An employee is a valuable asset to a company. They are responsible for moving a company forward in its growth and expansion. They are the backbone of a company. Various employees hold various positions of responsibility in the company, look after various sectors, and work together. Considering such a scenario, it becomes more than important to look after your employees’ welfare and check whether each employee is performing their tasks efficiently or not. If not, steps can be taken to determine what makes the employee not perform up to his optimum potential and what can be done to improve it.

Is productivity and time tracking related?

Productivity can be referred to as something that measures or, rather, determines how effectively you complete your tasks at hand. Time tracking, as mentioned earlier, is rather the measure of an employee’s work hours. The two terms are not directly related, however in an indirect fashion, one can make a statement that the more productive an employee will be, he will be more efficient in his tasks. He will complete more tasks in the same time frame compared to other employees. People, in general, have the misconception that proper productivity strategies are just another jargon of the modern world used to justify their modern-day hypes.

On the other hand, people are unaware that productivity can be quite beneficial. You may be employing some productivity techniques regularly, but you may not realize that anything that improves your task performance efficiency also contributes to productivity. It’s just a matter of realizing it. So, in a way, productivity and time tracking although are a measure of two different things but two of them can be combined and used in such a way so that the employee who is the most efficient gets better pay, given that it is established that the organization or the company follows the same policy.

What exactly is time tracking/time management?

Time tracking is essentially a mechanism used by many organizations in which, as the name suggests, they monitor the time that an employee spends at their company. In simpler words, time tracking is the mechanism that monitors the working hours of any particular employee in any specific organization. Once an apt judgment is made, the employees are paid accordingly based on their time at the organization. Several software and services are available that help in time tracking and one such software is BuddyPunch.

There are several tools, software, and technologies available on the internet that have automated the process of time tracking for the employees and have reduced the workload on the organizations. In the past, however, several companies went the manual, non-automated route and required that every employee enter their required time details – be it entry time, exit time, and much more. Each month (or whenever the payment period is calculated depending on the company to company), a proper tabulation is made based on the time tracking analysis from the employee’s data. Based on this, the required formalities are done. However, one can already guess the disadvantages of this manual time tracking mode.

  •   Time Consuming: Suppose there is a very large organization – so large that it handles close to 1000-3000 employees (or even higher than that) daily. Based on this, imagine the amount of time wasted, wherein each employee has to locate their entry in a particular notebook. If not, he has to find out where exactly his data is stored, and once this is done, check the time and fill every column as required by the company in concern. Now again, imagine this process is repeated by all company employees multiple times of the day. Wouldn’t this be inconvenient? Aren’t the employees wasting their time unnecessarily on things that are not even productive in terms of the work that is required at the company?
  •   Probability of incorrect data: Humans tend to make mistakes. In cases like these, when several other things are running concurrently in an employee’s mind, he might tend to lose track of time and enter incorrect data into his timesheet by mistake. Apart from this, some employees might also use unfair means and enter incorrect data to inflate their working hours to get more pay artificially. Keeping morality out of the question, it can be established that manual mode is no longer necessary to maintain time tracking of employees.

Because of these reasons, several software and services have come up with automated solutions for time tracking, and one such company is BuddyPunch. In automated solutions, the only thing that an employee has to do is enter his fingerprint into any machine. There is an internal clock set up in the machine. As soon as any finger is placed in the detector of the machine, it scans the fingerprint, matches the scanned fingerprint with the database, and assigns a particular timestamp to the matched employee based on the time on the system. As it is evident, it not only reduces all the disadvantages of the manual mode, since the process is very instant, so there is no loss of time, and since the machine does time management hence there are no chances of human errors; hence the organization can track time of their employees more effectively.

What should be the features of an ideal time tracker?

There are numerous time-tracking software and services available in the market, so it becomes necessary to determine and judge which time tracking is the best for you. It will entirely depend on your use case.

  •   Decide whether you want to go the manual route or the automated route: There are a lot of factors to consider before you decide to go the automated route. If your organization size is small and does not want to invest in this zone, you can opt for the manual route. However, if your organization size is considerably larger, choosing the automated route is the best for you.
  •   Make sure it is light on your pocket: Since there is a variety of time tracking software out there offering a variety of features, make sure you select that particular service that gets your job done. Do not pay for services that you do not need. You can try out BuddyPunch for good pricing plans and better services.