How to Benefit from Timesheet Management

Timesheet Management is all about shifting from efficiency to effectiveness! The sooner you are able to get your team to understand this well.

Historically, time tracking and timesheets have been looked at being invasive and induce a level of self-doubt within employees. This thought needs to be well handled and eliminated for a healthy work environment and building an inclusive culture.

Our teams must know and understand full well the overall business context and the fact that they stand to gain a lot rather than looking it as a micromanaging act.

Time logging has been practiced since the 19th century.

The overall concept is simple – be fully aware of how many hours did the employees work for to calculate their payroll. Back then it was merely looked at from an accounting, wage management and HR standpoint only.

But a lot has changed and changed for better.

We have come a long way from just cranking hours against activities to waking up to the concept of project management, productivity, efficiency and profitability.

It’s just not only about the money anymore. Rather it’s to do more with outcomes, achievements, business success and personal growth.

To that effect, let us win our mission to make our customers happy, our teams successful be on a steady growth path personally and professionally by being effective self-time managers!

17 “True” benefits of timesheet management

• Cultivate a Habit – no one ever likes cataloguing their entire day. But then unless it’s done you don’t know how far you are from what you could have actually accomplished. Start with timing your daily tasks first.
• Eliminate wasteful activities – Once you review the activities you have done over a week you exactly know which activities could have been avoided or traded for more meaningful tasks. That’s your first great win right there!
• Better Task Planning and Prioritization – You know which tasks are more aligned to your goals for the day and week. Hence you plan your work week accordingly. Man with a plan!
• Enables Collaboration – Having clarity on your as well as the team’s tasks + the added awareness of what is required to achieve the goal sets the stage for meaningful collaboration.
• Take control of your day – Timesheets help you stick to your plan. This way you can put the low value tasks on the backburner and focus first on important tasks.
• Identify your peak hours – With time tracking, you know what times are best suited for tasks that require focus and undivided attention. This is very important to deliver high value tasks consistently.
• Improve your efficiency – unless you know if you are closing tasks in the expected time you cannot really improve. Efficiency is about doing more with less. Hence, you are able to identify growth opportunities for yourself and get better at your daily task management.
• Become more effective – this is all about quality. When you are at high efficiency, your focus must be to be effective i.e. enabling business value. Closing 10 tasks in record time and ending up with rework is not exactly being effective. Do once, but with quality and in record time!
• Capture reliable business data – timesheets allow you to make notes on the tasks you are working on. This can prove very helpful over time for quick reference. You also prevent losing out on critical learning’s or important aspects of the tasks you encountered during their execution.
• Identify skill gaps and build them – with time tracking you will quickly identify tasks you are good at, tasks that take longer and tasks you are not able to do on your own. This is your growth opportunity. Identify what is required to overcome the task delays and build those skills to keep your projects on track.
• Improve problem solving abilities – if there is a trend emerging for delays or roadblocks on specific tasks, you can get creative. Park those tasks, set problem solving sessions with the team and define the way forward. These way future roadblocks are prevented and task execution is improved.
• Commit yourself – knowing full well where we stand w.r.t the project goals, our weekly plan, gap in expected progress fuels our commitment to the shared objective. The team is motivated to commit themselves further to contribute more.
• Increase accountability – the overall project execution becomes transparent with timesheets. Hence, each one of us feels more accountable towards the assigned tasks and works to ensure the project or other team members’ work is not hampered.
• Ability to handle unplanned requests – improved time management allows you to have some bandwidth to accommodate unplanned requests from your managers, customers or your team members.
• See the big picture – project planning & estimation is often done based on past team performances. Thus you can see how your work and contribution can impact the overall project performance.
• Contribute to the company’s bottom line – when you deliver quality work in less time you help improve project profitability & enable your company to take up more projects. As a result you grow individually and as a team.
• Improve your work-life balance – this is by far the most common yet least realized benefit of effective time management.

To sum it up

Timesheet management is equally critical for project as well as our own success! It helps build a culture of

• Time bound execution & honoring timelines
• Being goals driven
• Continuous improvement
• Commitment to shared objectives
• Increased personal responsibility and ownership
• Transparency across levels
• Open collaboration and communication

The market is flooded with online and virtual time tracking and time sheets. Pick one that is aligned to your business process and suits your team.

Whether it is excel based templates, just timesheet tools or a complete integrated project, time and resource management tool like Orangescrum – time tracking is a must.

Not only your teams become productive and your resource utilization goes up but end to end resource capacity planning also becomes robust.

As a result there is all round growth and optimization across teams and business functions.

Start benefiting from timesheet management today with a 14day free trial!