Tracking work of my employees

SirLouen

Elite Member
Executive VIP
Jr. VIP
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
5,034
Reaction score
4,509
Lately I've been thinking on how I could track work of my employees on a simple way, but at the same time, enough solid to scale over time.

The problem is this:

I've been looking for work for my employees, but they sometimes are hard stuck, while other times I feel they are simply not doing anything in particular because of a lack of tasks so I would like to balance this by having a better comprehension over 3 or 4 months of what tasks they are actually finishing day by day.

For example, some tasks they might be doing at any given point.

1. Written a 1200 word article
2. Posted 10 links in blog comments
3. Outreached 5 sites
etc.

I would like to see like a monthy calendar view, for each of my employees, with a list of the tasks done each day.

I was thinking on just printing some calendars every month for each employee and told them to write down what are the tasks they are doing everyday and send me a photo at the end of the month, but then I thought I could do this somehow online to monitor everything more efficiently.

Any ideas on how to implement this?
Maybe some cloud service does this efficiently?
 
upwork does this by recording their screen and sharing with you so you can see what they are working on at what time of day.
hubstaff is not bad for this too.
but it sounds like a better start would be to set more expectations, or ask them to at least submit a daily report to you of what they were working on.
 
Some things I have experienced in agency's I worked for:

Time tracking via shared Google sheets. Put in time for task. Every client must get up to a certain amount of time based on tier for services. Fill in monthly work history doc with some bullet points on those tasks.
ZoHo - takes a lot of time to setup and made for bigger teams. You assign projects (milestones) with weekly/monthly deadlines and tasks to reach the milestones. The tasks and then the employee clicks on timers when they do tasks. Tasks have expectations of time.
Google Calendar - put in what you are working on. Assign deadlines, invite team members to the deadlines so they have reminders.
Trello boards for project management.
Screen monitoring.
Google Ques - simple task management system for small team.

In all of these systems there were KPI's we had to update and general reporting.

Ultimately, I think it depends on what's your style and the size of your team. If its a small team, like 3 or 4 employees, you could probably just have shared Google sheets with work history and monitor monthly KPI reports. If KPI's go down, the tasks are not getting done.

Regarding style, people don't like being micro managed. There is a thin line between micro managing and being transparent. With my team I tell them I just want transparency. Its small so we just use sheets and calendar. We don't have many deadlines in our industry though, so I have to vet good people.
 
There are tools like redmine, youtrack, and jira - all three used widely in software development niche. Probably you could make some use of these tools. Personally I use Jira to have clear view on whole stuff Im working on at the moment.
 
Reading the kind of tasks I doubt he will need anything complex say Monday, Harvest, Jira etc

If I recall timedoctor used to have it back in the day but never looked back, they may and others still provide screenshots etc on a monthly basis but likely also per-user pricing

Really depends on do you trust them or not? If not, well hire someone else.
The simplest would be Google Calendar (share it) and they all add their time in there and you can get an idea (or they create one and share with you so you can review, whichever).

If you do not trust them but want to keep them well screen recording...
 
Usually i just pay them fix rate by calculating the time it would take by trying them myself.
 
the less task management programs the better, the less messy.

I would assign a calendar and daily goal, in the same notion you can use them
 
It is best to measure the results, and calculate the cost per result.
 
As people suggested above, screen monitoring is the best unless you can calculate accuretely how much time it takes to complete the small project and pay them a fix rate each day.
 
Back then when i provided web development services we agreed to use this tool: toggl.com

I was paid by hour. Every major task was included there and my boss could take a look at any time and check how i was doing.

No screenshots though, work was measured by production.
 
Back
Top