How to talk your employees into work time recording? 5 effective tips!

Work time recording is very often the key aspect for people running a business. Time tracking greatly helps them price projects for clients, analyze the amount of work time spent by the team, and determine project profitability. How to convince your team to track and report their work time eagerly? We are offering five effective and helpful tips drawn from our deployment experience.

1. Give your team an appropriate and user-friendly tool for work time recording!

Providing the proper work time reporting tool is the key to success. Offering your team a solution that is easy to use and work time tracking will not cause any more problems. Tracking work time will become part and parcel of your employees' task-based work as this is how they will operate every day. Your employees will not have to take any extra steps to record, track, and report how much time they spent on a project or task. Make sure you avoid hybrids of any kind. If you deploy different tools for different duties, it will not lead to a better work organization. Imagine you have a tool for reporting work time, another tool for task-based work, and yet another one for in-house communication. This will, without doubt, not be environmentally friendly for your employees.

Quite the contrary, it will cause more chaos in daily work. When considering which one of the available solutions to use, pay attention to the fact that the more complex a tool is, the better it will be for your business and teamwork. As for IC Project, it combines project-based and task-based work, work time tracking and reporting, team communication, file and document circulation, and more. You should also make sure that the tool you use is transparent and intuitive, and it seems that is the chief strength of the Polish project management tool IC Project.

Don't forget that work time tracking software is not only a solution for employees but also a key instrument for people managing their business. However, in this case, you have to pay attention to converting data into proper views. The IC Project lets you assign an hourly rate to every employee, and every iteration of tracking and reporting work time will be automatically calculated into the cost of the given employee in the financial module. This feature gives you a clear and transparent outlook on the profitability of your projects. It seems to be the perfect example of a comprehensive approach. When implementing a tool, let's focus our attention not only on the employee but also on the financial and reporting performance—for the benefit of the business owner. If we only have positive effects in the two above aspects, we will be ready for all solutions when it comes down to reporting time off work and project-and task-based work.

2. Demonstrate how work time reporting will benefit the business and management.

Work time reporting is very often perceived by employees as a form of additional control of their work on the part of their superiors. Do not let your team think about changes introduced in your business this way. Work time tracking is key for calculating project profitability and analyzing what we spend our work time on the most, but by no means does it serve to control and exactly check who and how they work in the business. Explanations for any situation must always be given with the person in mind who communicates and oversees changes in the business, so it is key to talk to your team and allow your employees to air their opinions.

During the discussion, decide how you would like to measure work time and what tools would be useful and necessary to do it. It's also worthwhile explaining why such a need appeared in the business in the first place. The most common causes include analysis of what the team devotes work time the most to so that small tasks do not escape attention during the evaluation process; much more precise appraisals for clients, taking into account the financial aspect and analysis of previous projects; checking whether the team performs any extra duties, which can also be priced; and seeing whether the entire workflow can be better streamlined. Truth be told, work time tracking is the preliminary step for the work in the business to be streamlined and employee productivity to be boosted thanks to the optimization of certain processes. Agree on a common plan of action, terms, and other details that will ensure a clear circulation of information when introducing changes in your business.

3. Offer your employees small benefits for reporting their work time.

When implementing an IC project, we are often asked how to encourage the team to track and report the most significant part of the time devoted to work. In many cases, a candid conversation demonstrating the benefits, the provision of a proper tool, or a simple authoritative instruction can be helpful, although the latter is not always effective. In this case, a simple benefit for the team proves to be the perfect solution – we strike a clear and transparent deal with our subordinates. What could be a benefit in this case? Let's give several examples from which we learned from the creativity of the businesses implementing the IC Project with us in their daily work.

Example 1: Agree with the team that any employee who reports and tracks at least 90% of their total work time can end the week an hour earlier. Imagine a situation where a vast majority of the team leaves work at 3 p.m. on Friday and two or three employees have to stay an hour longer. For our money, they will be the first to take care of reporting their work time in the week to come. Let's face it, it doesn't cost the business anything because one hour is no loss (given work time is burnt on different extra tasks, breaks, a cup of coffee here and there, or additional meetings) and it will eventually give a plethora of benefits thanks to better tracking and optimization of business processes.

Example 2: There has been a very popular trend these days when you offer your team fresh fruit, cookies, or other delicacies. Maybe this will solve the problem. And again, we move in the same direction: if the entire team reports at least 90% of their entire work time in one week, they will be welcomed with fresh fruit at work on the following Monday. Any costs to your business? Negligible, and yet it seems that every employee would like to start a week with a warm welcome on the part of their employer and vitamins in the delicious form of fruit. Of course, fruit can be replaced by anything else. However, remember that this example is a bit different from the one described earlier. Here, we take advantage of team pressure, where the lack of a report from one employee will lead to no benefits for the rest of their colleagues. On the other hand, Example 1 revolves around individual responsibility. We present different solutions depending on how you would like to proceed in your business and what incentives you would like to use.

Example 3: Inflation is a natural phenomenon in Poland, which is growing day by day. Therefore, you are surely going to give people pay raises in your business. Why don't you use the time when you introduce work time tracking to offer some minimum raises? Let's go for a simple solution: your employee reports at least 90% of their entire work time for a month and they will receive PLN 100 extra with their salary. Any costs to your business? Again, negligible, and yet you benefit from the fact that you introduce a raise and a condition to be met to get it. We are convinced that such a decision will evoke euphoria in the team and will also motivate them to track and report time. It will probably be very difficult to find a person who will not take additional money for simple reporting of their work time using a dedicated and user-friendly tool. Remember that the proper tool gives you access to special reports, thanks to which you will see exactly how much time the given employee reported in the given month.

4. You have to show patience and consistency in action.

No matter the steps you take to implement work time reporting in your business, you will also have to demonstrate a great dose of patience and consistency. Regardless of what we talk about, every new thing in your business needs time to get used to it. The first days or even weeks are also marked by poor memory of what to do and a lack of well-developed habits, but all this will change in time. As long as you keep on reminding and singling out employees with missing reports, you will allow your team to catch on to proper habits. We are certain that even if you offer a benefit, there will be employees who will begin by simply forgetting to track their work time.

You have to be forgiving towards them. By reminding, informing, and setting reminders in your tool, you will achieve the desired results. Remember – you can’t give up after several days if there is no effect and your team is not willing to report the work time; it is through consistency that you will achieve it and the changes will grow on your team. Let's stress the fact that you will always have the final say, and let's keep it at that.

5. Set an in-house reporting methodology—better organization defeats chaos.

It is crucial to set an in-house methodology for work in your business. The more liberty you leave to your employees in deciding how to work, the less organized your business will be. This works the same in implementing tools—if you provide different tools for different processes, for instance, communication, tasks, projects, and files, you will have more chaos. Try to find a comprehensive solution that offers one common platform for teamwork. This is the first aspect that will set the foundations for the methodology of work in your business.

Moving forward, choose a way to report work time together with your team. As exemplified by the IC Project, we have two different options to track and report work time – by manually entering the time devoted on the given day to the given task after the work is done or by implementing ongoing tracking with a counter followed by reporting the time spent working as indicated by the counter. Discuss with your team which option would be better. A lot of companies decide to employ one method, but there is a bulk of businesses that leave freedom to the employee in this case—allowing them to choose a way that is most adapted to their needs and expectations. This can also work. Remember that tracking and reporting should be carried out in your tool – this is how you will get specific calculations and outlooks from this. Do not let some of your employees leave their reports in Excel, for instance, because work time recording will make no sense then—it will just give you more to work on and no tangible benefits.