No matter what field they’re in, every manager is responsible for employee task tracking. Whether it’s a small-scale administrative responsibility or a massive quarterly project, every task needs to be accounted for.
Employee task tracking is about developing a system to organize, assign, and track your team's tasks. This obviously takes a lot of forethought and planning, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
In this guide, we'll take a look at the different ways managers can track tasks and employees and the tools that can help them do it. But first, let’s make sure we’re clear on what a task tracker is.
A task tracker is a smarter way to manage all of your tasks. Think of it as a digital to-do list that helps you assign tasks to employees, prioritize them, and track progress.
You’ve probably already heard of popular task trackers like Asana, monday.com, and Trello — but these standalone tools can only take you so far. When you find a task tracking solution with employee time tracking, you unlock a whole new level of efficiency and tangible data for better project planning.
A task tracker simplifies project management by helping you manage your workload more effectively with customizable views, workflow automation, and enterprise-grade communication.
The right task tracker helps streamline processes, eliminate wasted time, provide real-time insights into project spending, and produce more deliverables faster. Managers can define, prioritize, and adjust task assignments as work progresses — cutting down on time wasted checking in.
These tools also improve communication and collaboration by keeping everyone aligned. Team members can see task dependencies, due dates, and who’s responsible for what.
Many task trackers allow employees to track time to specific tasks and projects, which provides data for estimating future costs and identifying roadblocks. If a task takes longer than expected, managers can step in to optimize the process or reassign work to other team members.
The right software integrates with different tools your team already uses to streamline the flow of information. This ensures that tasks, updates, and progress are easily accessible across platforms, improving team productivity.
Companies can track employees manually or through workforce project management software, integrations, and automation apps, depending on the workplace environment and company requirements. Here are a few of the top ways you can track employees.
Of course, how your business operates has a profound effect on tracking employees and their workloads:
Companies can track employees manually or through workforce project management software, integrations, and automation apps, depending on the workplace environment and company requirements. Here are a few of the top ways you can track employees.
Employee time tracking is a type of task tracking that looks at hours worked and activity while tracking time. This is how companies keep track of the hours each employee works, whether they’re hourly or salaried. Time tracking also guarantees that employees are compensated appropriately and that they keep track of any overtime pay.
Some industries require time tracking so they can bill clients accurately and pay their teams. Agencies, software developers, law firms, and any company with hourly workers need time tracking for this reason.
Managers use time tracking software to record how much time is spent on a project or task. This allows them to estimate hours for future work and know when they'll complete the project.
Even beyond those reasons, companies can benefit from keeping track of how their employees spend their time. If you want to better understand how productive your team is or where projects are getting stuck, time tracking can give you detailed reports on hours spent per project or task.
Learn more about how a task tracker works.
GPS time tracking helps field teams track tasks when they’re on the go. This kind of tracking is ideal for those who spend a lot of time on the road, like truck drivers, delivery drivers, and service providers.
GPS tracking allows managers to see how their mobile staff go from one client site to the next in these jobs. It can also automate clock-ins and clock-outs using geofencing technology and help identify areas where employees could improve productivity or their routes.
At the end of the day, managers and team members can see time spent at each job site, travel time, and total hours.
Employee task tracking is a type of project management that monitors employee performance through task completion. Some form of task tracking exists in most any workplace, as keeping track of and organizing tasks can be challenging without project management tools.
With the right project management tool, managers can better forecast workloads, optimize schedules, and spot potential bottlenecks. This real-time visibility helps managers see where each person does their best so they can better assign tasks in the future.
Quality tracking is the final type of employee tracking we’ll cover here. It focuses on the numbers that quantify how impactful an employee's work is. These numbers are often found in reports on employee productivity.
Increasing the amount of output your team can handle is good, but not if it compromises quality. That’s why many businesses use feedback from their clients or customers to improve.
Oftentimes, a customizable customer experience survey is sufficient for managers to determine which employees are associated with more positive customer feedback and which are related to negative customer feedback. Customer support teams and client-facing professionals can use these metrics to help them track tasks and performance.
Task tracking tools streamline how teams manage tasks to improve efficiency and ensure better project progress.
Here are its main benefits:
With these tools, team members always know what to prioritize and how their work fits into larger company goals.
A good task tracker tool includes a wide array of functionalities. If you’re in the market for a task tracker, there are some features that you should keep in mind.
Task management software offers multiple ways to monitor task progress and gain a clear overview of your team’s work.
Tools like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and timeline views help project managers adapt to different project management methodologies and keep projects on track. Real-time progress notifications and milestone alerts ensure everyone stays aligned.
