Why You Need More Than a Time Tracking App to Boost Productivity

Creating a highly productive workplace is critical to the long term success of any business. Productivity allows businesses to increase sales, enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction, improve their bottom line, and realize the full potential of their human resources. It doesn’t just benefit companies - productivity offers many benefits to the employees, too. 

By achieving results that lead to a successful and growing business, employees are far more likely to enjoy incentives including bonuses, pay raises, increased benefits, and other perks as the business continues to grow and thrive.

Businesses around the world are searching for useful tools and apps in the hopes of boosting employee productivity. Some of the most popular productivity boosting solutions currently being used are time tracking apps, which log the time employees spend working on various projects, sales calls, cold calls, and other important tasks. Time tracking apps give employers a clearer picture of whether their employees are spending their time working, or scrolling through their Facebook feed for the fifteenth time.

While time tracking apps certainly have their place in an organization, they’re often not a wholly effective way to increase productivity. The only real purpose they have is to assist billing in organizations where employees or contractors bill for time. In order to boost productivity in a meaningful way, your business needs more than just a time tracking app.

 

The pros and cons of employee time tracking apps

Time tracking apps can be an extremely useful tool for businesses, letting you and your employees accurately log billable hours letting you bill more accurately, as well as better manage and keep track of time spent on projects and tasks. They can also be used to identify tasks that may be taking up valuable time, like responding to emails and meetings, as well as common time wasters like social media and streaming video. By using a time tracking tool to identify these distractions, you can better understand how your employees are spending their time and why they might not be working as productively as they could in a less disruptive environment.

While these are important metrics for employers, time tracking tools can also have a number of drawbacks in terms of productivity. Many time tracking apps are not intuitive and take time to set up, configure, and log time. While this might seem like a minor detail, the amount of time spent manually configuring, setting up, and logging time can eat into employee productivity, completely negating the point of tracking employee time in the first place. There’s also the fact that simply tracking time the spent performing tasks misses out on valuable intangibles like brainstorming and research. Tasks such as these are difficult to track with time as the sole metric, but are essential to employee productivity. In order to accurately measure the full scope of employee productivity, you need to look beyond time.

 

Is it possible to monitor employee productivity accurately?

Using time as the only way to measure employee productivity simply isn’t giving you an accurate picture. Employers are constantly searching for ways to accurately track employee time, but don’t think about how productive that time actually is. Studies have revealed that the average employee is productive for just 2 hours and 53 minutes of a regular 8-hour work day, meaning that just because an employee spends a certain amount of time completing a task, doesn’t mean that time has been spent productively. With this realization, businesses have started searching for a more accurate way to measure employee productivity, including business insight tools and employee monitoring software.

In order to improve employee productivity, you first need to understand how your employees work. Business insights tools like Prodoscore let you access information about how your employees work, including what tools they’ve successfully adopted, how productive they are within each tool, volume of activity, and much more. 

All this information is summarized by a Productivity Score™ for each employee, letting you view employee productivity at a glance, how they compare to other employees, and how they measure up to the organization as a whole. With this information at your fingertips, you can work to improve employee productivity by rewarding high performers, reallocating resources to assist employees who are in need of assistance, and coaching lower performing employees.

 

Discretion and integrations you can trust

Business insights are especially important for businesses currently hosting a remote workforce. Solutions like Prodoscore eliminate the uncertainty involved with working from home, giving you real-time information about how your entire team is working, allowing you to pivot when something just isn’t working for your remote workforce. 

When using business insight tools to monitor productivity, employees don’t need to worry about manually logging time or configuring their app - employers can set it and forget it, with the app discreetly measuring employee productivity in real-time without alienating employees or putting unnecessary pressure on them. Prodoscore integrates with all your favorite workplace solutions, including G Suite and Microsoft Office 365, CRM solutions, phone systems like Salesforce and Zoho, and more.

Productivity is so much more than time spent completing tasks - in order to accurately monitor employee productivity, you need real measurable insights. Business insights are the most effective way to understand the way your employees work, letting you improve trust between you and your employees, increase revenue results by addressing productivity issues head-on and allowing employees to focus on what they’re best at, and improve employee retention by letting you accurately recognize the employees who are thriving, and focus your coaching efforts on those who are struggling.

 

If your business is looking for a way to monitor employee productivity, it’s time that you start looking beyond tracking time. Business insights give you measurable visibility into how your employees are performing, when they’re working best, what their favorite tools are, and what could be done to improve revenue results, enhance employee coaching, and most importantly, boost employee productivity.

Contact us to set up a demonstration of Prodoscore today.