As a business owner, you’ll constantly be making various decisions at your firm. Some decisions can be impactful for your company, highlighting the importance of getting them right.

A popular strategy for doing this is data driven decision making. It replaces assumptions and biases with facts and knowledge. Mastering the strategy can lead to you making better choices for your business, speeding up its growth in the process.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can use data-driven decision making with a popular productivity tool: a time tracker. We’ll cover how time trackers help businesses make better decisions, especially for their teams and employees.

Understanding data driven decision making: the basics

Data driven decision making is a simple concept. It simply involves using data to make various decisions. The strategy replaces opinions, biases, and guesses to make accurate choices. As a result, your decisions will also be better for your company, both in the long and short term.

A key requirement for data-driven decision making is of course data. You may obtain it from different sources, such as from your customers, third-party providers, and more. But, you may already have an excellent source of data in your workspace: time tracking software.

How a time tracker can contribute to data-driven decision making

Most time tracking solutions on the market are simple apps that have one function: tracking time. But, high-quality trackers like WebWork offer much more functionality. Such apps enable you to collect lots of productivity data from your team members. This information can be invaluable when expanding your team, prioritizing tasks, and setting goals. Data driven decision making in these areas may be the difference between success and failure.

Key time tracking metrics for data driven decision making

As mentioned previously, data-driven decision making can use lots of information. Let’s now explore what data you can use from your time tracking software.

Tracked time data

The first type of data you should use is also the most obvious one. Any high-quality time tracker will give you the tracked hours of your employees. These hours will be handy in quite a few cases. These include when setting deadlines, calculating employee raises, and adjusting project targets. Prioritizing your team’s tasks will also be much easier with tracked time data.

Project and task progress

Assessing your team’s progress on tasks and projects is important for data driven decision making. It can be beneficial in many of the same ways as tracked time data. But, it can also help you with resource allocation. If one of your projects is behind on its targets, you may want to spend more time on it. Doing this effectively and accurately should be simple with the appropriate information.

Employee productivity: activity levels, app & website usage, and more

Having an accurate understanding of the productivity of your staff is vital. It can assist you in decisions relating to flexible working hours, employee benefits, and more. However, collecting this data can be a bit trickier. Many things contribute to it, including activity levels and app & website usage. But, the benefit of this is that you can easily verify it and ensure accuracy. You can even use non-traditional data like screenshots for this purpose.

Data-driven decision making with a time tracker: step-by-step

Making decisions based on time tracking data can have many benefits for your company. Let’s now explore how you can take advantage of data-driven decision making, starting with choosing the right time tracker for the purpose.

Choosing the right time tracker for data driven decision making

The first step of the process is choosing the right time tracker. As you might expect, a simple app that has no extra functionality won’t work for collecting data. As a result, you should look for an app with as many tracking features as possible. This will not only help you make data-driven decisions in more situations but also provide you with higher accuracy.

Setting up effective data collection

After choosing a time tracker, you should start collecting data. Of course, it will take some time to build a usable database for data-driven decision making. But, you must first set up your time tracker correctly. Most time trackers collect the most data on their desktop applications. But, if you want to collect extra information with features like employee GPS tracking, you will need to use the app on other platforms.

Analyzing collected data accurately

The last and sometimes most important step of time tracking for data-driven decisions is analyzing data. After all, your data will only be as accurate as your interpretation of it. A feature that will be invaluable for data analysis is a variety of reports. For example, WebWork offers more than a dozen of them which can help you find the data you’re looking for quickly.

Practical examples of data driven decision making

Before bringing this article to a close, let’s explore a few examples of data driven decision making with a time tracker.

Optimizing employee schedules to boost productivity

In our first example, you will be able to boost your team’s productivity. By tracking this over time, you can experiment with different schedules. You should consider not only traditional work arrangements but also shift schedules. This strategy simply involves letting your employees work at different times of the day and then assessing their performance. You will be able to identify when your team members perform their best throughout the day. Then, you should use this data to let each of them work when they’re most productive.

Enhancing employee work-life balance and professional engagement

Improving employee work-life balance is another use case for data driven decision making. Your staff’s work hours will be a pretty accurate indication of their work-life balance. Extra data like productivity levels can even help you detect burnout. You will then be able to maintain a healthy work-life balance in your team more easily. This will lead to higher professional engagement, which is an important metric for business growth.

Managing time effectively for teams of all sizes

Data-driven decision making is also useful for many time management techniques for teams. The main data you should pay attention to in this example is productivity, which will help you pick the best strategy for your professionals. This can be used for teams of all sizes, as small and large ones may need to use different techniques to perform their best.

Concluding thoughts

Data driven decision making with a time tracker is an excellent strategy for businesses of all sizes. It will help you make better choices at your company, lots of which will have measurable impacts on your firm. If you’re running a small business, the strategy can often be the difference between success and failure. This further highlights the importance of a high-quality time tracker, which is a worthwhile investment in the long run.