Time tracking simplifies logging hours, automating payroll, and generating invoices. Team members can easily “clock in” and “clock out” for tasks, giving managers visibility into attendance, workloads, and real-time project spending.
This feature often feeds seamlessly into timesheets and payroll to reduce manual admin work and help you optimize resource allocation for existing and future projects.
Mobile-friendly task trackers are essential for field, hybrid, and remote teams.
Apps for Android, iOS, and desktop platforms allow team members to update their task lists, log hours, and check task statuses from anywhere. This flexibility is particularly useful for teams working on-site at multiple locations.
The ability to easily break large projects into smaller tasks helps teams focus and stay productive.
Robust task management software allows managers to prioritize tasks and define clear dependencies, preventing incomplete tasks from holding up entire projects. Using templates for dependency setup can further streamline planning.
Integrating task tracking tools with other platforms can significantly reduce manual work while keeping everything in sync.
Instead of juggling multiple apps for time tracking, communication, and creative work, integrations consolidate workflows into one seamless process.
For example, connecting your task tracking software with Slack can trigger notifications when tasks reach key milestones. This helps managers identify bottlenecks faster and improve productivity.
Popular integrations include Google Docs for collaborative editing, Trello for Kanban workflows, and Salesforce for managing client relationships.
Mobile-friendly task trackers are essential for field, hybrid, and remote teams.
Apps for Android, iOS, and desktop platforms allow team members to update their task lists, log hours, and check task statuses from anywhere. This flexibility is particularly useful for teams working on-site at multiple locations.
The ability to easily break large projects into smaller tasks helps teams focus and stay productive.
Robust task management software allows managers to prioritize tasks and define clear dependencies, preventing incomplete tasks from holding up entire projects. Using templates for dependency setup can further streamline planning.
Integrating task tracking tools with other platforms can significantly reduce manual work while keeping everything in sync.
Instead of juggling multiple apps for time tracking, communication, and creative work, integrations consolidate workflows into one seamless process.
For example, connecting your task tracking software with Slack can trigger notifications when tasks reach key milestones. This helps managers identify bottlenecks faster and improve productivity.
Popular integrations include Google Docs for collaborative editing, Trello for Kanban workflows, and Salesforce for managing client relationships.
There are many metrics for keeping track of what employees are doing, so here are some tips for doing it right. These tips should make it easier for both big and small businesses to keep track of individuals and teams.
The first thing you can do to make it easier to keep track of employee tasks is to set your team up for success. Without the right training and support, employees are much less likely to stay with the company and work hard.
Make sure everyone on your team knows what the expectations are around delivering work, communicating with the team, and any other aspect of your business that relates to their job. They should have a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities, as well.
Here are some additional tips for effectively leading and supporting a team.
As a manager, you need to set achievable and realistic goals so that your employees don't get discouraged and quit caring. Employees should have goals that they can reach with a reasonable amount of work — not vanity metrics that don’t contribute to larger company goals.
These goals should also consider how long it takes to finish a specific task, how often important deadlines come up, and how busy an employee is. Each of these things affects how realistic a goal is, and it usually depends on the employee.
Managers should document these goals to ensure they’re on the same page with their employees. Some strategies might include creating checklists, templates, or workflows so employees can visualize their responsibilities ahead of time.
Recurring tasks can provide an easy-to-follow layout that assists employees in understanding what their managers’ expectations are. It’s also important to create documentation that can streamline processes, highlight milestones, and allow employees and managers to track progress towards a goal.
By giving employees the proper training from the start, you can ensure that everyone is ready to do their jobs well. If employees have access to adequate training, they can learn whatever they need to accomplish their work correctly and on time.
Offer ongoing training so that employees can keep learning as processes change or as new software and tools are introduced into the workflow. You can also assign a mentor or ambassador, so they have a designated professional to help them out along the way.
Setting up a team for success also means making sure they can talk to each other openly and honestly. Managers often give feedback to their employees, but it's just as important for employees to be able to say what they feel and think.
Managers should listen to their employees' comments, suggestions, and complaints. This will avoid employees feeling like they have too much to do or that their tasks are unrealistic. Just being open to feedback can go a long way in helping employees know that they are being heard.
Keeping communication open makes it easier for employees to share how they feel at work or about things in their personal lives that could be impacting their performance. For this reason, managers should take extra steps to be available. You could have set “office hours” where you won’t have meetings scheduled, sbut can be available to your team.
This kind of honest communication is essential for building trust between employees and their managers, which can help the company by making employees more productive at their jobs.
