Time management for businesses of all sizes

Time management for businesses means understanding where and how your employees spend their time. How are you tracking time and productivity?

Even before COVID-19, industry pundits had been predicting the rise of remote work and, given our current environment, it looks like it’s here to stay.

For businesses seeking to maintain and improve their productivity, understanding how employees spend their time is of utmost importance — and doubly so when that work is increasingly being delivered in a decentralised framework.

That’s where good time management comes in.

No matter what size or stage of business you’re managing, having the right processes and systems in place to manage time will allow you to improve productivity. To help get you there, this article will cover the following points:

1. What is time management?
2. Why is time management important?
3. How does time management relate to productivity?
4. How can I start to improve time management?
5. What time tracking tools are available?

1. What is time management?

Time management is the way an organisation collects information on, and organises, the time its employees spend on work and leave.

On a more advanced level, time management allows a business to assess which tasks are the most resource-intensive, to plan ahead for scheduled projects, and even help in planning when to scale up or scale down capacity according to seasonal business requirements.

2. Why is time management important?

Time management is important for both the analysis of current performance and for forecasting future needs. Understanding time management, and how to improve it, will help a business support its staff in reaching their potential.

Examples of time management for businesses include:

• Analysing time spent in meetings versus time spent ‘doing the work’
• Improving or streamlining workflows to remove inefficient processes
• Identifying high performing staff members to complete time-sensitive work

3. How does time management relate to productivity?

Time is a key variable in any equation that attempts to measure productivity. Therefore, a thorough understanding and application of time management will have direct impacts on a business’s productivity.

That’s because productivity is considered as the output of work completed (usually products or services) delivered per unit of time.

For businesses, productivity is generally measured in two broad ways:

1. Workforce productivity: Economists and business leaders measure workforce productivity as the output of an organisation as a whole per unit of time
2. Business productivity: Workforce managers look closely at business productivity, as it measures productivity on an individual level and is useful for comparing productivity among staff members and business units

4. How can I start to improve time management in my organisation?

The first step to improving any organisation’s time management is to gather detailed information regarding the time employees spend on any given task, and to make that information available for analysis, ideally in real-time.

For a small business with limited types of workers, this may be as simple as analysing existing rosters or timesheets and defining the various tasks and processes staff spend time on each day. But for larger organisations employing many different types of workers, this will require a more complex system.

No matter what camp you’re in, the first thing you’ll need to get right is to acquire the correct workforce management and time tracking tools for your needs.

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5. What tools are available today?

At its most basic, time tracking can be as simple as a detailed work roster, but trying to maintain such a system in a growing business is both cumbersome and fraught with potential disaster, as it leaves you open to error and employee fraud in the form of time theft.

Some more contemporary solutions include the need for third-party hardware or software to recreate the ability for staff to ‘clock in and out’, however many are delivered as standalone products, leading to time and money lost to integration issues.

Think cloud-first

In contrast, cloud-based, digital time management tools are currently available as part of existing MYOB solutions for businesses of all sizes. Being cloud-based means the workforce maintains flexibility, and the system is readily able to scale with future growth, while delivering security and reporting intelligence to management.

Workforce management for bigger business

For more complex organisations, workforce management solutions include the time tracking tools and more required to offer capabilities such as automated reporting insights for optimising rosters and identifying workflow problems to solve. Retailers can even gain insights into the sales cost efficiency of each shift worked with this type of workforce management feature.

Look for security

With MYOB solutions, data is stored securely offsite and away from prying eyes or potential tampering. The end result? The business receives full oversight of key productivity figures without having to continually service on-premise data security.

Time to get equipped

Smaller businesses of up to 20 full-time employees will gain the benefit of enhanced time management, as well as the ability to onboard new staff, create timesheets and payslips online with MYOB Team.

Find out more about time tracking with MYOB Team here.

For bigger businesses up to 500 full-time employees, MYOB Advanced People includes specialised workforce management tools including time tracking, including retailers, healthcare, field services, manufacturing, wholesale and distribution.

Discover how you can receive enhanced productivity tools through workforce management with MYOB Advanced People here.