Why Most of Time Tracker Implementations Fail Within The First 3 Months?

Time tracking is a useful solution for a many projects. It gives to project managers, CEOs and employees an opportunity to put their work in order, work more effectively, plan forward, finish work on time and within a budget. However most of time trackers’ implementation attempts fail within the first few months and while the companies and projects where time trackers are implemented are very different, the reasons why a time tracker doesn't work are more or less the same.

Time trackers have developed a great deal from original timesheets that were used to calculate staff’s payroll. While a time tracker is still used in that manner, many extra features like project time calculation, project costing, and employees’ productivity monitoring have been added. Despite all the advantages that a time tracker gives to a work team, there are still problems that administrators face when trying to implement it and the main problem they usually come upon is the human factor.

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As with every modern technology, your employees have to be ready to use a time tracker in daily work. And if a new time tracking solution and advantages that it is going to bring to work process are not correctly introduced to a company's team, they will likely not be on board with the idea.

What happens in cases like that is that all of a sudden employees feel as if they are being constantly monitored. Not understanding why they must track their work time, employees think that their productivity is being measured and an employer puts them under a magnifying glass. Just as some members of staff can strive under pressure, others may crumble. Because of it before installing any time tracker, your employees have to be introduced to the idea and the reasoning behind it. This way the whole team will be on the same page and the misconceptions will be avoided.

Use the automatic time tracker

Most of the problems in the time tracker’s implementation do not stop here, another big issue arises from the method of time tracking. Usually, an extra tool is installed in order to track work time. But having yet another tool is not easy for the team and most of the time what happens is they forget to use it at all. And if staff does not track time, the tool will be of no use. Therefore, project managers should seek the time tracker that is or can be integrated with the solutions employees already use. The automatic time tracker (such as CrocoTime) allows it. Your team will adopt CrocoTime in no time.

Another big potential problem that arises from using a specific time tracker is a need for the team to manually enter work time. It may seem not a big deal at first but the reality is quite different. After 2-4 weeks most companies find out that the information entered in the system manually does not match the reality. The reason for it is the "freedom" that employees get. Instead of actually tracking the work time they spend on the tasks, they guess the approximate values and enter it in the time tracker. It defies the reason of implementing a time tracker in the first place. The time tracker of CrocoTime is free from such issues as it monitors computer usage automatically and provides this data along with the data manually entered by employees. It also reminds employees of the tasks they did on computers, during meetings, and phone calls fast and easy.

Try to Understand

Another problem of manual data entry is repetitiveness. What happens is that employees have to update the time tracking tool from time to time and they find this so boring. In turn, employees try to do it as rarely as it possible and do not enjoy the process. In that situation, a time tracker that allows quick and easy or even automatic time tracking is really your best choice! If you choose CrocoTime ( http://crocotime.com/en/ ), make sure that all work time at the end of the day is relevant for specific projects.

If the chosen time tracker does not fit the company's needs, it will be useless. For instance, a project that is all about completing individual tasks and the time spent on each of them will not benefit from a time tracker that just monitors hours that a user has been active on a computer in bulk. Instead, the time tracker of CrocoTime that tracks each of the tasks separately and in correspondence with projects, should be used.

Well, in order to avoid errors when choosing and installing a time tracker in your office, it is very important to prepare your team for the change, to understand what information is important to get out of it and guarantee that the way this data is collected does not interrupt the work processes.