3 non-obvious advantages of an accurate time tracker

For a business owner, project manager or CIO, few things can be so destructive to a business morale or the respect the employees have for management as hypocrisy. Why? Here are some reasons:

Lead By Example

The most obvious reason for a founder or project manager to keep track of their time is the force in impulse it provides to the rest of the company. This is specifically important with an innovation like time tracking, which is often met with much resistance.

“Time tracking is a subject that causes many a manager’s eyes to roll,” observes Kelly Totten, Accounting Consultant and digital CFO for Creative Service Firms. “The concern is understandable. Most of us have experienced the negative consequences that occur when bad time tracking practices are employed.”

If the founder or project manager of a company sets the lead in tracking their own time, it can be a big motivator toward helping employees to do the same things and defeat the negative spout time tracking can sometimes have.

The Insight

One of the greatest benefits of time tracker is the understanding it gives you into your company’s productivity and profitability. Namely, time tracking helps you to see how your resources are spent.

Are they being spent on projects that generate substantial profit or are they being wasted on projects that generate a small percent of the company’s profits? Is a toxic client tying up a big portion of your employees’ work time? Does that problematic client represent the bulk of your company’s income, so that it would be more profitable to devote more resources to them? Or is that client a small drop in the ocean? Do your employees work as efficiently as possible or are they bogged down by antiquated PCs, work courses or other obstructions?

An automatic time tracker can help you answer these questions and more. The benefit this provides is compounded if you can motivate all of your employees to adopt the same “big picture” approach. Too many managers create a culture of "drones" demanding little more than blind obedience from employees. By supporting your employees to see the full picture and how the time tracker fits into it, you can create a new work culture where everyone collaborates and looks for ways they can improve their productivity.

Self-Improvement

Any discussion of time tracking would be incomplete if it did not also include benefits to you personally, the project, or top manager. Possibly, the one biggest benefit is the insight that you will gain into how your time is being used and the potential rebuilding you may be able to do.

“Most owners normally work 2,500 or more hours a year,” says Travis Snider, Small Business Accelerator Lead Instructor and Business Coach at Everett Community College. “If less critical tasks can be reduced by 30 percent, 700 hours per year may become available for other purposes. What could you do with an extra 700 hours per year worth $200 or more per hour?”

Thats right, but without accurately tracking your time, you have no chance of knowing accurately how your time is spent vs how much is wasted. With the automatic time tracker, you may find your daily practice more streamlined, less stressful and far more productive.

As anything in business, the success of introduction of time tracking on a company-wide basis largely depends on the model that you, the founder or project manager, set. By installing time tracking as something equally important both for the management and the employees, you can help your company to become more profitable, help your employees to get personally invested in the company and help yourself to be even more productive.