When running a business, many factors contribute to your success. While most of these are well-known across the globe, some concepts are less widespread. One such thing is the topic of this article: employee accountability.
Accountability plays a vital role in teams of any size. When employees take ownership of their assignments and treat these tasks as their own, they can perform to their fullest. When the opposite is true, however, businesses can suffer a variety of negative effects.
In this article, we’ll explore employee accountability in depth. We’ll cover why it’s important and talk about how you can improve it at your company with time tracking.
What is employee accountability?
Employee accountability is simply when team members complete their tasks with a sense of responsibility. It involves putting appropriate effort into assignments and treating them as your own. Besides aiming to perform their best, accountable employees also seek to improve their knowledge. They’ll develop their professional skills to be more productive and to produce higher-quality work.
Another major part of accountability comes when dealing with mistakes. Accountable employees won’t look to blame their mistakes on others. Instead, they will typically use them as opportunities to grow.
As you might imagine, employee accountability is a positive thing for any business. It is also beneficial for your team members, making it an important thing to pursue.
The effects of employee accountability in a team
Let’s now explore the effects employee accountability can have on your business.
Increase employee engagement
Employee engagement and accountability are two closely tied concepts. They both measure how committed professionals are to their jobs and affect productivity by a lot. As a result, improving accountability will help you improve employee engagement as well. This will then have many positive effects on your business, such as the aforementioned boost in productivity.
Other benefits of high engagement and accountability include low employee turnover and enhanced remote collaboration. Each of these has its own set of positive effects on your company, helping it grow and perform better.
Encourage professional growth
When team members are accountable for their work, they’ll constantly be looking to improve their performance. They will want to pursue new skills and certifications in their professions. As you might imagine, encouraging professional growth is always a good thing both for your business and your team. It can help your company speed up its growth while your employees reap the benefits of expanding their skills.
Boosting employee accountability with time tracking
Having learned about employee accountability, let’s now shift our focus toward time tracking. How can time tracking software help boost accountability?
Eliminate distractions and improve focus
An important part of accountability is focus. After all, professionals need to give their full attention to the tasks they’re working on to perform their best. Improving focus can help establish employee accountability in your team. Thankfully, time tracking is perfect for this task. Advanced apps like WebWork can help you detect distractions for your team. You should then work with your team to eliminate these distractions.
Identify areas of improvement
Identifying areas of improvement is important for helping with professional development. You should see where your team is performing poorly and provide them with feedback. Make sure to give actionable feedback that can help employees feel like they’re growing in their careers.
Streamline project and task management
While the main purpose of time tracking apps is to track time, many of them are fully-featured productivity suites. Software like WebWork can help you enhance employee accountability by managing tasks more effectively. This can allow staff to spend more time working on their skills. It will also boost their productivity and output, letting them get more done throughout the day.
Make data-driven decisions
Time tracking apps collect and present you with lots of useful data from your workspace. This is especially true for apps that have many tracking features, like app and website usage and activity level monitoring. You should use this data to make data-driven decisions for your team. This can help you set realistic deadlines and progress targets in both the long and short term.
Time tracking tips for boosting employee accountability
If you want to boost employee accountability with time tracking, you should consider a few tips to get the most from your efforts. Before bringing this article to a close, let’s explore these tips.
Choose the right time tracker
The first tip we’ll look at is choosing the right time tracker. As mentioned previously, time tracking apps can be powerful tools for lots of things. But, they can also be limited to only tracking time. Because of this, it is important to choose a time tracker that has lots of functionality. This includes monitoring features that help with productivity and time management techniques.
Ensure correct usage of your time tracker
Continuing on the topic of features, it is also important to ensure your team use them correctly. For example, while many apps offer location tracking, this typically works only on mobile. Activity level tracking, on the other hand, will likely only work on desktop devices. It is important to research the tool you’re going to use to make sure you can take full advantage of it to boost accountability.
Periodically review and revise your practices
When trying to achieve anything in your business, you should periodically check your progress. This will help you stay on track with your goals to achieve them more easily. This is the case with improving employee accountability as well. Periodically check that your team members are engaged in their jobs, but ensure they’re not overworked either. An unhealthy work-life balance can lead to burnout. A downward spiral in productivity will follow, reducing the output of your firm.
Final thoughts
Employee accountability is vital for a productive and engaged workforce. When employees take ownership of their roles and responsibilities, the whole team benefits. Tools like time tracking can play a big part in promoting accountability. They do this by helping employees stay focused and manage tasks more easily. Fostering a culture of accountability can help team members reach their full potential. In turn, you’ll experience increased growth at your organization.
