There’s nothing quite as disconcerting as working in an unhealthy work environment. Just waking up in the morning and getting ready for work becomes a chore, and you dread the sight of your office miles away. There are plenty of reasons why things might be a bit uncomfortable in your workplace, and tensions are bound to arise whenever people work together. Most often the problems are related to the flow of work, and you get your daily conflicts about who should be doing what. This is where employee timesheets come in, and they can save you and the business a lot of pain in the long run. Here’s how.
Enhanced workflow
Order is everything when it comes to the workplace, and nothing helps in keeping the order like a timesheet. When you know what each and every member of your team is doing at a particular moment, the workflow starts improving because everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s no hassle when it comes to the division of labor, and people know what tasks are required of them in a much more efficient and smoother way. So, you’ll have less problems like this employee asking if they should do this task or not, and all similar issues that arise when the workflow is random and in a state of disarray.
Better billing process
Billable hours can be a pain to figure out, and it can be the source of a lot of turmoil between companies and clients. This is why businesses do their best to keep track of their employees’ working hours, and this is where the timesheets come in. You get to better track your team’s working hours, which will make the process of billing your clients a lot easier because you’ll have solid documentation of the exact hours you should get paid for.
Resource management
It’s a pretty normal thing for a company to put too many people on a project, or too few. This happens because you can’t figure out exactly how many hours by how many people are needed to get this particular assignment done. When you’re using a timesheet, you’ll start figuring out a solution to this problem. By keeping track of your progress over past projects, you can better allocate resources in upcoming ones. There won’t be a need to assign anything but the exact needed number of employees, because you know what this job needs to get done from your past experience and records. If you continue to keep track of your workflow using timesheets, with time, you won’t face any problems allocating the proper resources.
Cost control
It’s a safe bet to assume that no business ever wants to spend more money than it should, and cost control is a priority for any company, no matter how big it is. When you start using a timesheet, you’ll be better able to keep track of your costs in a very efficient way. There are different costs for any project –– materials cost, suppliers’ fees, and the employees’ hourly wages, and that last one is hardest to figure out, especially without a timekeeping solution. You don’t even need to spend time creating a timesheet template, because you can easily find a helpful website with ready templates to get you started without wasting any time. Once you start using the timesheet, you’ll be able to control your spending and find out the real cost of any project you’re working on, because it can be very hard to track the expenses of a project without such a tool.
Employee satisfaction
Nothing is more important than employee satisfaction in the workplace, because if they are satisfied, then you’ll be able to get the best results out of them. The timesheet can help you achieve that employee satisfaction in different ways. For starters, nobody likes to feel like they’re being micromanaged, and it’s often the reason for a lot of conflict between management and subordinates. The timesheet spares everybody that pain, because management won’t need to micromanage anyone. Everybody knows when they’re supposed to arrive, when they should leave, and what they need to be working on. That way the employee won’t feel like their managers are needlessly breathing down their necks to get the job done.
On a different note, the timesheet will also help you make hardworking employees feel appreciated. When you keep good track of tasks completed and working hours, you can better reward those who go above and beyond for the job, and truly go the extra mile to get things done. These people need to feel appreciated so they can keep on giving, and that will only happen if you reward them. The timesheet will help you figure this step out, and you’ll have a clear idea on who’s really giving it their all and who’s slacking around most of the day.
Predicting failures and estimating costs
One of the most important benefits of a timesheet is how it will help you predict costs for future projects. The longer you keep doing it, the better you’ll get at estimating costs, which in turn will help you figure out a reasonable budget that won’t need any amends down the line. When you start figuring out how much time you need for a certain project, you’ll find it quite easy to estimate the exact cost, and that comes with experience in using the timesheets. Having this sort of reference to build on in future projects is very important, and it’ll help you in more ways than one.
It happens a lot that teams face a certain gap or roadblock that repeats itself in a specific phase of the project’s life cycle. With timesheets, you can identify that consistent problem, and you’ll be able to figure out a solution in turn to ensure that it doesn’t repeat itself in the future.
It’s pretty incredible how a simple notion like employee timesheets can make this much of a difference in a work environment. It will not only start improving the general mood around the office, but also help businesses run more efficiently and smoothly in the long run.
