Even if you’re not billing out project hours or measuring how resources are employed across the organisation, time management tools will give you the real facts about how time is split across each section of the team.
Individuals will also appreciate how their days are spent and can optimise their working habits to ensure they’re using time effectively. Rolling out timesheets won’t always be the most popular decision, but logging hours really does have benefits in the end.
Time management software systems are not just about clocking in and out. Although we use timesheets to log total hours in-house here (this is a legal requirement in Ireland), we also use ‘Projects‘ to record hours worked on specific jobs.
It's not unusual in many modern, fast-growing companies with flat structures that hours are split across both sales and marketing tasks and sub-tasks. Keeping a note of these – and associating hourly costs to them – helps to keep track of time spent in these roles and associate them with cost centres after the reports are exported each month.
Accurate records are also helpful evidence for staff to illustrate when they have pressures on time spent focusing on specific functions and to prove why they might need the additional resources they’ve been requesting.
Similarly, managers can also give meaningful guidance on where to adjust or correct the ratios of time spent. Or assistance in helping to streamline the workflows of team members to correct the proportions of where focus and priorities should lie.
This horizontal and vertical approach to logging working time provides managers of remote, hybrid, and flexible workers with a strong overview of what their team is doing.
Time management solutions integrated into the wider HR management suite give a further, holistic view of where resources are employed.
A single solution that can export data on all billable hours, total worked hours, and employee costs makes sense for reporting, resource planning, and accounting purposes.
Solutions that allow you to log in from any device, anywhere, add a further element of control, especially for remote teams in the field.
Clocking in and out from the road using a mobile and adding notes on which client or project the team member has interacted with or spent time preparing material or following up on – is invaluable for billing purposes.
One of the main things that rose to the surface when we started using the project hours in-house here was how working in blocks is way more efficient than flitting from task to task.
Even some of the more experienced team members, especially, have shifted from being vehemently proud of their multi-tasking abilities from days of yore to realising that reacquainting yourself with projects that you dip in and out of is super inefficient. Whereas allocating time and working to make progress on larger chunks of work is much more effective.
And all this is only apparent once time management software is in place to show the facts.
If you don’t record the facts – and base actions on that data – then aren’t you just guessing?