clock in the form of a snailWhen it comes to successfully completing a business project, having good knowledge of each participant and their involvement is essential. Whether it involves a small job for a reduced group of employees, a project for an entire department or a large-scale project involving the entire company, success will depend on whether the pieces fit together as precisely as possible.

A company is based on two main cornerstones: productivity and efficiency. Employees who perform poorly affect the results and costs of the whole company. Hence, controlling performance and the hours of the employees they are responsible for should be a priority for any project manager.

Why control employee hours? There are some very good reasons to do this.

1. Calculate invoices and wages precisely.

When presenting invoices to clients, the company needs to know the real labor hours invested in completing the project. Invoicing correctly is a responsibility and this means it is essential to know how many hours in total and how many per person were needed.

Even when a project is carried out on a sealed budget, it is of the utmost interest to know the real labor hours needed in order to calculate efficiency and estimate results. Completing a project in one week is not the same as doing so in ten days.

Furthermore, this knowledge about the involvement of each employee can be used for certain wage and salary calculations. This would enable pay to be better adjusted to real working hours, whether this means an increase or a decrease.

Whether for billing the client or administrating wages, using work supervision and control software also allows rapid and precise calculation of all that information without the paperwork involved in using other management systems (or not using one at all).

2. Locate areas for improvement

Locating the waste or lack of labor hours and being able to relate it to the effectiveness of the employee or department enables an analysis of which sectors or areas are failing and management of their improvement.

The control software allows knowledge of which worker is wasting time or stands out in terms of productivity and efficiency. The overall total and crosschecking against accounting data could determine the effectiveness of the company, department, project team or specific worker.

3. Helping employees to improve

Once workers know they are being monitored and their activity recorded, even if only in terms of their hours, they will get more involved and improve productivity. Even the most efficient worker could be surprised by an analysis of their browsing habits and find that they spend more time than necessary on internal company communication, for example.

This is not a matter of finding inappropriate activity, because even writing emails from and for the company could be a waste of precious time. The information obtained allows each employee to see those areas where they are less productive and take corrective steps.

4. Facilitating assessment of work

By assessing performance, a project manager is just one click away from data on the work carried out, how it was done, how much was done and when it was done. This facilitates management and the immediate location of mistakes, enabling a boss to receive direct feedback from the employee, which will improve overall performance.

5. Knowing who is the best worker.

By crosschecking all this information against the results of each project carried out, the project manager can know who is most productive and most efficient. In short, those who are the best employees. By doing this, they can manage their team so the best can teach and push the rest, thereby increasing overall productivity.

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