Employer Tracking Your Time? Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing

Trust is a load-bearing wall in the structure of human relationships. It holds up many institutions, including work. 

If you feel your employer doesn’t trust you, it could seem like this wall is losing strength in your work life. Given that business changes have arisen for many organizations in the past few years, you might notice evidence of its impending breakdown more often.

One event that can bring up concerns about trust is the implementation of employee time tracking. You might understand the value of time data for the business but not realize that tracking how you spend your time can be beneficial for you, too.

Time Tracking vs. Monitoring

If the thought of time tracking generates fear in you, it’s probably because you equate it with employee monitoring, which has become more common with the rise of remote work. Demand for monitoring software has risen 54% since the start of the pandemic. 

Still, this is nothing to be afraid of, as it doesn’t mean your employer is helping generate that specific demand. And many companies are concerned about the legal grey area around employee monitoring practices and privacy laws.

Though they aren’t mutually exclusive, monitoring and time tracking are two different things — and are usually used to achieve quite different goals. Monitoring tends to be about verifying individual performance and focus, while time tracking is more about ensuring that project estimates and billable rates are accurate.

Why Your Employer May Choose to Track Time

Alarming statistics around employees’ lack of productivity make it clear why many employers would be interested in keeping an eye on how time is spent — and lost. However, there are many other reasons business owners start tracking time.

Your employer could be looking to:

• Set more realistic goals for project timelines and deliverables
• Determine how profitable each client is
• Identify and reduce inefficiencies that could derail or delay projects
• Ensure workload is fairly distributed
• Pinpoint opportunities to automate non-billable administrative work
• Improve the accuracy of client billing
• Provide transparency for the entire organization

Benefits of Time Tracking for Employees

There’s major appeal in time tracking for you, too. The employer’s benefits trickle down, allowing you to:

• Achieve goals more regularly — and demonstrate your progress 
• Manage your time more carefully to improve personal productivity
• Find out if you’re being as efficient as you can be
• Reduce the likelihood of burnout by recognizing when you’re doing too much
• Provide evidence for uneven workload
• Draw a more distinct line between billable and non-billable hours
• Build a history of your performance to make a case for future role changes

An Opportunity for Conversation

None of us likes to face uncomfortable things head-on, but we often learn that our fears were unjustified. As long as you have a solid relationship with your employer in other areas, it’s safe to assume their desire to track time isn’t derived from mistrust. Instead, it’s likely an attempt at smoothing out the operational and client work experience. 

If you have specific concerns about the impact of time tracking on your work life or productivity, strike up a conversation about it with your direct supervisor. You might want to ask for clear communication from leadership and more or better training on the time-tracking software they’ve selected. 

Most importantly, request that they clarify expectations. Will you need to log every moment right away, or will they phase in time tracking? What should you do if you forget to log a task? The answers could go a long way in easing your worries. 

Champion Automated Time Tracking

Time tracking in general could be hard to get used to, but it’ll be even harder if your employer goes for antiquated methods. Traditional timesheets won’t cut it anymore, especially for a service business that charges clients by the hour.

Together with your colleagues, consider building a business case for a more modern, effective solution. If you participate in the research, you’re likely to get excited about what a time-tracking solution could do for the business and your job. Make your life easier — and their data better — by suggesting they opt for technology that offers automated time tracking. 

➡️ Don’t forget to present case studies to verify the effectiveness of your chosen platform. Accelo has a library of client success stories that prove it has the potential to be revolutionary in a time-tracking capacity. 

Accelo is unique in that it’s fully end-to-end: an integrated platform that consolidates all the stages of client work while attaching time to each task, project and retainer. If your higher-ups have yet to find a solution for accurate and automated time tracking, recommend they start a free trial or schedule a demo.

About the Author

Chelsea Williams is Senior Copywriter at Accelo, where she shares unique insights with service professionals and tells user stories via blogs, eBooks, industry reports and more. She has over 15 years of B2B and B2C writing experience — primarily in tech, sales, education and healthcare. Chelsea is an AWAI-certified Master Copywriter trained in brand storytelling and microcopy.