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Discover 14 Best Practices For Implementing Productivity Trackers In The Workplace

Discover 14 Best Practices For Implementing Productivity Trackers In The Workplace

  • Maksymilian Kujawa
  • February 17, 2025
  • 9 min read
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Even though global employee engagement is gradually going up (23% as of 2023), we still lose $8.9 trillion in global GDP due to low engagement. Of course, it’s a multi-faceted issue, but productivity tracking can help you increase employee engagement in your company.

However, tracking productivity is not an easy task for a vast majority of businesses. For one thing, when it comes to productivity tracking, you need something specific, something measurable, otherwise, it’s just your hunch.

And here, we see some discrepancies in the way organizations measure employee productivity vs. how those employees want their productivity to be measured. In 2023, Slack published the second edition of their State of The Work report, which shows those discrepancies.

graphical representation of a research on productivity trackers

Tracking employee productivity: Managers and workers by Slack

On the one hand, managers primarily focus on what the report calls “visible activity“, which is an easy but not necessarily effective way to measure employee productivity. It’s the same story with cost metrics; while they seem easy to implement, they don’t always tell the whole story.

And what about employees? For them, the best form of employee performance tracking focuses on:

  1. Their completion of tasks and goals (27% of answers)

  2. The time spent on a specific activity (13%)

  3. And conversations with their managers (17%)

Why are we talking about this? Because if you want to introduce an effective productivity tracking system to your company, you need to get your employees onboard and make sure you measure team productivity in the right way.

Read on to discover our best practices for tracking productivity in your company (many of them are in line with Slack’s findings).

Introduce a Time-Tracking System That Works Across Departments

First of all, you need a versatile productivity tracking system that allows you to track employee productivity regardless of their department or job description. Productivity doesn’t always mean the same thing.

For instance, sales team’s efficiency depends on the number of client interactions or closed deals. On the other hand, web developers’ productivity can be tracked based on the number of completed sprints or the number of published landing pages.

A good time-tracking software will enable you to adjust productivity tracking to various departments and roles so that you can get valuable insights that are in line with what a given person or team is responsible for.

Only this way will you be able to see and work on some tangible productivity improvements.

Choose Productivity Trackers That Checks All The Right Boxes

While there are many employee-productivity tools out there, you should pick the one that offers everything you need. A good time-tracking software comes with the following features:

The vast majority of those features are available even in the TimeCamp’s free plan!

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Track time in projects and tasks, create reports, and bill your clients in just one tool.

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Even better, if your software offers customization options, especially:

  • Role or team-specific metrics

  • Customizable dashboards

  • Different time-tracking options (live, end-of-day, broad)

Recognize Your Employees’ Productivity Patterns

Every person and every team has its own patterns of work and productivity throughout the day. Understanding how your team performs is the key to making adjustments that will skyrocket your productivity.

For instance, your productivity-tracking tool may reveal that your team is most productive in the morning but experiences a decline in the afternoons. With this insight, managers can adjust work schedules and perhaps even redistribute workloads to align with your team’s “natural rhythm”.

This way, you can not only increase team performance and other KPIs (key performance indicators) but also win higher employee engagement and motivation to work.

Improve your team members' engagement and work-life balance

Help Your Employees Prioritize And Reduce Wasted Time

The truth is that not all employees are perfectly organized or focused at the right things at all times. In fact, in many cases, your employees may not even “feel” that they’re wasting time or how much time this last visit on Facebook consumed.

Time-tracking tools are fantastic when it comes to breaking down daily activities and showing how much time is allocated to productive tasks versus distractions and time-wasters. In many cases, just showing those trends and numbers to your employees will help them with work organization.

Sometimes, additional support (e.g., in the form of deadline reminders) can also be helpful. Of course, the change won’t happen overnight, but over time, with access to the real-time insights, your employee will be able to develop self-awareness and identify areas for improvement, which will allow them to better structure their schedules and manage their priorities.

timecamp productivity trackers dashboard view

Balance Individual And Team Productivity Tracking

In the report we cited at the beginning of this post, managers said they often focus on visible activities. It’s a potential risk because it can put more emphasis on personal productivity vs. team productivity and collective outputs. You should use time-tracking and project management tools to monitor both individual and team progress accurately.

