Time sinks
You can hardly ever find a manager or a company owner who will tell you that his employees don’t waste work time and work absolutely effectively. It is impossible to find an employee who has never spent work time on his personal affairs. Most popular time sinks among office workers are: smoke breaks, chats with colleagues, telephone conversations with friends and relatives, computer games, reading of books, extra job, the Internet.
But one of the most important time sinks is the Internet. There is a special term for such an activity – no-purpose browsing. No-purpose browsing puts effectiveness of employees at stake. People use the Internet at work in order to check their social nets, read news, blogs of celebrities, download games and electronic books and do many other things.
There are several risks connected with no-purpose browsing:
- Performance degradation
- Lost productivity
- Decrease of safety rate of corporate nets
- Limitation of capacity of the net
- Increase of expenses on the Internet connection
Is a control needed?
Most companies prefer to control their employees. Very often they use time trackers to record work time and activities which have been done by an employee. There are many measures used by management of different companies: verbal and written warnings, penalties, extra work or even dismissals. But if an employee knows that a time tracker is installed on his computer, he will try to perform his work without any breaks and no-purpose browsing. Time trackers can be good tools not only for management but also for personnel in order to check their effectiveness.
Time trackers are the best tools for monitoring of employees. Specifics of operation of certain companies, for example, consulting companies, require an accurate record of work time of employees.
The Internet is under control
Most managers pay a lot of attention to time spent by employees in the Internet. Time trackers help to find out what sites have been visited during a work day and how much time was spent there. There are two groups of sites: those which are connected with work and those which get an employee distracted from his duties. Time tracker allows detecting both of these groups and calculating the level of effectiveness of an employee.
Monitoring of activities of employees in the Internet is a necessary procedure in human recourse management. It is also important to inform employees about time tracking as it may be a good motivation for them to become more productive.
So, management of work time of employees is one of key aspects providing development of a company.