Time is the most valuable asset any of us have, and it is essential in business. Therefore, the importance of time management cannot be understated. Time management is the practice of efficiently organizing time to ensure you accomplish as much as possible.
An essential element of time management is timekeeping. Businesses, in particular, need to keep track of employees’ time to ensure they are as productive as possible and help the organization accomplish its goals. Poor timekeeping has negative impacts on any business, which may include:
Unaccomplished Goals
The foremost impact of poor timekeeping practices in a business is that employees do not accomplish their goals, nor does the business. Every business has long, medium, and short-term goals. When time management is poor, even small daily goals go unmet. There are many tools that companies can use to improve their timekeeping practices and meet their goals. A time sheet application is one such tool.
It can help you know when employees start work and how much overtime they work, which can help hold employees accountable. You can even integrate the software into payroll for more effectiveness.
With time tracking software, you can ensure employees perform tasks within the allotted time, are at work on time, and use their time productively to accomplish their goals every day.
Poor Work Quality
When in business, your clients judge you on the quality of your work. It not only determines whether you receive payment, but it is also crucial for your brand reputation and the future of your business.
Poor timekeeping often leads to poor quality work by employees as they will procrastinate and rush to do tasks at the last minute leading to shoddy work.
When employees are rushed, they feel stressed and have trouble focusing, which will lead to poor work quality and, eventually, losing clients.
Proper time management ensures that employees have enough time to do jobs well and review them. They can completely concentrate on jobs when they are not in a rush, and the results will prove it.
Missed Deadlines
The business world is time-sensitive, and projects typically have deadlines for completion. The same goes for service delivery and product releases. Poor timekeeping practices will result in missing deadlines and appointments.
If your employees have poor time management skills, they don’t value their time and will not respect other people’s time. They will, in turn, miss appointments which will lose you, clients.
Employees will not do projects according to schedule, which will aggravate clients and may cost you payments. Missing deadlines and appointments may seem like a small thing, but it may eventually lead to the failure of your business.
Increased Costs
The main aim of a business is to make a profit which means keeping costs as low as possible. However, if your company has bad time management, it will inevitably lead to higher costs.
People will work for longer hours and consume more resources to do jobs they could have completed sooner and with less. You may then be forced to pay employees overtime or give clients discounts to ensure projects get finished.
Increasing costs soon eat into your earnings, and no business that does not make money can survive for long.
Damaging of Relationships
Business is all about relationships, and poor timekeeping practices will ruin your business relationships. When you miss deadlines and appointments with clients, you inevitably will strain your relationships with clients.
After doing it several times, you will ultimately lose them. The same goes for delivering poor-quality results. Strained relationships make it even harder to get things done, which has a cascading effect resulting in the demise of your business.
Time management is essential to business, and having good timekeeping practices can have significant business impacts. It can lead to poor quality work, missing deadlines, damaging relationships, increased costs, and unaccomplished goals. Every business should aim to improve its time management practices at all costs.
