How to Get More Value From Your Greatest Asset

Odds are, employee costs for compensation, taxes, state and voluntary benefits are the biggest expense in your company. Each employee hour has a cost and a time tracking tool can help you determine exactly how that cost gets spent. Do you know how your employees are spending your time?

Do You Know How Your Employees are Spending Time?

Time is a perishable asset. A perishable asset is one that loses value over time. High-tech products that lose popularity quickly, hotel rooms that go unbooked, underutilized capacity, and time, are all perishable assets. Once past, these assets have no further value

Many companies will track time for payroll processing, to enforce attendance policy or to create customer invoices. All good objectives with real payback.

But it always surprises me that companies stop short of looking into the way time is spent in their organization, especially when a good time tracking solution can provide that insight. As a business manager, if you had a window into the actual use of employee time by project, client, task or location, you could:

• Gain visibility into how employee time is really spent. Are employees spending the bulk of their time in meetings, handling administration and paperwork versus driving revenue activities like sales, customer service or onsite services?
• Identify opportunities to improve processes, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. Do the reports show a pattern of increasing time spent on non-customer activities? Is there a way to be more efficient?
• Compare project time estimates against actual project costs. Are you actively tracking project time so you can give employees a project scope and keep scope creep under control? Can your project estimates be better?
• Increase employee work satisfaction by removing inefficient and unnecessary tasks, and shifting resources to understaffed areas. Are there things that your employees are doing that they feel are a waste of time? When you have the actual numbers at your fingertips, find out what is it really worth to make some changes?
• Proven: successfully adopted and used within businesses

If you look at time as a perishable asset, and have employee time tracking systems in place, you'll get a whole lot more value from your greatest asset.