Employee Time Management Systems

It’s a well-known reality that even with the best of intentions, many people struggle with time. No matter how many time management tips employees use, staying completely productive all the time is nearly impossible. As a business owner, this may not feel like your problem, but if it’s affecting your business, unfortunately, it’s on you.

The obvious problem is that when staff isn’t able to manage their time, they may fail to meet your expectations when it comes to time. This might be that meetings start late, staff don’t arrive to work on time, or maybe they fail to meet deadlines. However, while the problem might seem like an issue with poor work ethic, it could be more related to their inability to manage their time effectively which in turn causes them a lot of stress too.

But here’s where things get a bit sinister. Poor time management is not only problematic for your staff and their wellbeing; it’s deadly for your business. If staff is continually running late, struggling to meet deadlines and achieve work-related goals, your business is at risk.  

This is where you step in. Fortunately, there is a solution. All you need is a better time management system.

If you want to learn more about:

Time management tips to help your staff achieve their goals

How better time management will help your staff use time more efficiently and boost productivity.

Then keep reading.

But before we get into that, what is time management?

Time management is often mistaken for time tracking, and even though they are similar, they are not the same. It’s not about how much time you have, rather how effectively you use it. Time management is more about looking at categories of time.

Once your staff has learned how to manage their time more effectively, they will no longer be worrying about the pressure of a deadline, they will be more efficient, and their overall stress will be reduced. By learning to manage their time wisely, they will procrastinate less and produce more.

So how can you help your staff today?

Effectively Managing Employee Time

Use Buddy Punch to audit their time

Part of the problem with poor time management is humans’ innate inability to accurately estimate where our times goes. Research suggests we grossly underestimate how much time it will take to complete a task while overestimating our level of productivity and how much time is spent on a task.

It is suggested that to aid the problem; staff should become aware of how they spend their time and their daily activities. The ability to physically see what they are doing with their time brings awareness to how much is wasted and together with their employers, they can work to figure out how to use this time more effectively. With the same logic, simply asking staff to keep a close log of how they are using their time should start to change their behavior.

However, this can create a new problem since asking staff to log their time is not necessarily as simple as it sounds. Due to the inconvenience of keeping a log book with them at all times, or simply forgetting to take it with them, it can be a task that is left to the bottom of the pile. That’s why we suggest using Buddy Punch to make things easier. Buddy Punch eliminates this problem as it allows your staff to log what they are doing, whenever they are doing it from any device. So even if they are on the move, all they have to do is whip out their phone and continue logging.

Once you have managed to get your staff to track regularly, Buddy Punch will notify management and keep them up to date with their employees’ logs. This will not only help the manager see how their employees are spending their time, but it will also help hold their staff accountable. If management then notices over a period of time that there are certain points in the day where employees could be using their time more effectively, then they can arrange to meet with them to discuss how to move forward.

While it might feel like a time-consuming task on your part, the benefits of nipping this in the bud for the long term far outweigh the price of continuous poor time management.  

Click here to find out more about employee tracking.

Help employees improve their ability to plan and estimate

When an employee has been given a long-term project, help them create a plan and regularly review it. Ensure that within the plan there are smaller steps to break down the task and make it feel more manageable. Not only does this reduce overwhelm for the employee, but can boost self-esteem when they are regularly checking off tasks they have completed. When planning for longer-term projects, you could also aim to meet targets at an earlier stage than necessary so they if they are a little later, extra time taken to complete the task has already been accounted for.

Encourage staff to exercise and meditate

For your staff, the problem is that it can just feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between checking emails, daily meetings, dealing with clients and phone calls and general interruptions, getting actual work done can feel impossible. That’s not to mention all the unexpected problems that arise, like the file that’s missing required for the early morning meeting. This can cause enormous stress for your employees, which will reduce their level of wellbeing and overall productivity.

While you might think that encouraging exercise and meditation is just another task that takes up your time, the return on investment is well worth it. Both methods are proven to help reduce overall stress levels by increasing endorphins and improving focus. In other words, when staff feels less stressed and more relaxed, they are better able to get on with the tasks provided and get things done more efficiently.

Create a culture to start with your MIT

As a rule, morning time is the most productive time of day. Yet in many places of work, that’s not the way it goes. Instead, staff walk in 5 minutes late, they grab a coffee, they have a chat with their colleagues and they wonder where all their time goes. However, if you adopt the philosophy as a company of “eating the frog” as made famous by Brian Tracy, productivity goes up. The idea is that if you start on your most difficult or important tasks of the day first thing, you will build confidence in your ability to finish tasks and gain the momentum you need to carry on.

Schedule notification check-ins

Never has there been a time where distractions have been such a big part of our lives. Whether it’s a ping from a new email, a phone call from a client or a social media update, there’s no denying that all these (relatively) new distractions are impeding on you and your staff’s ability to get work done. A way around this is to change the settings on your computer so that they can only be checked at certain point in the day. You could take it even further by turning off all app alerts on your mobile devices and tablets. While it might take some adjusting and feel a tad extreme, remind yourself and your staff that the benefits of doing so are worth it. Productivity goes up, the ability to do deep work is improved, stress levels are decreased, and peace of mind is restored. Wins all round.

Employee Tracking

If you think your business could benefit from an employee tracking system to help manage your employees time, look no further than Buddy Punch.

We know how important it is for your business to save money and time wherever you can. We know that you need to make sure your staff is working when they say they are, and you need to use your valuable time to work on the business rather than using your time to complete time-consuming administrative tasks.

Buddy Punch time clock software is designed so that tracking employee time is as easy as possible. Employees can quickly and easily log in and out of the system from any place, at any time, on any device with an internet connection, and administrators can easily access and manage their employee’s accounts to help keep staff accountable.