How to Successfully Implement Time Tracking at Your Company

The Ultimate Reason Why Your Company Fails at Time Tracking

These days many companies decide to implement time tracking. And it’s a fantastic solution that allows the entire organization to stay on top of work. Yet thousands of businesses from all over the world every day struggle to make time tracking effective. How to successfully implement time tracking in your company? What is the great secret?

In fact, it is all easy. Very often companies decide to start using time tracking software for the sake of doing it. Sometimes it’s because they have to, because the Management Board has ordered to track employees attendance. And it’s not enough to just get the tool, launch it, and voilà, it’s all done. It’s much more than that.

While time tracking can be incredibly helpful in organizing work, managing employees, payroll, projects and workflow, it has to be done smartly. Implementing time tracking is a process. It takes not only time but also knowledge, engagement, and the right strategy.

In this article, we’ll guide you through the right procedure of implementing time tracking software. We sat down with our CEO to discuss this problem and help your company get on track.

How to Avoid Mistakes?

The first step every organization should consider when implementing time tracking is how to avoid mistakes. Why is that? Because it’s enough to make even one wrong move to make time tracking go wrong.

However, there are steps you should take to get the desired results. If you’re not applying any strategies, you are less likely to succeed.

How does time tracking look like in your company? If you want to avoid mistakes or improve your current tactics, here are 11 rules you should follow to successfully implement time tracking.

1. Explain

This is the first thing you should do if you want to implement time tracking in your organization – tell people why the company needs it, what are the benefits, how it works, and how good it can be for them.

They should know the company’s expectations, rules, and requirements towards their employees.

2. Follow the company’s rules on time tracking

If your company allows you and your team to track time the way you want it, fantastic! But most organizations prefer to have a coherent set of rules that every employee must follow. Not without a reason. If people track time according to the established standards, all processes are smooth and highly efficient.

It’s important to check if everything works properly. It takes minutes, sometimes seconds. It’s the only way to always be up to date with the possibility of potential errors in the use of the program by employees.

3. Use the right tools

Tracking time doesn’t mean that your employees have to spend extra time filling timesheets, checking and calculating all the numbers. Quite the opposite. There are so many tools, such as TimeCamp, that do all the work for your people. It would be a sin not to use such apps.

All your employees have to do is turn on the timer and the software automatically collects all the data. It’s a great way to eliminate manually filling timesheets.

👉 Read also our article about Best Time Recording Apps!

4. Track all activities

According to a study from AffinityLive cited in the Harvard Business Review, “the U.S. economy is losing 50 million hours, or $7.4 billion a day, in productivity.”

That’s because employees don’t track activities such as e-mail checking or creating a reply (which may take more than just 5 minutes daily), scrolling down their Facebook fee or reading news. If people knew how much time they spend on all the activities, it would be easier for them That’s why time tracking is crucial, even if you track time of a coffee break.

If you think that the slightest differences in your daily reports don’t make any difference to your company, you couldn’t be more wrong. Let’s calculate – 5 minutes a day is 25 minutes a week which makes over 100 hours in a week. Those lost or extra hours can contribute to revenue loss. You don’t have to be a mathematician to notice that.

5. Only let Managers create projects and tasks

Over the years we have identified a problem common for many companies – assigning time devoted to one task to different projects by all employees in the company. This is due to the fact that employees create their own task names. It’s a good idea to limit the number of people who can create tasks. Only people who are responsible for the entire project should be allowed to do that, for example, a project manager.

6. Make one person responsible for time tracking

You should appoint one person in your company who would take care of time tracking implementation. And later such a person would control time tracking on a daily basis. It will guarantee that employees obey the rules of monitoring their work. Also, people could turn to that person with potential problems instead of bothering each other and pulling away from work.

7. Clearly inform that tracking time is obligatory

If you want to measure your employees work hours, you should require them to use the tool which you make available to them. Before you implement time tracking, say it out loud.

Time tracking must be your employees’ obligation. Feel free to remind them about that every day, and if you have to, every hour. With time, they may stop paying attention to it.

8. Show People The Benefits

When you implement time tracking, you should tell your employees about its advantages. Talk to your staff and show them the good sides of such a software. Tell them it’s not only for you but also for them. To make their work easier and more effective.

You may want to consider rewarding those employees whose productivity and results have increased. That will be a great motivation and you will be surprised how much people will be willing to use time tracking.

9. Communicate the perfect work outcome

Managers must clearly define what results they expect from employees. On the other hand, employees must justify any deviation from the ideal work image created by the manager. Work time monitoring should be reflected in the company culture itself and should not boil down to percentages and figures. Instead, it should constitute of work efficiency measured in terms of labor input, and their profitability. That’s what TimeCamp is for.

10. Make work easier for HR Department

To properly implement time tracking, the software should completely eliminate the need for book-based recording of working hours, holidays, business trips or overtime. Microsoft Excel is the basic tool for such work. You can easily export data to Excel with many applications (e.g. TimeCamp) so that with the correct configuration of the program, the work of the HR department will be more efficient.

11. Improve the process of working time monitoring

As mentioned before, if you want to implement time tracking in your company, you have to think about it as a process. But to make it successful on an ongoing basis, you have to maintain and improve this process.

Expectations, plans, processes, and assumptions related to time tracking may change over time. That’s why it’s crucial to constantly analyze, measure and interpret the outcomes. If you’re not achieving satisfactory results, ask yourself, “What went wrong?” That’s a key question in enhancing the process of time management in your company.

Time Tracking Made Easy

Time tracking can be a really painless and even pleasant activity. Yes, it can be pleasant. Because when your employees can eliminate timesheets which have to be filled manually and see how exactly their workday looks like, they can get more organized and productive.

TimeCamp - timesheet and reports

TimeCamp dashboard with the graphical view of time spent on top apps and sites, categories, and projects. Your employees can easily see (and probably get shocked) how much time they spend on certain activities.

Report - People By Days and Tasks

TimeCamp allows you to see all the tasks your team has been working on, when they worked on them and for how long. The reports are precise and if needed, you can change, edit or remove them.

Graphical timesheet integrated with calendar is a week timesheet, a calendar-like way to track time. This type of view allows your employees to quickly and easily add time for specific timeframe during the desired day by drawing (adding) entries. It visualizes all work so that you can get a quick insight into your employees’ workflow, see the billable and non-billable hours, and easily schedule and manage time and attendance. It helps to get a precise picture of how many hours your employees work.

TimeCamp is a modern and innovative time tracking software. If you want to implement time tracking in your company, this is a perfect choice. It’s easy-to-use, very intuitive, and your employees won’t need any guide or detailed manual to use it. It’s that simple.

Final Thoughts

Remember, if your organization struggles to implement time tracking, it’s not the fault of the software. You might simply not paying attention to the process of implementation itself. If you still have a problem with proper time tracking in your company, review the entire process of implementing the system.

We hope this guide is helpful and you can now see your mistakes and define the main issues and obstacles. Engage your team in actions and take your company to another level.

⇓ Watch our video tutorial to see how TimeCamp works ⇓

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.

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Kate Borucka Kate is a professional freelance copywriter and translator with a niche focus on time tracking software, time management, and SaaS solutions. With a degree in English studies, she has a knack for turning complex technical topics into clear, engaging content that resonates with diverse audiences. When she’s not immersed in the latest software trends or navigating linguistic differences between English and Polish, she’s busy trying to master the art of squeezing more hours out of the day—juggling work, life, and embarking on new adventures with her endlessly curious daughter, discovering the world together (and loving every minute of it), always finding ways to weave the insights from their adventures into her creative work.

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