Tips for a successful time registration

Many organisations use time registration to, for example, be able to invoice hours to customers, compensate (overtime) work or to gain insight into how much time employees spend on specific tasks. However, this is difficult when employees do not actually (fully) register these hours – something that unfortunately often happens. In this blog, we give tips to realise a successful time registration within your intranet or digital workspace.

Tips for a successful time registration

In many cases, the employee can’t be blamed for the fact that the time sheet is often not filled in sufficiently, because inefficient processes make time registration a time-consuming task that keeps them off their work. There are a number of things you can do to ensure that employees adequately register their hours.

Make registering hours simple

An obvious tip, but registering hours at many organisations is still a complicated and outdated process. Due to many steps and options, the employee has to think again and again, which results in mistakes or even that they ‘just guess it’.

Therefore, ensure that employees have to think as little as possible while registering their hours and can go quickly through the process. Reduce the amount of steps, options and exceptions to a minimum and make it super clear what to register and how. This also increases the chances of them actually recording their hours more and that it will be included in their routine.

Digitise your timesheets – and we don’t mean in Excel

One thing that will incredibly simplify your time registration process already, is by digitising it. This way, you eliminate the piles of paperwork that need to be searched through, updated and entered into the computer, you no longer have to add everything manually and a large part of the work can be automated. Consequently, you have everything immediately in one overview. Additionally, many time registration tools are also available on mobile, so that employees who don’t or hardly work behind a computer can easily register hours as well.

With online time registration, it’s important to choose a system that suits your organisation and activities. In most cases, an Excel file alone is not sufficient- not everyone is equally handy in working with this, it is often experienced as complicated and it’s not clear enough.

Examples of these types of tools are:

• TimeChimp
• Harvest
• Replicon
• Workday
• Toggl
• Time:on
• Rodeo

Communicate the importance of registering hours

People are more likely to do a task if they know why they are doing it and what value it adds. Because if the task is useless, why waste time on it? So let your employees know why they keep track of their time and why it’s important.

For example, you can link it to goals (not as in “who worked the most hours”, but like collective productivity), or regularly show the results of the analysis of the timesheets. This way, you make the end result of their time and effort tangible and visible. Of course, it’s also important to set a good example here.

Unite time registration with other processes

If you want the time registration to become part of the routine, it is advisable to link it to other activities. You do this by uniting the time registration with all other processes, applications and information that someone needs to work. You can do this by integrating your time registration system into your intranet or digital workspace. This makes it easier for people to see time registration as part of their work.

Additionally, you ensure that your time registration system is always and everywhere quickly and easily accessible, whether you make it accessible with a shortcut with Single Sign-On or fully integrated via a Micro App or in a full tab in your workspace or intranet. That way, people can update their hours anytime, anywhere, from any device, so they don’t forget anything and don’t have to do everything all at once at the end of the day.

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