How to Create a Progressive Time Tracking Policy in Your Organization?

Employee time tracking norms are no longer the same. Therefore, traditional log sheets or biometric time tracking approaches in modern hybrid workplaces will not work.

Today, you need advanced employee time tracking systems to track remote, in-house and hybrid employees' time on a dashboard. In addition, you need a portal that can provide real-time timesheet details.

But just getting a robust employee efficiency software is not sufficient. The reason?

Your employees will hesitate to use Desktop Time Tracking Solutions . They will feel more concerned about their privacy, performance and work-personal life balance.

But you can get your employees on board with a standard time tracking policy. When you provide a written document stating how, when, and what your time monitoring terms are, it will relax your employees and openly accept time trackers.

But, how can I create a timesheet policy in my company?

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Well, no need to worry. Just follow through with this guide to understand how to customize a time tracking policy in your organization.

What’s Exactly a Time Tracking Policy?

A time tracking software is a formal document stating your company’s timekeeping goals, procedures and rules. This document is generated to inform employees about their time tracking responsibilities.

It helps to bring your whole team on the same page. With a comprehensive policy, you can build a transparent work time tracking module in your organization.

The policy also provides a framework for each employee to take action. In addition, it will tell employees what to expect if they fail to meet your policy terms.

Why Should You Create a Time Tracking Policy?

Once you plan to use employee live tracking software , it is crucial to implement a standard timesheet policy. The policy will not only streamline your work operations. But it will also align your team members with your company goals.

Besides this, a standard time tracking guidelines can help to:

Educate Your Team

Time tracking standards for offline and remote employees are never the same. On-site workers follow set work routines, so time monitoring rules for them are different. On the contrary, off-site workers like sales field agents have flexible work schedules. Thus, you can not use the same framework to monitor all your employees' work time.

Having a standard policy will educate your employees under which guidelines their working hours will be tracked. Also, an employee can easily refer to a policy document whenever they have any concerns.

Build a Transparent Work Culture

Employees are always concerned about their privacy with desktop monitoring software. They feel fully exposed and have no control over their personal lives.

With the regulated policy, you can assure your employees that the company will only track their work-related activities during the set hours. But, again, stating this in a written statement will ease your employees' stress.

In addition, it will bring transparency to your organization and help to earn your staff’s trust.

Simplify Internal Operations

Today, employee efficiency software not only helps you monitor progress and productivity. Advanced tools like TrackOlap also help process payrolls, assign tasks and more.

Thus, you can seamlessly generate pay slips with a click with time tracking data. Also, assign tasks to employees based on their speed, efficiency and schedules.

How to Customize a Time Tracking Policy?

Does creating a timesheet policy sound like a complicated task? If so, you are unnecessarily worrying. Using the TrackOlap policy management software, you can quickly draft a timesheet policy taking feedback from your team in real-time.

After getting the Policy Management Software , you should write a work time monitoring policy following these guidelines:

Define Your Policy Goals

First of all, ask yourself, “why are you setting up a time tracking policy?”

Clear policy setting goals will help you set accurate policy terms like time-offs, leaves, breaks, etc.

Also, adding the objectives can help employees understand the value of the policy and how to implement it in the real world.

Define Your Policy Scope

The policy scope focuses on the question — to whom does the policy apply?

To be honest, one timesheet monitoring policy is not sufficient for an entire organization. Based on different departments and job roles, time monitoring guidelines will vary.

For instance, sales reps and marketers have different job roles. Sales reps have to go on the field and adjust their schedules accordingly to client meetings. On the other hand, marketers have to spend more time at their desks and implement various digital marketing strategies using different tools.

In addition, if you are a hybrid organization with employees working in different time zones, a company-wide tracking policy will not work.

Besides this, timesheet compliance for every employee is different. For example, your company might have some fixed salary employees and some whom you pay on an hourly basis.

Thus, you have to define for whom you are creating a policy before moving ahead.

Set Policy Framework

Once you have a proper goal and scope to set up a policy, the next step is to define your policy framework. This includes the terms and conditions that you will describe in the policy.

