Time is a valuable commodity when you’re managing a mobile team.
In the past, keeping track of worker’s time has been a messy affair - relying on a world of paper forms, spreadsheets and ‘finger in the air’ guesstimates.
The results were often inaccurate and having to manually manage all of this timesheet information would eat up your administrative resources.
But digital management has transformed the way that mobile workers’ time can be tracked with real-time tracking and online handling of timesheets.
Here’s how time management can improve performance:
- Improved management visibility
- More realistic scheduling
- Better customer relations
- Getting the best from workers
- Increased scalability and flexibility
Improved management visibility
With a digital approach to time management, you’re able to track how long a task actually takes - not how long you think it should take or what an employee estimate it has taken. This gives you the accurate data required for effective management.
By analysing the time spent on each operational process, from travel and job completion to admin and break times, you can start to hone and improve performance. You can start to identify those time sinks that would have remained hidden using a traditional time management approach.
More realistic scheduling
Effective time tracking makes for better scheduling. You have real-world data on travel and job completion time to help make the best use of your resources. This improves customer service and provides mobile workers with realistic and achievable schedules.
It helps to guard against the problem of unrealistic schedules causing stressed-out workers and delivery targets that are unattainable. And the more data you collect, the more accurate your scheduling estimates can become.
Better customer relations
Accurate time management is particularly important when services are being billed on an hourly rate. A digital approach allows accurate times for each task to be recorded and shared with customers and clients.
It removes the reliance on ‘guesstimates’ that can become the cause of complaints and disputes over service delivery costs. An integrated workforce management solution will use exact time record data to automatically generate customer invoices.
Getting the best from workers
If it consistently takes one mobile worker twice as long to complete jobs as their colleagues - you need to know why. That’s something that accurate time management data can help you to figure out.
Whether it’s a dip in performance or inefficiency with their working process, online timesheets can help to identify where the issue lies. It also means that good performance can be properly recognised with attainable goals and targets set.
Increased scalability and flexibility
An automated and online approach to time management removes the administrative limitations of a traditional paper-based operation. It has the scalability to handle the changing needs of a growing workforce.
It’s also a powerful tool when it comes to handling mobile teams that contain a mix of employees, contractors and agency workers. Accurate time management allows working hours to be tracked and properly reimbursed.