The goal is to have the full picture of productivity in your organization without losing the balance between teamwork and individual contributions. Here are some suggestions that will help you achieve that:

  1. Set role-specific goals that are aligned with team/organization objectives.

  2. Focus on the big picture and monitor primarily outcomes and timely work completion instead of concentrating on micromanaging.

  3. Encourage team members to share their suggestions and feedback on how to improve overall productivity of the given team or department.

  4. Always recognize individual contributions to the team success.

Use Insights From Your Productivity Trackers

Effective productivity-tracking software will provide you with information on how your team performs and what patterns and trends govern their work. Use this input to:

  • Pinpoint potential bottlenecks

  • Identify underutilized resources

  • Identify skill gaps and workflow inefficiencies

  • Improve workforce planning

This input can even be used to work on training plans for your team, plan promotions, and improve task management to be in line with available productivity data. Another interesting idea is comparative analysis. You can segment and compare data across departments, roles, projects, and task types to identify areas for improvement and potential workflow efficiency problems that hinder productivity growth.

Some of those issues may not be apparent at the first sight. For instance, you may find that your seemingly underperforming team simply struggles with unclear guidelines provided by another department that lead to many corrections and revisions of work.

Optimize Workflows With Time Tracking Insights

Time tracking is a goldmine of insights into employee productivity. Use them to optimize your company’s workflow. Here’s how you can do so:

  1. Set specific goals: Good goals to set include reducing task completion times, improving employee performance, and adjusting workloads to make them more aligned with your team’s work patterns.

  2. Identify bottlenecks: Productivity tracking comes in handy when identifying repetitive delays or overstrained processes (e.g., excessive time spent on administrative tasks). Spotting these bottlenecks, discovering their root causes, and eliminating them can help you quickly improve employee performance.

  3. Involve your team members: You shouldn’t just impose productivity tracking on your team. It’s better to involve them in the process, explain the benefits to them, and ask them for feedback and ongoing participation. This way, you will get them onboard more easily and can get even more out of your tracking software because employees will be more willing to support your efforts.

  4. Make employee productivity monitoring an ongoing process: Employee productivity is never constant; it fluctuates depending on many factors (including external ones, such as the weather or time of year), so it’s good to think about it long-term and set tracking for continuous improvement.

Address Uncovered Inefficiencies

If your time-tracking tool shows that overall team productivity could be enhanced, there are a few steps you can take to work on your productivity levels:

  • Try to pinpoint the root causes: Start by identifying the issues that are likely to cause drops in employee productivity. Some of the most common reasons are unclear expectations, too much workload, and skill gaps.

  • Implement corrective actions: Depending on the identified reasons, work on corrective actions to remove bottlenecks and other elements hindering your employee morale and productivity. Typically, such corrective actions include adjusting the work schedules and KPIs, automating some of the processes (especially mundane and repetitive ones), and improving the manager-employee communication and expectations.

  • Track progress: Once you get things back on track, it’s still good to keep monitoring employee productivity long-term. This way, you can spot potential issues sooner and tackle problems before they escalate.

Make Sure You Have Your Employees Onboard

If you want to make the most of tracking employee productivity, you need to ensure your employees understand the goals and expectations behind this solution. To do so, you need to be transparent about your objectives and tracking solutions you implement in the company.

Above all else, you need to clearly define what will be tracked, how the data will be used, and who will have access to it. Assure employees that private or unrelated activities are not being monitored and that tracking employee productivity doesn’t violate your employees’ privacy.

Also, it’s crucial to use employee tracking to improve the overall team performance instead of focusing on individual employees. Of course, this solution should help you monitor progress of both entire teams and individuals, but your employees should not feel threatened by your time management and tracking policy.

Another vital issue is compensation. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is a quite significant gap between the productivity increase and real hourly compensation:

Make sure that’s not the case in your business. Otherwise, you can expect those productivity numbers to go down soon.

