PeopleSonic has recently introduced timesheet management features to help small businesses run smoother, by offering simplified visual interfaces to view, approve and edit timesheet information and save time and effort involved with manually exchanging and approving timesheets via email.
There is also an option for bulk import of timesheets so managers and admin can quickly parse a high volume of timesheet data – faster, smarter and a more efficient way of going through bulk timesheets!
Why Timesheets?
This of course begs the question, why timesheets?
With 2020 completely changing how businesses operate and how we ‘work’, smaller businesses have been left scrambling to adjust to the new normal as they lack the manpower and resources of bigger organizations to brute force a solution. Instead, they have had to resort to being smart about how they transitioned to hybrid work and implemented COVID-safe practices for their office space.
Small businesses have faced unprecedented hardships in sustaining and growing and for them, the smarter way of working will always favour them over any ‘traditional’ processes. In this case however, the ‘traditional’ process of timesheets has made a resurgence as the smarter solution to keeping businesses operational and highly productive in the face of changing workplace norms and is a solution that all small companies need to adopt.
For these businesses, an interesting trend has emerged with how timesheets have been keeping teams within those businesses functioning. Here’s a quick breakdown of how timesheets became a sleeper success to keeping small and medium businesses running “business as usual”, and how the timesheet feature from PeopleSonic can help you achieve the same.
Resource allocation in a hybrid setup
With most businesses worldwide, whether large or small, having to work completely or partly remotely, the way teams communicate has changed, and that results in poor collaboration or resource management – you can no longer turn in your seat and ask your team member what they are working on!
That’s where timesheets come in – a daily timesheet will help a manager stay on top of how their team is functioning and can allocate resources to specific tasks or projects based on their importance and time/cost budgets. These timesheets also let managers understand how tasks are being completed and can understand the resource costs associated with such a task and allocate accordingly in the future.
Boosting project management
Timesheets have always been important tools for project management, but that importance has become crystal clear this year. Timesheets let managers understand which employees are ideal for a new project, task or role based on their performance in similar tasks previously. They can analyze how certain team members perform in different time-based scenarios, identify key skills and learn to utilize each resource to their maximum potential.
Project managers can also benefit from timesheets when planning trainings and improvements for teams and future projects. Employees in need of additional training can be highlighted, overall efficiency of putting certain people together on a task can be determined, as well as their availability. All of these things help project managers estimate optimal costs and time requirements when creating projections for future and current tasks.
Reduce resource wastage
Or alternatively, increase efficiency of resources. A timesheet can help a manager pinpoint the areas where a team’s efforts are being wasted. By identifying tasks that are taking longer than usual, or necessary, managers can figure out how to prioritize tasks and make decisions to optimize project completion.
What do these things achieve for small businesses? In short: saving money. Optimizing processes to reduce overhead has been critical for small to medium businesses this year and is a trend that’s likely to continue into next year and beyond.
