Tracking Work Hours with Resource Scheduling

If you manage a team of employees, you know how important it is to track work hours

If you manage a team of employees, you know how important it is to track work hours. Not only do you need to make sure that everyone is staying on task, but you also need to ensure that your team is meeting project deadlines. This can be a lot to keep track of, especially if you’re managing a large team. But if you use Outlook or a resource scheduling system, you can track work hours and monitor employee productivity a lot easier than you probably think.

Outlook and resource scheduling tools allow managers to see how their employees will be spending their time.  Once these items fall into the past, this same information can be turned into actuals to track work hours. Most of the time, what was scheduled is what happened, so it just needs a customer/project assigned to it to be useful. Sometimes the actual time spent is different, but that can be tracked as well so you can not only see the actual time, but how and when it varied from the schedule. This information can be used to improve employee productivity and optimize project timelines.

How do use resource scheduling to track work hours?

If you’re not using resource scheduling to track work hours, you’re missing out on a valuable tool for managing your team. Here’s how to get started:

1. Determine which employees will be responsible for tracking their work hours.
2. Create a schedule for each employee. This can be done in a calendar tool such as Outlook or in a resource scheduling tool that links with Outlook such as Timewatch’s Whitespace® system.
3. Using Timewatch’s plugin for Outlook, users can allocate Customer / Project data to appointments.
4. Use Whitespace® to report upon the actual time spent.

How do I track my employees’ time and attendance?

There are a few ways to track employee time and attendance, but it important to ascertain the difference between time worked and time scheduled. Let’s take a look at an example.

Company X uses resource scheduling software to plan what they will do, and then report on that information as if it were an actual, but it isn’t actual, it was what should have happened. In some cases less time is spent with customers than was scheduled, so when time is billed their customers are billed too much, which can lead to issues if the customer feels they are being overbilled. This leads to bills needing to be corrected and loss of goodwill with the customer.

In some cases more time with the customer, but as the actuals are taken as time scheduling, too little is billed.

The net result is that by not tracking actuals correctly, customers can be underbilled or overbilled, which wastes administrators and customers’ time, appears unprofessional, and can cause loss of good will with customers.

It may seem that this could be solved by changing the scheduled hours to the actual hours so that billing is correct, but this causes several problems:

1. By altering the schedule to reflect actuals for reporting / billing actuals, you lose the history of what was scheduled – you no longer have any idea of what was scheduled.
2. As historical accuracy of scheduling has been altered, it is not possible to report upon scheduling accurately any more.
3. ‘Scheduled vs actual’ time reporting is not possible as scheduling data means different things in the future as it does for the past. For scheduled vs actual time analysis you need your scheduled data to remain historically accurate AND have actual time held as a separate data set.
4. If past schedules are edited to reflect the actual time, someone needs to do that (either administrators or employees), so if you are going to do that, you may as well track the actual time, which solves 1, 2 & 3 above.
   So, if you need to report upon or bill actual time, you should track actual time, but many companies don’t do this.

Why? don’t companies that need scheduling log actual time?

The answer is simple, it takes more effort. It takes time for people to track time, and for many it is just easier to use the schedule and live with the problems. Timewatch solves this with automatic and semi-automatic time tracking. Our system ‘autofills’ employees’ timesheets with their scheduled items, but allows employees to add and adjust time if needed.

The beauty of the automatic and semi-automatic scheduling timesheet is that the both scheduled and actual time is available for reporting. The history of what was scheduled is maintained accurately, and with real actual time tracked accurately as well, customers get true ‘Scheduled vs Actuals’ reporting, their customers get accurate billing, administrative overheads are dramatically reduced, and with no customer billing issues, there’s no loss of customer goodwill.

What are the benefits of tracking employee productivity?

There are many benefits to tracking employee productivity, including improved project management, better decision-making, and increased accountability. By understanding how your employees are spending their time, you can make more informed decisions about how to allocate resources and set project deadlines. You can also use productivity data to identify areas where employees may need additional training or support. Ultimately, tracking employee productivity can help you create a more efficient and effective workplace.

Resource scheduling is a valuable tool for any manager trying to track work hours and employee productivity. By following the steps above, you can get started using resource scheduling to improve your team’s performance.