Keeping Track

Over the weekend, I once again came into contact with one aspect of office life – be it online or bricks-and-mortar – that has always been contentious. It causes distrust and arguments. It causes bad feeling. It causes suspicion and paranoia. What is it?

Time tracking.

With the introduction of modern management and all its acronyms, the ability to track an employee’s day has grown in importance. In my experience, there are three main ways to deal with the subject:

Paranoid

Managers under pressure to meet KPIs and other goals frequently fall prey to a desire to track absolutely every moment. Tools are, of course, available to handle this, though many simply demand a list of hours worked and a task breakdown.

Working in such a dictatorial environment has the advantage of showing how efficient you can be, but it also comes with drawbacks. Not least of these is the feeling of being under surveillance: either an application sits in the background, logging every keystroke, every mouse click and every file or workers are expected to note everything they do in a spreadsheet.

In turn, this raises the issues of privacy (where logging is automatic) and of wasted effort (where a manual system is used).

Carefree

At the other extreme are the employers who don’t care about tracking. Either they arrange to pay per-task or they work out deadlines and leave their employees to do the job.

This kind of hands-off treatment can work very well, especially if your workers are honestly interested in what they’re doing, reasonably well organised and communicative when there are problems.

On the other hand, it can be a nightmare if people miss deadlines, don’t say anything when they hit a snag or don’t really care about the work. In that case, you’re just asking for trouble by giving them free rein.

Sensible

Between the two extremes is what, personally, I find to be the most sensible solution. A good manager discusses the projects and tasks with the workers, sets deadlines and then tracks the major steps (milestones, if you prefer).

By giving people freedom and space, respect and trust are encouraged. It shows that, as an employer, you don’t feel the need to stand behind your employees, looking over their shoulder and breathing down their neck.

In return for the trust you show, you can also reasonably expect your workers to track what they do. Not down to the minute, as that takes far too much effort and is very intrusive, but at least the number of hours on each task.

Online Freelancing

Some would say that fussing about the minutiae of a person’s work is pedantic and annoying. I’d normally agree with them, but I can also see that working with online freelancers who you can’t see is a difficult situation. How do you know they’re actually working and not just playing Call of Duty?

Most of the big online sites provide tools to manage this. For instance, I’ve begun using oDesk’s tracker to keep tabs on my hours for a client. Before this, we worked on trust – but his accountants don’t like that and I can see their point.

The majority tools generally have a start/stop button that you control yourself and – in the case of the one I’m using – take a screenshot a few times every hour just as “proof” that you’re working. If you happen to be visiting Playboy‘s web site when the shot is taken (not that I do), you can cancel the upload – and lose 10 minutes or so of logged time (and stop the clock). Some also allow for web cam pictures to be taken (which is a horrible thought).

These tools also record activity levels – by counting key-presses and mouse clicks – but not what’s being typed or clicked. As a writer and editor, this part is less useful as a good deal of time is spent researching or reading, without any physical activity other than eye movement and the mouse’s scroll wheel.

The good news? It seems I mostly underestimate how long it takes me to do things, so I shall end up better-paid than I was without the tracking.

How do you feel about having your time tracked? Do you consider it rude and invasive or a necessary part of the employer-employee relationship?