Introduction

It’s no secret that businesses in all industries are increasingly becoming competitive. They need to manage their time better to remain competitive in their respective industries. A business can only increase its profits faster if employees do their daily tasks within the shortest amount of time.

That is why business owners are increasingly investing in employee time tracking tools and services. In this detailed article, you’ll find the top three benefits of employee time tracking. Let’s find out more.

Ensures Accountability

With a top-rated time tracking system in your workplace, project managers can quickly and straightforwardly monitor:

• The amount of time an employee puts in a given job
• When individual employees complete their tasks
• Which worker completed a specific job

Workers can also easily access the time tracked. This enables them to complete their tasks with enhanced efficiency, hold themselves accountable, and avoid procrastination.

Most time-tracking solutions allow managers to access their workers’ timesheets. This encourages workers to take responsibility for completing required tasks and meet deadlines.

Boosts Productivity

Another major benefit of employee time tracking is that it enables your staff to work more productively. Managers need to assign specific jobs and timeframes to every worker. As a result, they’ll have a clear and focused workflow that’ll keep them on track and motivated. Also, time tracking enables individuals to optimize their time spent working.

By breaking projects down into manageable tasks and measuring the time required to execute each one of them, workers can discover when they’re more productive. Worker time tracking is primarily a way of holding up a mirror to how your employees work.

It allows business owners and managers to gain insights, which help them to make data-driven, positive changes to their workflows. Schedules are the key to a productive staff, and worker time tracking provides you with the data and techniques to achieve that.

Improves Employee Well-Being

Regarding remote and hybrid working, most individuals fall under the umbrella of overworking. With no in-person contact and physical office, it can be challenging to identify workers overexerting themselves.

Overworking, in most cases, is closely associated with high levels of stress and burnout, so identifying this early enough is incredibly beneficial for your team’s well-being. Tracking how long every worker spends working daily can help quickly highlight anyone who's putting in more time than is recommended.

And what is more? Time tracking allows flexible and remote workers to communicate when they aren’t working and establish clear boundaries. This helps them effectively work around each other.

Tracking individual time off can also encourage workers to take enough time away to de-stress. Doing so benefits the well-being of your staff and boosts the productivity levels.

Employee time tracking is a vital tool for companies of all sizes, especially those that hire contractors and remote/flexible workers. Partner with the right employee time-tracking service provider to boost your workers' productivity, increase profits, and expand your business.

Even with the best tech, the heart of the company is its people, who dedicate their time and efforts to growing the business and making it a success. As competition in the global economy increases, leaders and HR practitioners acknowledge the value of a happy, satisfied workforce. 

A good way to ensure employees' satisfaction is to recognize them. Because of this, many HR departments put together and continuously develop recognition programs designed to keep workers happy. Recognition programs aim to recognize and reward good work but may also recognize other important milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries. Companies may use platforms or employee recognition software specifically designed to recognize employees to streamline the process.

There are many ways that employers can recognize employees. Recognition can be formal, like at a year-end conference, or informal, where a manager can acknowledge and thank an employee for their efforts in passing. In some cases, recognition can involve something tangible like a bonus or gift; in other cases, it may be a simple thank you verbally or via email. 

Some companies may gift employees for birthdays, work anniversaries, or holidays. 

Management must know how to recognize an employee and whether or not recognition comes with a bonus or gift.

 While employee recognition is in place to enhance the employees' experience at work, there are several benefits that the company can enjoy. 

Attract and Retain Top Talent

Since many companies compete globally, they have a wider net of available talent. While this may be an advantage, it also means that top candidates have a wider range of potential companies to work for. In the past, it was common for employees to join a firm as a young adult and remain with the company for the duration of their career, regardless of how they felt about the job, employer, and workplace.

These days, it's common and easy for employees to job-hop and move from one company to another if they feel unappreciated or undervalued. Because of this, HR practitioners not only need to work on attracting the best candidates but also need to make sure these employees feel valued and happy at work so that they retain them.

Lower Staff Turnover

High staff turnover rates are bad for businesses. It takes time and money to go through the process of searching for and placing new staff, and once new people have been hired, it takes time to train and onboard them.

A high staff turnover also slows down productivity as, depending on how long it takes to fill a position, the position may be vacant for some time. In this case, the work stalls or is assigned to other employees, adding to their workload. Once a new candidate is hired, it takes time to train and onboard them. 

It is typically more cost-effective and efficient to have staff stay with a company for longer so that work processes and flows are disrupted. 

Improves Employee Motivation and Productivity

People are naturally wired to seek validation. Employees want to know that their efforts are appreciated and that their seniors and peers value their contribution. Often, recognition is linked to engagement and motivation. When employees feel valued, they are motivated to work harder and increase their efforts since they know they are being seen. This improves productivity. 

On the other hand, companies that don't recognize or reward employees may notice that their staff's motivation may decrease. Employees who think management doesn't acknowledge their efforts may adopt a 'why bother' attitude since they feel their work goes unnoticed. 

