by Awesome Author | Jun 18, 2020 | Management & Leadership
At first, glance, tracking employee time seems pretty straightforward. Your employees simply denote the hours they were at work on a timesheet, or punch a time clock and turn their time cards in at the end of the week or month. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, a lot. The ability to accurately track employee hours is one of the most important tasks a business undertakes. Timesheets and time cards provide invaluable data to your business regarding how efficiently you use employee time, your labor costs, and areas for productivity improvement.
For big and small businesses alike, finding ways to make your time tracking both easier for employees and managers is essential to improving margins, accurately bidding projects, and ultimately running a more successful company.
Time tracking trouble?
Employers have long relied on manual timecards to track employee work hours. Employees either clock in and clock out or they’re responsible for recording and reporting how many hours they worked and when. The manual aspect makes the process vulnerable to errors, miscalculations, and estimates.
In one 2018 survey, 44% of business owners reported that they regularly struggle with timesheet errors. An astounding 92% of the respondents reported that the errors were typically caused by the user. The biggest problem? Employees forget to record their time. That was followed by employees recording their time incorrectly or to the wrong job.
Fortunately, you can implement the following time tracking best practices to simplify your timekeeping and improve the accuracy of your labor costs.
Educate employees about time tracking
Make sure that your employees understand the importance of time tracking, as well as how your time tracking systems work and what’s expected of them. With each new employee, walk them through your time tracking tool, as well as the guidelines for how to track time. For instance, let employees know if they need to check in to a mobile app daily (versus entering data later).
Provide them with information about how long their breaks should be, what type of personal business is permitted on the job, and how they can correct entries if they made an error. Educating your employees will not only reduce errors and misinformation but can also prevent employee time theft.
Automate your system
The next step to better employee time tracking is to get rid of manual timesheets and clocking in with paper time cards. Automating your record-keeping provides a host of benefits, from making it easier for employees to document their work time to streamlining the record-keeping for your HR or office administrators. It also provides for 100% accurate timesheets, eliminating the need for time clock rounding.
People platforms like Hourly offer time tracking apps that allow employees to easily document when they’ve begun working. You can automate breaks and lunches so that they’re always included in the report and even set rules so help ensure the employees work the time they’re required—and not more or less.
Make time tracking easy for your managers
Time tracking poses a problem for some employees, but it can also be the least favorite part of a manager or supervisor’s job. Managers routinely have to collect all employee timecards or reports, check them for accuracy regarding billable time worked, overtime, and correct any errors. What seems like a simple task can take up hours each month or week, especially if managers have to keep track of employee time because employees aren’t good about reporting their work hours.
Time tracking software solutions like Hourly not only simplify time tracking for employees, but they reduce the workload for managers as well. Your managers will be able to automate their reporting, quickly find missing information and headquarter all the employees’ time data in one place.
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Avoid these 3-time tracking mistakes
It’s easy to keep doing things the same way. But when it comes to time tracking, finding small improvements and avoiding common pitfalls adds up to real savings. Sidestep these time tracking mistakes and you’ll add efficiency to your timekeeping system and improve the quality of your labor cost data.
Not collecting enough detail about employee work hours
There’s a fine line between trying to keep timecards simple and oversimplifying your data in a way that’s detrimental. For instance, employees should clock in at the beginning of each shift and clock out at the end, of course. But that’s just the basics.
Tracking breaks, lunches, and regular work hours are required by federal law. Properly tracking over time is also essential. That not only ensures that employees get overtime pay but also allows your organization to better manage its resources and reduce overtime spending. You can even track hours to specific projects, job sites, and more.
Time tracking tools such as Hourly allow you to document a higher level of detail about your employee work hours. Then you can generate practical data you can use to make smarter decisions about your labor.
Not leveraging time tracking software features
You don’t have to be a tech wizard to benefit from time tracking solutions like Hourly. The platform provides multiple, easy-to-use features that enable your company to run more efficiently, and frankly, get more from your timecard reports. For example, with Hourly, you can:
- Know who’s working in real-time. Log in to the app and see who is on the job—and whether anyone is missing.
- Have employees clock in by location. With this feature, your employees can only clock in once they’re at the right worksite.
- Geofence jobs. The software can send you an alert if employees are not where they’re supposed to be during the workday.
- Set alerts for important issues. Hourly can send alerts if your employees head into overtime or switch work locations.
Not combining payroll, worker’s comp, and time tracking solutions
All of these things are deeply related. By incorporating them into one solution you can reduce the time you spend, and improve your compliance with labor laws as well as documentation in all three areas. Hourly is the only small business solution that incorporates payroll, worker’s compensation, and time tracking into one application.
You can simplify your paydays, running payroll for employees, contractors and freelancers with the click of a button. Integrating workers comp ensures that you and your employees are covered in case of an accident and ensures that your vital employee information is all in place. Add in time tracking and you’ve streamlined a significant component of your HR function.
Time to clock out?
Improving your employee time tracking doesn’t take much—and it’s well worth the effort. Explore how a people platform like Hourly can make time tracking easier for your employees, while also providing your company with increased efficiency, time savings and more.
The original article by Kelly Kearsley was originally published at Hourly.io
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
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by Awesome Author | Aug 4, 2019 | Small Business & Entrepreneurs
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
With over 100 million startups opening each year, it is becoming critical for new businesses to improve their online visibility and stand out among their competitors. In the digital era, the basic rule for business success is to effectively use SEO to engage customers, establish your brand, and drive profitability.
