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.

 

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was a time of chaos – not only were people rightly worried for their safety and that of their loved ones, they were simultaneously trying to transition to working from home for their office jobs. While that shift was necessary for the survival of businesses the world over, it brought a new set of challenges to overcome.

Today, let’s discuss one niggle that HR has been attempting to resolve: how to effectively measure and track productivity. Let’s talk punctuality.

A Routine Helps Productivity

Workplaces have attendance and punctuality measurements not just to ensure employees are working the hours they are supposed to be, but to bring a measure of order to chaos. 

A stable routine is often cited to improve one’s productivity and the same rule can be extrapolated for teams and workplaces. Working from home has impacted productivity and efficiency already, people have to manage children, pets and families in the same space as their makeshift home offices and wild variances to clock in and clock out impacts the output of the team as a whole.

To alleviate that, implementing some form of attendance or a check-in time can do wonders to quickly ramp up productiveness.

The Benefits of Attendance Tracking

Dedicated office buildings and work spaces used to have some sort of manual or automated clock in system by the main door or reception – how does one recreate that when everyone is working from different parts of a city, country (or even world)? 

The answer lies in the use of an effective HR software with an integrated solution to manage employee work timings. Here’s how the use of solutions such as PeopleSonic can instantly benefit your business in these pandemic-ridden times:

• A central dashboard to easily let managers observe trends in employee attendance and timings and identify problem areas.
• Specialised utility that allows managers to set a sort of a ‘grace’ period for morning check in – so many employees with young children often find themselves in unplanned kid-emergencies which would otherwise negatively impact their record!
• Manage multiple shifts and different timings with a click of a button – COVID-19 has reduced work capabilities for many businesses, and many employees no longer work full-time and that would otherwise require a lot of manual logging that would fully occupy HR!
• Have attendance and work hours data down to minute-precision. Businesses fail and succeed with time efficiency, and knowing and understanding exact work patterns can help alleviate and improve workflows within teams and the organization as a whole.

As mentioned above, once the workforce is back in some semblance of punctuality, you will quickly see work output increase!

Prevent Your Company Culture From Stagnating

A curious thing that has suffered indelibly has been office culture. Each workplace has its unique culture, beloved to its employees and revered by competitors. 

Whether it was monthly lunch parties or (indoor) sports tournaments, each organization has lost those social events which added to the wow factor of working there. Why can’t that be recreated in the online workspace?

Setting up online lunches, quiz competitions or even social gaming obviously requires that the workflow of the team and company be as optimized as possible, which brings us back punctuality and productivity! Once your workforce is back on a regular schedule, HR can find it easy to plan and arrange for fun activities to bring back the cheer, the culture your organization was known for.

Attendance tracking and management isn’t just a business tool for HR to report employee timesheets and performance. It’s also a great way to boost morale and output, and more importantly, in our new reality, a way to recapture “normal” work life for most people.