It is always recommended to create a comprehensive time tracking policy. Try to describe every procedure, technique and term to track time in the policy.

Usually, the policy framework depends on your policy objectives and the people for whom you are creating it. But, the general points that you should describe in the policy document are—

Standard working days and hours
Over time terms and remuneration details
Paid sick leaves
Holiday leaves
Lunch break schedule
Rules for salaried employees
Hourly work rates
A total number of annual leaves, etc.

Timekeeping Methods

This is one of the crucial steps in creating a timesheet policy. Under this section, you will define rules and regulations related to your timekeeping policy.

As we have already mentioned, the same time tracking protocol will not work for all your employees. Depending upon job position and payroll structure, you have to create separate timekeeping standards for each employee.

For example, you have to set different timekeeping procedures for regular employees and managers. In addition, salaried employees and hourly-based employees time tracking rules will be different. Also, if you hire freelancers to do small assignments for you, their time tracking methods will be completely different.

Describe Responsibilities

After describing your time tracking procedure, you have to next write about responsibilities. In this section, you must define responsibility for individual employees.

Similar to tracking procedures, responsibilities for every employee will be different depending on their job title and salary structure.

Suppose you have hourly-based employees in your organization. In that case, their responsibilities will be like this:

Getting their work assigned by a supervisor or manager
Recording their time spent on completing an assignment
Logging in and out of time tracking software whenever they take a break and resume work again
Providing detailed time tracking reports to managers for payroll and performance monitoring

On the contrary, salaried employees don’t have to record their time spent on every task. Since they are not getting paid based on how many hours they spend working, thus, their responsibilities will be different.

Salaried employees' responsibilities include recording leaves, sick leaves, holidays and other time off. Similarly, managers have different sets of responsibilities in order to track time, like accepting leave requests, creating schedules, and so on.

Policy Implementation

Now that you have a solid timekeeping policy in order, you have to next focus on ensuring that your policy gets implemented properly in your company.

Many companies make a common mistake here; they use force and punishment to impose policies on their employees. But, this is totally the wrong approach.

Instead of forcing your employees to follow the rules, you should create a positive environment where they follow the rules on their own. The best way to implement any policy is by assuring your employees and bringing them on board with your ideas.

Here are some simple tips that you can follow to motivate your employees to deploy your time tracking policy:

Teach them how to use the employee time tracking system to improve their productivity and efficiency.
Provide easy access to timekeeping documents through a centralized policy management software.
Involve your team members in the policy creation process.
Constantly ask for feedback to improve your time tracking policy.
Offer rewards in order to follow policy, etc.

Take Employee Consent

Finally, you should take formal consent from your employees to deploy your time tracking policy. The consent is essential because while tracking your employees' work schedules, you might also access some of their private information.

Under global privacy laws, it is mandatory to receive your employees' consent before tracking their personal data.

It is very simple to get consent from all your employees using our Policy Management Software . This software will allow you to send policy drafts to your different team members and receive consent from them in real-time. In addition, your employees can put their concerns on a particular point in the policy and send them back to you.

This way, you can clear your employees' doubts before implementing the time management policy. With quick communication flow, it became easy to deploy policy in your organization with your employees' full consent.

Conclusion

Time tracking is essential for modern workplaces to drive maximum productivity and performance from their employees. However, automatic time tracking solutions have created some challenges for employees and employers.

Employees are concerned about their privacy and personal data. And on the other hand, employers are not fully aware of employee time tracking system functions. This is making it hard for companies to check their employees' performance without offending them.

Therefore, a proper time tracking policy is extremely important to bring transparency and trust among your team members. With a well-defined policy, your employees can understand the reason behind time tracking and their rights and responsibilities related to it.

In addition, your managers will know how to track employees working hours without disturbing their personal boundaries.

So, we know it is challenging to create a comprehensive keeping policy that can support your organization's goals. Therefore, we offer free demo sessions to our clients so they can understand how they can use time tracking software to improve their efficiency.

So, you can book your demo any time with our team from the TrackOlap website. Or, call us for more details.