In this post, I’ll discuss some basic, but effective SEO tips that will maximize your startup’s visibility and connect you with your target audience.
- Know Your Audience
- Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
- Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
- Your Blog Page Is a Star
- Leverage Free SEO Tools
1. Know Your Audience
Most businesses assume that SEO comprises preset rules and standard techniques. However, the fact is that your firm’s SEO efforts largely depend on how well you know your audience.
Which industry are you in? Which SEO strategies are your top competitors using to engage audience? Where does your target audience spend most of its time? Which social platform are they active on? How much time do they spend on their smart device? The answers to these questions will help you create and optimize a tailored SEO strategy for your new venture.
More than half of the world’s population is active online looking for solutions to their day-to-day issues, expressing their opinions, and making decisions. Therefore, it is critical to identify your audience’s unique traits, online behavior, and preferences.
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For instance, if you are an online yoga instructor, 80% of your time should be spent on understanding where your audience is likely to find you and take an action in your favour (sign up for the yoga retreat or recommend others).
If you are targeting health-conscious customers, chances are you may find them on health and nutrition tracking apps, fitness blogs, or social media sites. Engaging your audience through these channels will strengthen your brand visibility. Set up your listing in various online directories like Google My Business, Yelp for Business Owners, Bing, and Yoga Trail, enabling your customers to find you.
2. Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
Once you have defined your target audience, it is necessary to pinpoint what they are looking for. Here, you need to consider two critical areas: what your audience is searching for and how they are conducting the search.
Study the user’s intent behind typing a particular keyword. For instance, your user initially searches for “musical instruments seller,” however, you eventually discover keyword variations like “musical instruments for sale” or “local musical instruments shop.” Incorporating each of these variations will boost your startup’s SERP ranking.
It is a good idea to do some solid keyword research and design your website in a way that it lands your audience on what they are looking for (your webpage or blog).
Once the searchers are directed to your website or mobile application, your ultimate goal should be to offer an amazing user experience (UX). Firstly, is your website mobile-friendly? With people spending an average of six hours per day on smart devices like mobiles and tablets, it is pertinent that businesses use Responsive Web Design to cater to various device types, thereby improving the user experience.
Users typically take 0.05 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your site. What’s more, nearly 60% of searches on the internet come from mobile devices. Thus, in order to optimize your SEO efforts, you should leverage responsive web app development.
Focus on user experience to improve the site speed and ensure ease of navigation, thereby converting the clicks into conversions. Browse through the top UX design websites to learn how you can use the best illustrations, user interface, and branding to engage your audience.
3. Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
In 2017, 71% of internet users had an active social media account and this figure has only grown since then. The ever-increasing social network penetration is making it imperative for businesses to stay active on these platforms to engage their target audience and drive conversions.
Image Source Statista
StumbleUpon (now Mix) is one such social networking website that categorizes and recommends tailored content to users based on their personal tastes and interests. Thus, if a user has liked your webpage, it gets added into the StumbleUpon lineup and is featured to other users who are randomly searching on a specific topic using the Stumble button. Submitting your site to StumbleUpon can help you improve your social following and brand awareness.
Social media sites possess the largest demographics globally, making it critical for businesses to build a massive following on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and, Snapchat, among other platforms.
Image Source Statista
People aren’t merely interacting on these social platforms, they are using them to make purchasing decisions and recommend a product or service to their friends. Did you know that 70% of B2C marketers have acquired their customers through Facebook? That’s the power of staying active on social networking platforms.
4. Your Blog Page Is a Star
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of B2B marketers and 75 percent of B2C marketers include blogging in their current marketing strategies. Devising an effective content marketing strategy for your blog can help you retain loyal customers, attract qualified leads, promote your brand, and nurture customer relationships.
The content presented to the target audience should be relevant, insightful, and value-adding. Serving your audience with the content they are looking for on Google is a sure way of getting their attention and engaging them on your website.
In order to improve your startup’s visibility, share knowledge, advice, or entertainment in consumable formats like blog articles, videos, podcasts, emails, infographics, and webinars. When you share informative content on your blog, you come across as a domain expert, thereby increasing your website traffic and generating conversions.
5. Leverage Free SEO Tools
If yours is a young startup, you will need to conduct keyword research, analyze competitor performance, track traffic and conversion trends for your site, and assess the performance of your content marketing strategy. However, technology has made it possible to effortlessly measure new business success with several effective and free SEO tools.
SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs can help you create a strong online presence without spending a dime. Another free SEO tool, SEO Minion is an amazing Google Chrome extension that analyzes on-page SEO, checks broken links and redirects, simulates multi-location SERP, and improves the CTR by boosting your site’s search engine ranking.
These SEO tools can help you gain organic traffic and nail the SERP ranking with the least marketing budget.
With the world going digital, new ventures heavily depend on fresh and organic traffic to stand out from the competition and drive business profits. Building your startup’s visibility allows potential customers to know about your products/services and helps strengthen your online brand reputation.
SEO has been a key marketing tool used by startups to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. Use the effective SEO tips shared in this post to improve your brand performance and conversions.
This article by Jaykishan Panchal was previously published on Smallbizdaily.com
About the Author:
Jaykishan Panchal is an SEO & Content Marketing Manager at E2M Solutions Inc. and implements cutting edge SEO strategies to help businesses strengthen their online presence. Apart from helping small and big businesses he loves to jot down valuable resources for Entrepreneurs, Start Ups, and Technology Geeks.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
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