Reinforces Desired Behaviour

Positive reinforcement is an ideology that states that by praising a specific type of behaviour, people are more likely to repeat it. In the workplace, employees want their seniors to be pleased with them. So, if seniors recognize or praise good work or particular behaviour, employees are more likely to repeat it. 

For example, if an employee puts a lot of time and effort into doing a task and their manager praises them for it, that employee is likely to put the same amount of effort into future tasks knowing that it will please their manager. In this way, the company is getting the desired outcome of high-quality work. 

Conclusion

Recognizing employees, their hard work and their efforts are vital for the business's success. Recognition programs help leaders and HR to ensure employees feel appreciated, which improves productivity, helps attract and retain the best talent, reinforces desired behaviour, and boosts motivation. 

This month’s CFO Insight feature looks at the work of Rob Gorle - Finance Director of Perkbox, a leading digital employee engagement and customer loyalty saas platform. It’s designed to help businesses of all sizes attract, retain and motivate staff and customers. Since its launch in 2015, Perkbox has grown its annual revenue to £14M and recently raised £4.3m through crowdfunding platform Seedrs – the largest of its kind, which included an investment from VC Draper Esprit. Robert has previously worked at a number of other tech start-ups, including Zattikka and Plumbee. Here he talks about the ins-and-outs of his position and the challenges and rewards of supporting financial and commercial projects in such a high-growth and fast-paced environment.

 You worked for Yahoo! Inc. for over 7 years – could you tell us a bit about the experience?  What did these 7 years teach you and how do you draw on this in your current role?

 Yahoo! has some of the smartest and most driven people, many of whom have gone on to work with or set up other leading companies. Despite its size, it’s managed to keep a fun, young ‘work hard play hard’ culture. I had a number of roles, where I focused on financial planning and analysis. I spent three years at its HQ in Silicon Valley, getting involved in group-level planning. It was a rare opportunity for me to learn and get experience across a range of finance areas, ranging from systems, planning, management insight, commercial product analysis through to governance and M&A - much of which is still relevant to a fledgling start-ups’ finance team. I learnt how to work within a complex matrix organisation structure – everything after that has been relatively simple!

What goals are you arriving with as a Finance Director of Perkbox? What do you hope to accomplish?

 It’s important to understand the structure of the business and ensure that there are appropriate systems and controls in place, so that we have a solid foundation to scale. I’ve been here a few months now and we’ve already rolled out a new budget and forecasting framework, planned our first audit and are mid-way through implementing a new accounting system. I’m also looking forward to bringing a different perspective to the leadership team to support key decisions and prioritization, and to help identify any potential issues early. With this combination of governance, insight and decision support, I hope to help the company scale to achieve its huge potential in a growing market.

What are some of the challenges have you been faced with so far?

 Perkbox received a £4.4M funding in December and has already started to invest in its team. One common challenge at this exciting stage with new funding, is the difficulty in prioritizing investment across multiple requests from different products and functions, as well as new initiatives. Perkbox’s management team have maintained its focus on the core UK market to firmly establish itself as a leader, but different opportunities and extensions to the product are constantly under review.

Where revenue has tripled for two years running, the company has certainly experienced some growing pains. Without the time or priority to invest in new systems, the level of manual work has increased significantly in some areas. The new Netsuite accounting system will help to address this and help us scale by interfacing between different systems and automating various time-consuming processes.

Perkbox is a young, innovative start-up and it is critical to keep the energy and spark alive by empowering individuals to make quick decisions, while at the same time having robust processes and control in place during periods of rapid growth. We have updated key processes and even found, in some cases, that it was possible to reduce decision-making friction through clearer approval responsibilities, but we are aware that this is an area that needs to be regularly updated as the company grows headcount and expands.

Could you tell us about Perkbox’s extensive plans to expand in the UK?

 Over the past two years, Perkbox has become one of the leaders in the UK market, with over 5,000 customers, ranging from employers looking to engage a small team, through to customer loyalty schemes with 100k+ users. We are continuing to focus our resources on the UK, where we have now grown to over 130 staff. In January, we opened a new office in Sheffield to handle some of our sales and customer support areas.

We’re aiming to increase our market share for both customer loyalty and employee engagement products, and are rolling out tools across the business to help us segment our markets. Our initial offering was very much focused on SMEs, but as our range of perks and discounts has grown, we’ve become an effective retention tool for customers of all sizes.

What does the future hold for you and Perkbox? Do you have any upcoming plans or projects you would be willing to share with us?

We’re very much a technology company and are constantly redeveloping and improving our product. The 2017 plan includes a full roadmap of new features for making the rewards and discounts easier to use and administer and more relevant and engaging for different types of customers. We’re always on the lookout for great channel partners to offer new rewards, and for enthusiastic staff who share our passion for creating engaging products.