I have been leveraging Time Doctor for years and I have to say it really has helped make more transparency in the team. At first I was hesitant because I thought people wouldn’t want to have their time recorded – but then I realized – if people want to work remotely online and not in an office – this is one of the “sacrifices” they need to do for management to be able to manage everyone’s time and work.
Basically it is a time tracking software the team member installs on their computer and it measures their start time, each task the work on, and takes random screenshots of their computer screen.
How do we use it?
The way we are using Time Doctor is in a few ways:
Slack Integration
The favorite part for everyone is the Slack integration. What this does is, when someone starts a task in time doctor – it posts to a channel in Slack. Pretty straight forward – but very awesome for the team to all see – TRANSPARENTLY who is working on what.
It makes you feel like you are working alongside that person. There is action rather than silence and each time a new task is done it shows some kind of satisfaction and a passive way to show others you are really working.
Asana Integration
Another cool part that I used to set up is that it pulls the Asana tasks in and when someone needs to get to a certain task – it is listed out (their Asana tasks) to choose from inside of Time Doctor’s system.
You can force the team to have to pick a task in Asana to feed into Time Doctor (which then goes into Slack) or you can also let them manually type in a task in Time Doctor to show what they are working on.
This helps with reporting – as you can then measure how much time a specific task in Asana takes to get done.
Payroll
You also can connect the time they work into payroll. Either manually or automatically – we simply use it to see the total hours worked and compare that to the amount of hours they are contracted to work and make sure they match up when doing the payments.
Overall Gives You & Your Team More Insights
The cool part is that you can start to feel like you’re working in the same office together. Tasks are assigned in Asana, then you check on Time Doctor that you are working on them, which then feeds into Slack so the whole team can see it.
Time Doctor Dashboard
Payroll Report
Then at the end of each pay cycle (or earlier if management wants) reports are generated and compared to the contracts that are signed with that team member.
Really it is not about trust or not trust – it is about transparency when working online.
Try out Time Doctor today
It is a paid service with monthly fees per user –
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