time they spend on different projects and activities, and even optimize their time according to it.
Another really important thing that your employees will be happy about is no longer having to go into other systems to report their hours, as well as having to sit and copy info from one program to another and remember when they did what. They can use Outlook for that. So it’s both tremendously easy to learn and tremendously easy to use. They will certainly appreciate that too.
Easy flextime support
If your organization has a set of rules on how many hours to register on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, etc., it is important that your solution easily gives you an overview here. The solution should allow you to define how many hours should be reported, and then you should be able to get a quick overview of how many hours have been registered compared to what was to be reported.
You can also give your users the right to pull this info themselves so that they can continuously see if they have reported more hours or if there is little to catch up on. It will make life so much easier for everyone.
Easily share data
When you have gotten time tracking of employees in place, you will of course also want to see how time is being spent.
Your solution should come with a powerful reporting feature that allows you to easily pull a report that gives you an overview of how time has been spent, both on individual items and for the organization as a whole. In addition, you should also have the opportunity to dive into the numbers if you need to.
The reports should be easily printable for example to paper or pdf, or saved in Excel format, so that you can easily share info with relevant stakeholders, be it customers, project managers, management, etc.
If you need more, it is also a good feature to be able to import and export data via CSV files.
Make it a success and start now
So when you are looking for a solution for time tracking of employees, avoid systems where you have to enter data manually and where your employees are interrupted in their work. Make it easy for everyone and build on something familiar, the Outlook Calendar.
Show your employees the benefits of the solution and how it will actually help them in their work.
All this will mean that the time registration is actually getting done and that everyone is happy to do it, as everyone can reap the benefits of the right solution.
The right solution will also allow you to sign up for free, so that you can try it out and see how it will work for you in your organization.
Do it now.
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