Leading a team and managing projects is hard in and of itself. But if you happen to have a large team, things get even more complicated. Now, you have to coordinate more people and a larger number of tasks. There are so many things that can go wrong and tip the balance that it gets increasingly hard to keep things under control the more people you have on the team.
One of the most common issues team leaders can come across is the problem with time management across the whole team. Naturally, some employees finish their tasks faster than others, some procrastinate more, some are more easily distracted, and so on and so forth. But you need to be able to take into account all of these factors in order to successfully lead your team to reach a certain goal in time. And this is far from easy.
However, there are some things you can do to make this aspect of your job a little bit more manageable. One of the most effective ways to keep track of and improve team time management is by using employee time tracking software. That’s a program that allows you to oversee your workers’ tasks, track projects, budget, attendance, tools that each employee uses, and much more.
Here, we’re going to discuss some of the ways in which employee time tracking software can make managing time for big teams easier and more effective. So let’s begin!
Estimates
The first thing we’re going to focus on in this article is how to make more accurate estimates when it comes to how much time your team needs to do certain tasks or projects. This is important for a couple of reasons – it improves your ability to set appropriate deadlines (which we’ll talk about later), it enables you to manage your clients’ expectations better, and it dramatically boosts your time management since you know what you can expect from your team.
So, how can employee time tracking software help you improve your estimates? Well, it tracks the amount of time each individual employee takes to do each type of task. On a micro level, this means that when you assign a task to a team member, you’ll be able to more accurately predict when it will be done and plan other assignments accordingly. But you can also look at the bigger picture – take all the tasks together to create a map of the entire project, which will give your efforts better direction.
Deadlines
Another important factor in time management are deadlines. Knowing how much time your team takes to finish a project, which you can easily find out by using employee time tracking software, gives you an opportunity to set deadlines that are realistic, achievable and tailored to your team’s real capabilities. Your projects will therefore be more organized and there will be less stress among employees, which is an atmosphere beneficial to higher productivity.
Coordination
As we’ve mentioned earlier, getting a large number of employees to work together in sync is one of the hardest things about time management. However, because employee time tracking software provides you with real-time data on who’s doing which task, coordination between different sections of the team is made much easier. For instance, you can see who’s busy and who’s available for additional work, which will both help you organize your time more effectively and prevent potentially overworking some of the employees.
Distractions
Last but not least, work time tracker can be an excellent tool to help you detect and minimize the most common activities that are distracting your workers from doing their jobs. In order to do this, you need to look at which apps and websites your employees use. Chances are that you’ll see things like social media, news websites, etc. If you notice that there’s a recurring unproductive activity, you can work on minimizing it, and by that, you’ll improve your time management by getting your employees to focus on their tasks.
Conclusion
Time management isn’t easy to get right, especially if you have a big team. But, as we have seen, having a tool such as employee time tracking software can go a really long way in helping you organize your team’s time and workload, and ultimately getting them to be more efficient and more productive.
