If you are tired of paying for the hours your employees spend on Facebook, Instagram,Twitter, and other social networks and entertainment sites, then It is time to take control in your hands with the help of a time tracker. This article includes practical recommendations on choosing a time tracker which will become a valuable and helpful assistant, not a problem, for your company.
A time tracker is intended to show how many working hours in a company are spent productively and how many are wasted. But not all such systems are equally useful and reliable. If you can answer the following 7 questions positively while considering a particular time tracker, feel free to use it as it will become your reliable assistant.
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Is there enough performance to monitor all of the employees?
In order to provide statistics, time tracker has to handle large amounts of data. Accumulating from month to month, this volume increases, along with the number of employees. Algorithms for calculating statistics are complex and several time trackers are not capable of handling data on more than 50 employees per month. This makes it impossible for them to be used in large companies. CrocoTime is the first time tracker aimed at medium-sized and large companies. It was created under requirements of larger organizations and fits them not only with respect to performance (report on a thousand of employees is created in less than a second), but also with respect to functionality. The time tracker of CrocoTime is used by large companies in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Moldova.
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Can an employee tamper with the time tracker, disable the monitoring, or affect its correctness?
Today, most of the time trackers prevent unauthorized employees from disabling the monitoring. A user cannot hide or delete tracked activity, or remove monitoring agents from a computer without administrative privileges. However, there is another problem in several systems: accounting of employee’s offline activity. This type of monitoring is based on asking an employee for an input. If an employee had gone from a computer, he must input the information about what he was doing, into the system. There are 2 main problems of such an approach: first, not all employees use the time tracker in an ultimately honest way, and secondly, a constant reminder of the software is not only distracting but annoying and time-consuming.
- A time tracker has to meet two main criteria:
- an employee must not be distracted in any way on running the time tracker;
- the software must not in any way interfere with the work or slow it down.
CrocoTime uses the way of monitoring where an employee cannot “adjust” the statistics in his favor, and operation of the time tracker does not distract employees with constant reminders.
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Does the time tracker calculate productive and unproductive time?
A manager needs to have exact figures of productive and wasted time to understand how serious measures should be taken. But many such systems provide screenshots, key logging, number of clicks and keystrokes instead. Alas, on the basis of such data it is impossible to understand exactly how much time was spent on social networking and entertainment resources. CrocoTime time tracker counts time that was spent using applications and websites. The applications and websites are grouped into categories, each of the categories are configured as either productive or unproductive for a specific employee. The overall productive and unproductive time is determined on this basis. Work is monitored by the time tracker with an accuracy of seconds.
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Is statistics calculated by departments?
The most convenient way to analyze working time is on a department’s level, where it is easy to see the problematic departments and take appropriate measures not to each employee separately, but to discuss the situation with the head of the department. CrocoTime is the time tracker that implements the calculation of performance indicators for departments. A department’s tab can be expanded to see individual employees without switching to another screen. There is no need to waste time and interrupt thought process. The departments can be sorted by productive and unproductive time. To understand exactly how time is spent in a department, the summary statistics can be easily shown. For example, it will help to assess the percentage of time spent in social networks or entertainment sites.
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Is it possible to set work schedules?
Many companies do not punish their staff for communicating in social networks during lunchtime. When working with a time tracking and employee monitoring software this is possible only if the software supports work schedules, providing the opportunity to separate office hours and overtime.In addition, many companies allow their staff some amount of unproductive activity during working hours, but only if the staff compensates it after work. In other words they compare routine unproductive time with productive overtime. Not all employees have the same schedule, so it is important to have the ability to customize individual schedules. CrocoTime time tracker allows a user to create named work schedules and assign them to the necessary personnel.
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Does a time tracker support email alerts and notifications?
Violations of operating procedures are not at all rare. From time to time employees need to have breaks, to switch from task to task, or leave the workplace. But if this occurs regularly and takes a long time a company’s losses can be significant. CrocoTime time tracker provides alerts on violations that are automatically sent to a manager’s email. This saves the manager’s time and gives an opportunity to respond to the violations in time. Alerts and notifications can also be assigned to responsible staff (deputies).
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Can the reliability of the statistics be checked? Can the specific periods of use be seen in a time tracker statistics?
Some organizations fine or deprive employees for unproductive use of their working hours. Here is where disputes usually start about “the time tracker that incorrectly calculated activities of this or that employee”. Employees refuse to accept that they spent so much time on entertainment websites. The only way to resolve the issue is to provide detailed information about when and what applications and websites were used. CrocoTime time tracker provides such information with an accuracy of seconds. It is useful to know when an employee was absent from a computer, to avoid excessive smoke breaks. CrocoTime time tracker provides both total and specific periods of non-computer time.
Conclusion
Creating CrocoTime we asked ourselves these same questions and took all the nuances into account, using the experience of previous developments. We have implemented non-intrusive approach of time tracking and employee monitoring, combined with high performance and features useful and convenient for large companies.