A 1,000-person business has a total of 2 million employee hours to use or waste. Companies tend to meticulously manage and optimize money, resources, and materials, but fail to similarly optimize and manage their time. To get the most out of their workforce, businesses need to find ways to optimize the processes surrounding their most valuable asset: their employees’ work and time. Here are a few ideas.
Go Mobile
Any modern-day workforce should be able to enter hours on the go. Still, too often off-site employees and workers with billable hours have to enter hours after the fact, which is historically unreliable and can lead to billable hour leakage. Updating your time tracking to a solution with mobile capabilities lets employees enter their hours in real-time, and put an end to this variety of time leakage.
Get Detailed
50% of employees claim they don’t know exactly what is expected from them in their current role — this is a motivation problem. Companies need to track time in a way that enables detailed, granular information down to the employee-level — this in turn enables managers to empower their employees with the knowledge of their own specific impact on the company’s bottom line, and consequently set relevant and employee-specific goals in 2018.
Make Little Tweaks Count
The following tweaks by employers to habits and processes they take for granted as standard procedure have the potential to save employees time:
- Minimize red tape: Do employees need excessive permission to do their jobs? Oftentimes these red tape policies are a relic of managers past — ditch what you can to allow employees to redirect their time into more meaningful tasks.
- Move past email: Tools like Slack, Hipchat (etc.) help teams communicate at the blink of an eye, and — crucially — in an organized fashion. Companies that rely primarily on email for internal communication lose time trawling through long threads and searching for lost or forgotten messages
- Automate when possible: Spending days at a time collating employee hours for billing and payroll? There are a variety of solutions that can automate these recurring processes and save companies significant time.
Utilize Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The antiquated time tracking systems of yesterday are steeped in outdated processes that waste employee time. Companies’ time management processes should be as unobtrusive and automated as possible. With features like facial recognition, AI-powered chatbots, and intelligent business process management, modern time management solutions built for this century will mean that employees will have to think even less about tracking time.
For example, facial recognition features for clocking in allow employees to be automatically logged in through facial recognition. This process is not only fast and frictionless, but also eliminates buddy punching, and provides the benefits of biometrics without the additional hardware costs of new fingerprint readers. By utilizing modern solutions and cutting-edge technology like facial recognition, companies can liberate the time employees and managers previously spent on administrative time management tasks, and put it to better use.
 As Chief Executive Officer, Raj Narayanaswamy is responsible for executing Replicon’s strategic goals and leading corporate initiatives. With more than 25 years of software development and senior management experience, he is widely recognized for his visionary approach in developing innovative software applications that meet the needs of leading enterprise organizations. Raj has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai-India, and is an active member of the high-tech business community. |