| Jul 4, 2019 | | 6 min read

Best tools for Employee Time & Productivity Tracking

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The worst thing you can do as a leader is to be constantly peering over your employees shoulders. You want to be able to trust that your employees can motivate themselves and be productive without constant monitoring, but that’s not always the case. Productivity is a tough aspect to monitor within your team, so much so that studies have shown that 48% of projects never meet their initial deadline.

So what do you do?

Thankfully there are lots of helpful time and productivity tools that allow you and your employees to create timelines, create productive tasks, and hit your deadlines every time, allowing you to focus on the growth of your agency.

Table of Contents

Tools for Employee Time & Productivity Tracking

Toggl

TimeDoctor

Harvest

Asana

Trello

DeskTime

Monday

Task Manager

Conclusion

8 Best Time & Productivity Tools

Toggl

Toggl is a simple and easy-to-use time-tracking tool. It allows you to create projects, create tasks within your projects, and track the time of each task. It’s as simple as clicking a start and stop button as you complete your daily tasks. Toggl allows you to create timelines and budgets for personal and team projects to further help with accountability.

Best For
Teams/Individuals

Special Features
✅ Convenient browser extensions
✅ Create projects, timelines, and budgets
✅ Tracking reminders
✅ Profitability analysis
✅ Calendar integration
✅ Detailed reporting function
✅ +100 app integrations

Pricing
Free 30-day trial (up to 5 members)

Monthly:
Starter $10/month
Premium $20/month

Annually:
Starter $9/month
Premium $18/month

Enterprise: Customizable Plan

TimeDoctor

TimeDoctor is a time tracking and employee monitoring tool that analyzes how your employees are spending their work time. This application helps managers stay in the loop with daily employee activities— which is extremely useful if your team has remote employees.

TimeDoctor gives you the ability to screenshot employee tasks in real time, as well as monitor which websites and apps are being used. Use this to keep employees focused on tasks and provide proof-of-service for your clients.

Best For
Tracking Remote Employees

Special Features
✅ Works together with applications like Trello and Asana.
✅ Can be white-labeled to your brand
✅ Clients can view captured progress
✅ Payroll manager

Pricing
Free Plan

Monthly:
Free 14-day trial
$9.99/user/month

Harvest

Harvest is a simple online time-tracking software that uses start and stop timers as you move through your daily to-do list. This application is great to analyze where your time is going, how much your projects cost, and to keep records of your progress.

It’s been called a “seamless” and “lightweight app”, simple enough that anyone can use it. This software helps to take your time sheet data and turn it into visual data to give your team insights on current projects and tasks. A great space to track your time and expenses in the same place.

Best For
Individuals/Freelancers

Special Features
✅ Mac app, browser extensions, mobile app, and desktop app
✅ Built-in online invoices and payments
✅ Budget and expense tracking
✅ Automatic reminders sent to clients

Pricing
Free Plan

Monthly:
$12/user/month

Annually:
$10.80/user/month

Asana

Asana is a work management platform that helps businesses stay focused through their daily projects, goals, and tasks. The platform allows you to assign tasks, share details, and set deadlines and priorities all in one place. This application is great to help teams better align themselves with their goals and objectives and follow each project along step by step.

Asana is the perfect software to track your projects through it’s intuitive interface. If you like a more visual layout of your projects, Asana is the way to go.

Best For
Teams

Special Features
✅ Task templates
✅ Reporting functionality
✅ Tasks syncable with your own calendar (e.i. Google calendar)
✅ Ability to assign tasks to others
✅ Mobile app integration
✅ Private team projects

Pricing
Free/Basic Plan (Up to 15 members)

Monthly:
Premium $11.99/month
Business $23.99/month

Annually:
Premium $9.99/month
Business $19.99/month

Enterprise: Custom pricing

Trello

Trello is a collaborative and flexible project management solution that allows you to organize and prioritize projects in your own way. It’s set up to be a collaborative app for individuals and businesses. Trello offers unique features like task boards, cards, and power-ups calling them “living applications”.

In Trello’s own words, they are a “collaboration tool that gives you a visual overview of what is being worked on, who is working on it and how far they’ve come”.

Best For
Teams/Individuals

Special Features
✅ Collaborate with an unlimited number of team members
✅ Pair-able with popular productivity apps
✅ Drag and drop functionality
✅ Calendar view
✅ Productivity “Power-Ups”, task boards, and task cards.

Pricing
Free Plan

Monthly:
Business Class $12.50/user/month

Annually:
Business Class $9.99/user/month

Enterprise: custom pricing

DeskTime

DeskTime is a simple time tracking app that focuses on project management, productivity analysis, and acts as an employee monitoring tool. This software allows managers to take a look at unproductive habits of their employees, then classify pages and apps into either productive or unproductive.

This application helps teams monitor their success by calculating their productivity and efficiency in day-to-day tasks. Set your productivity targets and watch how DeskTime can skyrocket your team productivity!

Best For
Tracking Remote Employees

Special Features
✅ Cost calculation
✅ Displayed productivity timeline
✅ Offline time tracking
✅ Mobile app monitoring
✅ Computer use monitoring
✅ Employee time-off coordination
✅ Auto-screenshots

Pricing
Free (1 user only)

Monthly:
Team Plan $7/month
*Includes free 14-day trial

Monday

Monday is a project management software that allows you to create customizable projects and dashboards for you and your team. Monday is primarily a collaboration tool that will allow your team to discuss changes, add comments, ask questions, and make changes with a single click.

If you are a visual person, Monday has an amazing interface that allows you to choose from different views/layouts depending on what you’re working on.

Best For
Team Projects

Special Features
✅ Build-able & customizable dashboards
✅ Reporting and data features
✅ App integrations (e.i. Slack, Google Drive, MailChimp)
✅ Execution board
✅ Multiple visual displays
✅ Easy collaboration for multiple employees

Pricing
*Pricing is based on number of users— as users increase, price increases.

Monthly: Based on 2 users (lowest price available)
Basic $23/month
Standard $35/month
Pro $53/month

Enterprise: Custom

Task Manager

Task Manager is a digital marketing fulfillment dashboard for teams to track their projects and workflows. This application offers transparency to your customers as you work on their digital marketing services. This software allows flexible client communication workflows and easy task management within your team.

Task Manager is great for:

  • Fulfillment
  • Website Creation
  • PPC & Social Campaigns
  • Listing Management Tasks
  • Client Management
  • Review Responses

With all the data we have today, eliminate those spreadsheets — automation is the key to scale your business.

Best For
Teams who want to automate

Special Features
✅ Automated Reporting
✅ Projects & Custom Project Templates
✅ Integrated Intelligent Task List
✅ Executive Reports
✅ Assign tasks to Team Members

Pricing
*Important note: Task Manager is an application sold alongside many other products/services that are bundled into each package. These prices include more than just Task Manager; they include other products that will help automate your business.

Monthly:
Starter Plan $50/month

Annually:
Basic Plan $250/month
Pro Plan $999/month

Enterprise: Custom

Conclusion

There you have it! Eight time and productivity tools that can be used to boost employee productivity within your team. Some tools are simple, while others are more complex, but it’s for you to decide what is the best fit for your workspace. Quit micromanaging your employees and try out one of these awesome tools instead!

If you aren’t completely sold, check out some other resources!
Timely

Hours

Slack

 

About the Author

Maddi is a former Content Marketing Intern at Vendasta. She spends her days learning the in's and out's of blog writing and and drinking copious amounts of coffee. When she's not blogging you'll find her bullet journaling or planning the details of her next travel destination.

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