4 Reasons Why You Should Give Your Employees Access to Their Time Tracking Data
Employee time tracking app offers powerful productivity stats on each individual employee. Here are four reasons why employees should be able to see them as well.
It’s a well-known and, maybe for you, already empirically proven fact that an employee time tracking app is a useful tool for employers. It lets you see what your workers are doing - whether they’re busy at work or slacking off - and how long it takes them to finish certain tasks.
All of this is packed up neatly into informative reports, trends and statistics for each individual employee. This way, you know how productive and efficient your employees are, as well as what kinds of tasks they struggle with the most and what distractions they indulge in most often.
Based on these insights, you can make decisions aimed at improving productivity and optimizing business processes. But there’s something you’re missing out on…
If, for whatever reason, you keep all the insightful data to yourself and away from those that the data refers to - employees themselves - you risk not using the full productivity-boosting potential of software employee time tracking.
Many time management apps allow your employees to log in and get an overview of their own statistics, and this article will aim to convince you to consider using this functionality.
To that end, here are four ways how the simple act of letting your employees know about the login possibility and encouraging them to use it on a regular basis can positively affect their productivity:
1. Transparency
Building trust by enforcing transparency on your part should begin by telling your employees they’ll be tracked before the process even begins. But if you let them see their employee time tracking app data, this transparency is taken to the next level.
OK, but what does this have to do with productivity?
Well, for starters, productivity tends to improve when motivation goes up. And access to time tracking data demonstrates to employees that you trust them and that they can trust you too. This positive atmosphere is good for motivation and willpower. And productivity is just a natural product of this.
In addition, being able to see what you see in your employee time tracking app significantly lowers any stress employees might be under as a side effect of being monitored. And we know that stress and productivity don’t quite get along.
2. Source of Insight and Inspiration for Improvement
You, as a manager or an HR, use these stats to come up with strategies for improvement all the time. But you don’t really have time to go through each employee’s data individually and tailor specific methods for each one of them. Best you can do is create general guidelines and provide team-level feedback.
But imagine your employees having access to the same data. They will not only have just one subject to look at, but they’ll also care about the results of the productivity improvement strategies.
Thanks to employee monitoring software, employees can see how much time they spend in productive apps, what their biggest distractors are, and whether their productivity is improving over time. This might just prompt your employees to start coming up with strategies of their own. Those will be more detailed and personalized than you’d ever be able to manage.
3. Best Face Forward
Another factor that has the potential to lead to increased productivity is employees’ natural drive to present the best possible version of themselves to their superiors. They don’t want you to think they’re slacking off. They’d much rather be viewed as productive and therefore valuable to the company.
What this means is that if you give them access to employee time tracking app data and they see that their performance is going down, they’ll be prompted to work a bit harder to get themselves back on track and prove to you that they’re still a valuable asset.
This urge to put their best face forward can only be focused and stress-free if they can see what exactly they should be working on through time tracking recording software. And, who knows, it might as well turn into a habit.
4. Gamification
Finally, there’s this element of fun and competitiveness that emerges whenever you have statistics you can influence, just as is the case with employee time tracking app.
If you give your employees a glimpse into the data and metrics tracked by time clock tracking software, you have a chance of awakening this game element of workplace productivity. The thing is - everyone wants good scores and stats all painted green.
This will give them the sense of winning and improving, which will motivate them to be more productive and efficient.
Conclusion
An employee time tracking app has really powerful and useful productivity data on each employee, but it also offers a possibility to share this data with your workers. Combine these two and you get an additional influx of ideas on how workplace productivity can be improved and motivation to keep it high. This level of engagement can never be ignited from afar.