Why and how to correlate time tracking with employee satisfaction

Time tracking is a key element in every business across all industries. Not only is it a legal mandate to record all employees’ worked hours, but also it identifies how work time is being spent, including where, when and how long employees have been working. Time tracking insights shed light on how to drive productivity and improve workflow to develop an efficient and streamlined workplace.

While highlighting potential business inefficiencies, bottlenecks and areas for improvements, time tracking can also affect employee job satisfaction and experience.

Ximble's Time clock essentials blog post

 

An employee’s job satisfaction rests at the core of employee engagement, productivity and retention. In fact, happier employees with higher levels of job satisfaction are approximately 12% more productive than unsatisfied employees.

Through effective time tracking, employee job satisfaction can be boosted. However, poor time tracking can wreak havoc on job satisfaction levels. 

Accurate Payments

Whether it’s miscalculated hours, taxes or deductions, there is no faster way to make an employee miserable on payday than miscalculating their pay. Conversely, satisfaction increases every payday when they receive accurate payments for their completed work on time.

Maintaining poor time tracking and data processing methods leaves employees and the payroll team yearning for better. If employees are held in constant uncertainty about their paychecks, then productivity, morale and engagement erode and faith in management declines.

Implementing an efficient and reliable time tracking solution will accurately capture starting and finishing times of employees’ worked hours. The increased transparency in worked hours and due payments becomes clearer. Margin of error decreases as timesheets can be directly fed into payroll. The result?  Clear and accurate payments that make for a confident, satisfied workforce that maintains faith and trust in their company.

Valuable Insights

Employees hate performing pointless, menial tasks that hold no value or meaning. They care for purposeful, goal-orientated duties that contribute to the business’ objectives.

Void of these tasks, employees get bored, distracted and restless.

By tracking activities, management can identify redundant tasks and workflows that bottleneck performance. Once unclogged, a workflow is optimized and attains maximum efficiency. Employees will work smarter, not harder. They’ll be happier, too.

Analyzing and identifying restrictive workflows and replacing with optimized workflows leads to improved operations. However, communicating the hows and whys of these changes to employees is essential. Clear, candid explanations will ensure full recognition behind the purpose of their tasks and duties, bringing meaning to their workplace roles. 

Team Performance

Time tracking provides a way to log the time each individual employee spends on each activity. It can provide an indicator of each employee’s strengths, weaknesses and help to identify those workers who deliver a consistently level of productivity.

Using these insights, a manager can distinguish between those employees with subsequent advancement potential and those who will need training to strengthen their skill set. By identifying and making the investment to teach this latter cohort, a company can meet existing needs, minimize turnover, and boost satisfaction as staff recognize the business’ commitment to develop its employee’s knowledge and skill sets. Job satisfaction through opportunities is a sure-fire way to boost enthusiasm and engagement within the workplace.

Employees grow bored and disengage when assigned unchallenging and monotonous tasks. Combining new activities and skills with those previously learned prevents employees from slogging through too many repetitive tasks.

Well-being

One of the responsibilities that falls to managers is looking after the well-being of his or her charges within the workplace. While employers love hardworking and committed employees, they are not autonomous automatons. They’re any company’s most important asset. Failing to identify and address a floundering employee will eventually diminish that employee’s job satisfaction and lead to burnout.

Research by Kronos identified burnout as being responsible for 20% – 50% of employee turnover, with unfair compensations, unreasonable workloads and too much overtime being the top three contributors.

Using time track data, it becomes easier to spot over-exertion, thereby preventing burnout. Using this data to strike a healthier work/life balance for employees will lead to a heightened state of well-being, improved job satisfaction and increased personnel retention.

Another key point to monitor using time tracking is to ensure employees are taking adequate breaks. Research shows that taking breaks has many benefits in the workplace, including increased productivity and satisfaction. 

Rewarding Excellence

Recognized employees are happy employees.

Using a time tracking tool’s activity log develops an easier way of correlating workers’ efforts with the business results achieved as an activity log assigns a higher level of accountability to everyone through their shifts. Through this, it becomes easier identifying those worth of praise.

With such insight managers can take a moment to express appreciation for an employee’s efforts. A positive word here, or a reward given makes employees feel good about what they have been doing and will motivate them to continue working hard.

Be sure to illustrate clearly how much of a measurable impact an employee has made, to validate the accolade and to reinforce the purpose behind the employee’s role.

Doing it right will help to build trust, camaraderie and motivation in the workplace leading to greater engagement and retention through, you’ve guessed it, greater job satisfaction. Time tracking is far more than a tool for legal compliance and calculating payroll. It can be an integral part of any business’ efforts toward shaping a positive and healthy working environment. That’s why it’s essential to select the best time tracking tool for your business.

The right selection will maximize job satisfaction and boost engagement and productivity in turn.

About the Author:

Matthew Hughes is a British-born content writer with the mindset of a cat. He has a curiosity for the unknown, can be impulsive and can be won over with food. The best place to catch him will be in the offices of Ximble, a dynamic cloud-based workforce management system that simplifies employee scheduling, time tracking and management. He also hates Sudoku.