Companies need to consider employee well-being and workload management during these unprecedented times. For most employees, working eight hours a day can sometimes feel insufficient. This results in extending deadlines and completing projects within due time frames by working overtime.
However, mastering the art of managing overtime may be difficult, but possible. Managers must learn how to manage overtime effectively without compromising employee productivity or burnout levels. By proactively managing employee workload and optimising productivity levels, companies can ensure business continuity while protecting their most valuable asset: their people.
Read this article to learn why overtime tracking is essential and how to manage it easily.
The Advantages of Overtime Tracking
For Employers
In today’s world, it is crucial to maintain transparency and responsibility when it comes to overtime, and monitoring its usage benefits all parties involved in the work equation. For employers, this ensures that they adhere to labour laws while closely monitoring one of their most significant ongoing expenses. In some regions, such as the EU, it is legally required for companies to track employee work hours accurately.
Effective resource management is also supported by overtime tracking, allowing managers to analyse company-wide work patterns and assign tasks fairly among employees. Furthermore, this practice also holds significant value for HR departments - identifying unmanageable workloads and problematic behaviour before they spiral into employee burnout, disengagement or negative workplace culture.
For Employees
Ensuring accurate overtime tracking is crucial for employees to guarantee fair compensation and safeguard themselves against wage theft. Providing concrete evidence in addressing unsustainable or biased working conditions also helps with employee self-management. With the pandemic forcing many people to work from home, tracking overtime can be essential for maintaining a healthy work/life balance and preventing overwork.
Precisely documenting daily work hours enables employees to make necessary adjustments in their schedule to stay within their weekly capacity. Additionally, by keeping track of the time spent on specific tasks, they can make informed decisions about how to use their time more efficiently.
Overtime tracking can be easy
While everyone can benefit from monitoring overtime, it is typically the responsibility of managers to track employee overtime hours. Fortunately, there are various tools available that make this process hassle-free. For instance, Time is an automatic time-tracking app that can handle all your overtime tracking needs.
All you need to do is install the bot to your Slack workspace and let it do its job. With automatic tools like Time, minimal manual effort is required.
How it works
The Time for Slack tracks employees’ working and break hours. The interaction with the Time is simple - send commands to any channel, and the Time will handle the user’s request and start recording the event’s time.
On the manager’s side, tracking working hours is easy and requires no unique manipulations. Managers get a dashboard where they can see the accurate status of all employees, including information about the task, the channel, and the number of hours spent on the task. This allows seeing if your team members overwork and might need a break soon.
Managers can get reports that sum up the employees’ worked hours for a specific period. The report shows the team’s workload and clarifies to the managers if any team members overwork.
Stop spending time guessing if your team’s workload is okay, and make them feel comfortable. See the actual image of your team’s effort!