Address Compliance And Privacy Concerns

Your team might have reservations about privacy violations or the safety of the data collected by your monitoring and project management tools. It’s important to address these concerns early and implement solutions that protect your employees’ sensitive data.

Here are a few ideas you can use in your business:

  • Limit data collection and anonymize sensitive data: Do not collect data you don’t need for employee productivity tracking purposes. Additionally, it’s good to anonymize data whenever possible, especially when analyzing team-wide or company-wide stats.

  • Implement additional security measures: Some of the solutions you can implement include firewalls, encrypted data transmission (SSL), 2FA (two-factor authentication), and access control.

Integrate Your Tracking Software With Other Tools You Use

Employee productivity tracking should be a part of the larger project management strategy in your business. TimeCamp can be integrated with over 100 different tools, including:

timecamp productivity trackers integrations

Use those integrations to create one comprehensive ecosystem for your team members.

Measure ROI in Productivity Trackers Implementation

Of course, you need to see a positive return on investment in productivity tracking. On average, our clients see almost a 16% increase in productive hours thanks to TimeCamp. To see how it works in your business, focus on the following metrics that will show both increase in productivity and more general financial and operational benefits:

  1. Task completion rates (you should see that more tasks are successfully completed in a similar or even shorter timeframe)

  2. Time saved on tasks completed (you can use time sheets to compare data accurately)

  3. Output quality (improved productivity frequently results in fewer errors, better customer experiences, and higher sales conversion rates)

  4. Increased revenue (on a business level, increased productivity can result in higher sales levels and quicker project delivery, which leads to increases in your revenue)

  5. Reduced operational costs (minimized inefficiencies lead to lower operational costs, reduced overtime, and fewer errors that require corrective actions)

productive hours increase by using timecamp productivity trackers

The same metrics can be used for performance reviews and assessments so that your company gets a comprehensive, unbiased view of employee performance.

Ensure Successful Adoption Of Employee Productivity Tracking

You want your employess onboard when it comes to tracking their daily activity. To do so in a seamless way, you should involve your team in the decision-making process and outline the benefits of this solution for both them and the company.

Many organizations found it helpful to start with a pilot program so that team members could get adjusted to tracking their activity. You can also consider some initial training sessions to demonstrate how the tracker works and how it contributes to the quality of your employees’ work.

Additionally, ensure your employees get all the support they need and give them an open communication channel to share feedback and ask questions about the system you’re using.

When discussing time tracking with your employees, focus on benefits and improvements that will be possible thanks to this system. Your team will be more eager to give this new approach a try if they understand the benefits and feel included in the process.

benefits of adopting timecamp productivity trackers into team's workflow

Lastly: Deal With Potential Challenges

There are four straightforward tactics that will help you overcome potential challenges related to implementing productivity tracking without hurting employee satisfaction.

  • Be transparent: Clearly communicate the purpose of the productivity trackers and how it benefits both your employees and the company.

  • Focus on relevant data: Stick to metrics that truly help improve performance and highlight important findings. Limit data collection to the necessary minimum.

  • Focus on the big picture: Ensure the data reflects the full scope of your team’s work, including outcomes and timely delivery (per Slack report).

  • Avoid micromanaging: Use productivity tools to support your team’s growth, not to micromanage.

Wrapping up

Productivity trackers and employee monitoring can help your business on several levels. With this technology, you will be able to:

  • Identify patterns that govern work in your company

  • Track work hours and productivity goals with ease

  • Discover which repetitive tasks hinder growth or can be automated

  • Work on necessary improvements to enhance productivity and profitability of your company

We encourage you to give this tool a try. You can start for free even today!

Get to know where your time goes with TimeCamp!

Track time in projects and tasks, create reports, and bill your clients in just one tool.

Sign up for free

Sources:

https://slack.com/resources/why-use-slack/state-of-work

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

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Maksymilian Kujawa Seasoned marketer with 5+ years of experience working with SaaS products, B2B audiences, and market research. Passionate about data-driven strategies, storytelling, and bridging the gap between product and market needs. Always on the lookout for automation opportunities, recently deeply interested in the possibilities offered by AI. When not crafting marketing strategies, he enjoys exploring the worlds of business psychology, history, and sports.

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