🎙Is time tracking the right thing to do with your staff? Regardless of whether they are remote or local, what approach should be taken, if at all? Should you be tracking clicks, time, shifts or projects? Steve has tried a number of approaches to this problem and this episode will share with you his experience and successful solutions.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
💡Many feel that tracking a staff members time can result in a loss of trust and that the finished project and result is more important that counting hours worked.
💡If someone has a mixed job which requires them to shift roles often or perhaps even daily, tracking their time is going to be difficult. Non repetitive workload can be difficult to quantify. Also, tracking time means more work for you and extra software costs on top of your systems.
💡However, if you have good staff that are efficient they will not mind being tracked as they will want you to be aware of the amount of work they produce over the time allotted. This will only be of concern for those that feel they are not reaching the standard you require. Evidence to identify these people is to great advantage.
💡What you measure you can improve. With the data gathered you will be able to identify work blocks, misunderstandings or too heavy a workload. This is a way you can identify time consuming tasks to possibly automate or streamline.
💡If you ask your staff to keep a task board with all their regular tasks on it and keep you informed of how long it takes, you will have a good idea of their capacity and and spare time they have for extra work or projects.
💡When someone is absent a good record of their tasks and how long they can potentially take is essential for redistributing their work.
💡New staff can be assessed much more quickly with expected task times available to measure their progress.
💡You can install software to take screenshots of your employees working so you can keep track, or with sites like Upwork, actual key strokes can be recorded. Apps like Toggle and Harvest allow a clock in, clock out type arrangement. Asana, for instance, allows you to link directly to tasks and adds it into the staff's timesheets.
💡You could use a spreadsheet arrangement on which people log their tasks, start and finish, and then they can add notes on any problems they encountered. Most apps do not include a simple method for this and for troubleshooting this is a helpful factor.
BEST MOMENTS
1:56 - 💬 ‘There is a belief about not tracking people's time because you don’t want to lose a lot of trust.’
8.04 - 💬 ‘Our staff all have task boards and on their task boards is all their recurring work, whether its daily work, weekly, monthly or periodic. We ask them to, every month, have a look at the time it took them to complete all their tasks over the past month.’
12:32 - 💬 ‘You just get more feeling that you’re getting value from your team when you track what people do and you see the amount of work that they produce it makes me think I’ve got an awesome team.’
17:42 - 💬 ‘If you go through and present it in that way then you’re going to get so much buy in compared to if you just say ‘I’m going to start tracking your time’ because they’re going to think that you don’t actually trust them.’
19:30 - 💬 ‘You’ve got to be prepared to understand what they do and talk about it. It can create a lot of work. You could say to somebody; ‘What on earth have you done today, you’ve got no activity monitored yet you’ve charged me for six hours work?’ That can put huge amounts of distrust into that scenario.’
23:54 - 💬‘If you do do this I believe you will have improved systems. You will have better ability to give feedback to your staff. You will be able to increase the efficiency of their work, their productivity. You will be able to actually congratulate them and reward them for working hard.’
VALUABLE RESOURCES
Facebook Group: Facebook.com/SystemsAndOutsourcing/
Website: www.SystemizeYourSuccess.com
LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/SystemsAndOutsourcing/
YouTube: YouTube.com/DrSteveDay
ABOUT THE HOST
Steve used to be a slave to his business, but when he moved to Sweden in 2015, he was forced to change how he worked. He switched to running his businesses remotely. After totally nailing this concept, he spent his time helping other small business owners do the same. Steve’s been investing in property since 2002, has a degree in Computing, and worked as a doctor in the NHS before quitting to focus full-time on sharing his systems and outsourcing Methodology with the world. He now lives in Sweden and runs his UK-based businesses remotely with the help of his team of Filipino and UK-based Virtual Assistants.
Most business owners are overwhelmed because they don’t know how to create systems or get the right help.
Our systems and outsourcing Courses and coaching programme will help you automate your business and work effectively with affordable virtual assistants. That way, you will stop feeling overwhelmed and start making more money.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get the future of podcasts.