Every manager wants their team to operate as efficiently and autonomously as possible. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know exactly how your employees are working throughout the day just by intuition.
These days, it’s pretty simple to track your employees’ productivity with the help of productivity tracking software.
But which employee productivity tracking software tools are worth it?
Table of Contents
Employee Productivity Tracking Software Tools
Here are our top ten favorite employee productivity tracking apps on the market today:
1. EmailAnalytics
First, there’s our very own employee productivity tracking tool: EmailAnalytics (#shameless plug). It’s a comprehensive email monitoring tool that can tell you virtually everything about how your employees are emailing; think of it like Google Analytics for Gmail.
With it, you can use interactive data visuals to measure how many emails your employees are sending and receiving, how much time they’re spending on messages, their busiest days and times, and more. If you’re looking for analytics for email, this is the tool to use.
2. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a cloud-based employee time tracking and management solution for remote employee monitoring as well as for busy professionals to track self productivity. Its simple installation takes less than 5 minutes to get started, and employees can start tracking time right away.
The software automatically starts whenever the computer is started, which helps to make sure employees don’t miss tracking any time. Time doctor also tracks applications and websites accessed on the employee’s computer, and can take screenshots at set time intervals.
Be sure to check out our Time Doctor vs. RescueTime comparison!
3. ProofHub
ProofHub bills itself as “the one place for remote teams to work productively,” and does so by centralizing task lists, workflows, discussions, calendars, documents, and more.
It provides tools to help plan projects, collaborate with team members, clients, and vendors, and provides a bird’s-eye view of ongoing projects for managers to get an easy sense of what’s going on across their teams.
It runs in the cloud, so there’s no software to install, making for easy and convenient access no matter where you’re working from.
4. Everhour
Everhour is a simple time tracking tool that helps you determine not only how much time your employees are spending on various tasks, but also how that time is translating to company profitability.
It also has features for task management, expense tracking, reporting, and resource planning.
5. TMetric
TMetric is a handy tool both for single workers and teams. It provides accurate time calculations, measures the productivity and activity level of your team, takes periodic screenshots, and includes app/site usage monitoring.
6. TrackingTime
TrackingTime is a simple time tracker software for freelancers and teams. It allows you to keep track of progress and billable hours for your projects, organize and assign tasks for your team, and manage their access with user permissions.
You can also keep control over employee attendance, breaks, extra time and time off with time cards. And create custom online timesheets for productivity, payroll, invoicing, budgeting, billing and more, to export and share professional business reports with your clients.
With TrackingTime you can track time anywhere you work, from any device or directly in your favorite project management apps like Asana, Trello, Slack and 30+ online services.
7. Hubstaff
Improve your team's email response time by 42.5% With EmailAnalytics
- 35-50% of sales go to the first-responding vendor.
- Following up within an hour increases your chances of success by 7x.
- The average professional spends 50% of their workday on email.
Hubstaff is another type of time tracking software, with a handful of unique perks. Like most time tracking apps, it prompts your team members to keep tabs on how they spend their time on a regular basis, and gives you the chance to create reports on their ongoing progress.
You can also use it to track employees with GPS, and track how they use apps and access the web.
8. ActivTrak
Another free employee productivity monitoring app, ActivTrak helps you track your employees’ actions on practically any installed device. When you install the program, it’s completely invisible, and will send you regular reports and screenshots of the employees’ actions.
9. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is team monitoring and task management software. The unique feature here is a series of daily check-ins, which allows employees to check in daily and explain what they’re doing.
It’s a simple, high-level way to evaluate what your employees are working on, what their holdups are (if any), and which areas are in need of improvement.
10. Teamwork
Teamwork is a project management software that helps teams increase productivity through better collaboration and increased transparency. Features that productive teams love include task lists, kanban boards, live chat, time tracking, Gantt charts, & more.
Teamwork also integrates with many other well known productivity tools such as Slack and MS Teams.
Bonus: 11. ZoomShift
ZoomShift is a work scheduling tool that makes it easy to do shift planning. All you need to do is fill in the names of employees in charge of a particular shift, make a few clicks, and that’s it.
The tool is cloud-based, which means there’s no software to download, though an internet connection is required to use it. When there are sudden changes in the plan, ZoomShift informs everyone about those either via email, text, or push. No one is left out of the loop. You can even send out reminders for when a shift starts.
It’s a great tool for managing a company. The tool helps you stay organized, and when you’re organized you can maximize employee productivity.
Bonus: 12. SmartTask
SmartTask is an all-in-one cloud-based project management software that comes with time tracking functionality. It allows you to automatically or manually track time spent on tasks, and easily check the activity log of each of your remote team members.
Apart from time tracking, you can manage tasks with four different views, handle multiple projects, manage the team’s workload, collaborate with team members, and create custom project dashboards to monitor all your projects and remote team’s performance.
Bonus: 13. My Hours
My Hours is a time tracking software that helps users organize projects, track time, and report their work. Launched in 2002, My Hours can be used for creating projects and assigning tasks, tracking work hours and expenses, and creating customized reports for each client.
My Hours is versatile and provides solutions to varying user needs. It allows you to integrate with other apps like QuickBooks and Zapier, and helps you optimize your account books and workflow. Additionally, you can invite an unlimited number of team members and assign tasks to them.
Using Employee Productivity Tracking Effectively
Just installing a new employee productivity tracking software tool is usually enough to result in a positive change, as long as your employees know they’re being monitored. This is due to the Hawthorne effect, which essentially says that people change their behavior when they know they’re being monitored. It’s all about accountability.
Change by change, your team will become more effective, and capable of getting more done every week. Be sure to check out these ways to monitor employees working from home if you’ve got a home-based workforce!
For more tools you can use to track employee email activity, see our list of the 7 best email tracking apps!
And don’t miss our list of the top 50 email productivity tools, our list of the best remote employee monitoring software tools, our list of the best team management software, as well as our list of the top tools for remote teams.
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics.
