Time Tracking Vs Employee Scheduling: What's the difference?

How does your company plan staffing requirements and allocate time to daily tasks? Many businesses choose to track time using online software – but logging people’s hours only solves part of the productivity puzzle.

To optimise your available resources and run a cost-efficient business, ideally your company needs to be tracking time AND optimising employee schedules. What’s the difference between these two things? And how can they help you to improve staff performance?

Let’s take a closer look…

What is time tracking – and why is it a good idea?

In order to keep a record of how many hours people are working and how they’re spending their time, many companies choose to invest in time tracking software. Employees are required to enter details of what they’re doing during the course of the day, and submit timesheets at the end of the day or week.

Time tracking is a useful exercise for employers, because it provides valuable information on which tasks or customers take up most of your team’s time. By analysing employees’ hours, you can:

Check that workload is distributed evenly and that nobody is working unpaid overtime
Calculate approximately how long each of your core tasks take, to make sure you’re not trying to tackle too many jobs per day
Identify any major differences in pace of work between employees, asking those who work faster to share their tips and best practices
Validate your pricing model and accurately quote for future sales or jobs
Make sure you’re not over-servicing certain customers
Understand how employee workload is broken down, so people are concentrating on high-value tasks and their day isn’t swallowed up by endless admin
Provide evidence-based feedback in employee appraisals to benchmark their performance and support career progression
Pinpoint any inefficiencies in your current systems and processes, so you can invest in the tools to speed things up if necessary

Some staff members may worry that time tracking means they’re being spied on, or judged for how long things take. But you can alleviate their concerns by letting them know that logging hours will help you to make the best use of their time, and invest in the right resources to help them do their job better.

What is employee scheduling – and how is it different to time tracking?

In addition to logging time, some companies also choose to use employee scheduling software to plan staff rosters.

Unlike time tracking technology, which records how long people are working and what they are doing day-to-day, employee scheduling tools look ahead, assigning people to upcoming shifts and tasks. This way, every team member knows when they are working and what is expected of them.

There are many benefits to using employee scheduling software. These include:

Having a clear plan for exactly who’s working each shift, which can be shared digitally with every person in your company
Duplicating previous shift plans for future timetables, so you don’t have to build every rota from scratch each time it needs to be renewed
Automatically highlighting gaps in the schedule, so you can find employees to cover shifts and avoid being left under-staffed
Synching employee schedules with your holiday calendar, to identify where extra staff will be needed to cover others’ time off
Creating a list of core responsibilities that need to be completed each day and assigning them to relevant personnel

Discover more employee scheduling software benefits

The way in which each tool is managed differs as well. With time tracking software, it’s every employee’s responsibility to update their own log. However, employee scheduling solutions tend to be used by team leaders, managers and senior personnel to strategically plan company workload and staffing requirements.

Do I need both time tracking and employee scheduling tools?

While time tracking and employee scheduling software both offer benefits when used individually, they provide the greatest value when they’re used together – as they’re very complimentary.

Asking staff to track time will help you to understand resourcing requirements for each department, and give you a real-time picture of how long your core tasks take. But it’s only with shift planning software in place as well that you can turn this information into a fully-optimised schedule.

Employee scheduling software allows you to use insights into staff productivity to create a series of shift pattern templates, which you can populate and share centrally via your shift planning platform. And if this platform includes task planning and management tools, you can also include a digital breakdown of core responsibilities for each person or department – to keep people focussed during the course of the day.

Using scheduling tools alongside time tracking software also allows you to adapt resourcing in line with real-world demands. For example, if you’re unusually busy and you can see that people are having to put in overtime, you can expand your shift roster and look up which team members with the correct skills and qualifications are available to fulfil your extra staffing needs.

Keeping up the pace without burning people out

The key to running a productive operation that doesn’t burn staff out is to understand the full scope of your company workload, before making sure you’ve got the right people working each day to keep pace with customer needs.

Combining time tracking and employee scheduling software gives you a clear idea of how much your workforce is able to accomplish, so you can roster the right resources to meet every deadline. Keeping everyone happy – from your employees to your senior leadership team, to your customers.

WhosOffice employee scheduling software empowers companies to create the optimum staffing roster for every shift. Book your free trial to find out more.