Getting your team to do time tracking right all comes down to your skills as a manager. Initially, your employees won’t be any more eager to track the hours they spend on individual tasks than they are to update spreadsheets, fill out expense reports, or complete other required chores that seem like distractions from their “real” work. But gaining cooperation may be easier than you think, once team members realize time tracking can help them report on what they do, and as a result, get the respect they deserve. Here are four tips to help you get from point A to point B with minimal pain and pushback.

1. Helping Your Team Manage &
Track Time
4 tips for better time tracking
(without the eye rolls)

2. Introduction
If you’re looking to improve time management on your team, time tracking is the
place to start. While this is undoubtedly an unpopular topic among most
employees, it is nevertheless essential if you want the ability to consistently meet
deadlines, forecast future bandwidth, and effectively allocate resources.
In some ways, it all comes down to your skills as a manager.

3. Introduction
Initially, your employees won’t be eager to track the
hours they spend on individual tasks. It feels like a
distraction from their “real” work. But gaining their
cooperation is easier when they can visualize the
benefits: better reporting and more respect.
These 4 tips will make this possible…

4. 1. Establish a shared vision
In Managing High Performance and Retention (2001), Bob Weyant describes the
three kinds of power managers have to influence employee behavior:
1. Commitment to a shared vision
2. Personal power
3. Position power

5. Bob Weyant
Author, Managing High Performance and
Retention
“Effective leaders influence mostly through
shared vision/goal and personal power.”

6. 1. Establish a shared vision
So how do you get commitment to a shared vision? You start by
actually sharing your vision. Don’t just tell your team what they
need to start doing (tracking the hours they spend on individual
projects), explain the why as well.

7. 1. Establish a shared vision
If you don’t explain your true reasons for asking your team to start logging their
hours, they will make up their own reasons:
- “She doesn’t trust me.”
- “She thinks I’m wasting too much time.”
- “She’s a micromanager.”
- “She’s looking for reasons to fire me.”

8. 1. Establish a shared vision
Luckily, there are plenty of really good reasons to focus on time tracking that everyone
can get behind, including to:
- Account for ad hoc requests
- Balance team members’ workloads
- Defend headcount to upper management
- Justify saying ‘no’ to requests
- Be more realistic about team bandwidth

9. 1. Establish a shared vision
If you share this list of benefits with your team, your underperformers may
still have cause to worry or complain – after all, they won’t be able to get
away with slacking as easily anymore.
But those who are pulling their weight will look at this list with relief. “You
mean tracking my hours means job security and less overtime? Sign me
up!”

10. 2. Choose an intuitive solution
Make sure the solution you choose has the power to deliver on what you’ve
promised. Ideally, it should work intuitively with the processes you already
have in place, rather than taking too many additional steps. If your team uses a
project management software solution, choose a time-tracking that integrates
well with what you have.

11. 2. Choose an intuitive solution
But when selecting a time-tracking protocol for your team, there are a few
additional questions to ask, depending on your team’s needs, including:
- Does your current PM solution have a time-tracking feature that you’re
just not using?
- Does it take employees out of the work they’re doing and into a
separate system?
- If it’s a separate system, does it integrate well with other business tools
you use?

12. 2. Choose an intuitive solution
- Is it clunky and intrusive or smooth and intuitive?
- Is there a desktop widget that can run in the background, so you don’t have to open a
web browser or separate application to use it?
- Can you as the manager easily view individual and team results?
- Can time be logged on a mobile devices as well – or on desktop only?

13. 3. Enforce the policy
The only way to gather reliable metrics that will enable you to justify headcount,
address productivity problems, and reapportion workload – among all the other
benefits listed in section one above – is for team usage to be consistent and
universal.
Hold everyone accountable for using the tool on an ongoing basis.

14. 3. Enforce the policy
If usage becomes sporadic or uneven, refer back to your three
influencing options. Start by sharing the vision again, then try using
your personal power to improve adoption (often a short reminder
conversation will be all you need), and if those don’t work, rely on
your position power. This may mean applying rewards and
consequences to help motivate team members to comply.

15. 4. Allow some untracked hours
There must be a certain amount of freedom and downtime in order for creativity to
flourish. A work culture that’s too rigid will only get in the way of true spontaneity and
innovation.
No employee should be expected to account for every single minute of an 8-hour
workday. Make it clear that your real goal with time tracking is ti find predictable
patterns that show how long each type of task takes to complete., not to make sure each
employee is working on billable tasks 100% of the day.

16. 4. Allow some untracked hours
Of course, this requires some guidelines as to what should be
tracked or not (Ex: “only 80% of each day needs to be tracked”).
Or you might want to distinguish by task type what will be
tracked (Ex: anything assigned by another team member) or
what won’t (Ex: checking and responding to email).

17. Brad Hoover
CEO, Grammarly, Inc.
“Whether or not a team member is billing by the hour, it is
important to understand that time is one of the most valuable
(and scarce) resources at any organization. Operating under
the assumption that your time is worth money – whether to
you or to your client – helps you to prioritize the finite number
of hours in your day.”

18. Take Control of Your Time
Time tracking is one way to keep team members more mindful of how
they’re spending the precious resource of time. But even more
importantly, it gives managers the data they need to streamline
processes, predict and meet deadlines, make hiring and outsourcing
decisions, distribute workload evenly across the team, and ultimately
build trust with stakeholders and executives.

19. Devour Chaos, Drive Creativity
Creativity has a new protector.
Workfront provides just enough structure to bring order to creative teams’
workflows and give them more time for the real work of creativity.
To learn how Workfront marketing work management can benefit your team, watch
the demo today.