Another crucial part of keeping track of people and teams is managing employees effectively. A company's productivity can suffer without a clear framework and workflow. Here are some tips on how to efficiently manage your employees.
One of the essential parts of managing employees well is making sure they know what is expected. Without clear goals to reach, it's hard for employees to see if they're doing their jobs right and up to the company's standards.
Communication also ensures that employees are prepared for the amount of work and intensity their position will require.
Setting aside time every day to check in with employees is another crucial part of managing a team. These meetings can be concise, but they are helpful because they give people a chance to talk about any worries or problems that may come up with the tasks for that day.
Daily check-ins, such as automated Stand-ups, help get around these problems in real-time so that all employees know what they need to do on a given project. They also encourage teamwork to keep tasks moving smoothly and at a good pace.
Even though employees are expected to manage their own time, managers sometimes have to step in when employees don't use effective time management skills.
Manual or software-managed timesheets can usually demonstrate whether an employee isn't making the best use of their time. Managers can monitor tasks in real time to see if they are taking too long. The manager must then address the employee's time management issue by re-evaluating the employee's workload and, if necessary, offering better projects or more training.
Managing employees well also means encouraging team collaboration in the workspace. Making sure that team members work well together and know each other's strengths and weaknesses is a good way for a company to encourage teamwork.
One way to encourage collaboration is to assign shared tasks that a cross-functional team can take and tackle together. Allocating team tasks like this encourages problem-solving and increases productivity since employees may build on each other's ideas.
A manager also has to help employees know and meet their deadlines, especially if they want to ensure that all tasks are done by their due dates. Managers can encourage team members to participate in daily check-ins, make a to-do list, and keep the lines of communication open for the best chance at on-time delivery.
If unexpected requests come up, the manager can move tasks around as needed to lighten the employee’s load and ensure that essential deadlines are still met.
Managers can help discover issues by implementing a quality assurance approach. Quality assurance personnel or task management software can accomplish this task.
With QA, customer interactions with the company are tracked and evaluated. Suppose there is a reduction in the quality or a negative impact on the customer experience. In that case, these QA strategies can pinpoint the issue and provide a diagnosis, allowing the error to be corrected in the future.
Finally, effectively managing employees involves recognizing and praising their achievements. Making employees feel good about achieving goals is critical. It shows employees that they are valued and encourages them to keep working hard and exceed the company's objectives.
Organizing employee workloads and activities can be difficult, especially when multiple employees have a diverse set of tasks to fulfill. However, following the suggestions below can make the process much easier.
First, it's important to divide tasks among employees in the right way so that some don't have too much work and others have too much free time. So no one is overburdened, it is helpful to know how much work each of your employees is already doing and how many tasks they can take on.
It's also a good idea to consider each employee's strengths when delegating tasks. You can then assign each employee the tasks that best suit their capabilities for increased efficiency.
To organize tasks well, managers need to keep an overview of every project or task their employees are working on. A task list can help a manager keep track of what tasks are due and how far along they are. Additionally, managers should be aware of all task dependencies and check that projects are completed in the proper order.
Using a task management system or software can help make sure that tasks are never forgotten. This can be done by following a project management workflow where every employee is aware of their job responsibilities.
Managers should also set up alerts for tasks with due dates coming up or for tasks that have missed their deadline. This way, employees won't forget to do their jobs, and managers will know if an employee is having trouble or needs help.
Employees should know about this risk zone, so they are more likely to stay on top of their responsibilities and not feel singled out when a manager steps in to help them.
It's essential to track how well employees are doing with their individual and team tasks. Managers can evaluate their success and look back when it's review time. The tips below will help you measure progress more effectively.
One method of measuring task progress is tracking employees as they move through different stages of their tasks.
By keeping track of how long each step takes, managers can determine if anyone is spending too much or too little time on a particular action. Managers can compare the time spent on each stage to the quality or outcome of that stage. This will help managers understand if an employee needs to spend more or less time on that area in the future.
Another metric of progress is task completion. Managers can track the status of employees' tasks to gauge project progress, assess bottlenecks, and lay the groundwork to streamline tasks in the future.
Timeliness is another thing that employers can watch to get a sense of how their employees are doing. Timelines are not just about finishing project tasks on time, but also about how many tasks or subtasks are finished on time. Timeliness also includes employees' work hours because they show how well they can keep to schedules and manage their time.
Managers can watch how things are going if more tasks are done on time or if employees learn how to use their time better.
Progress can also be measured by looking at task accuracy, similar to quality. It is based on feedback from a quality assurance employee or a customer service survey. Progress from either of these two sources shows that the employee is getting better at doing a task correctly.
In the same way that managers should celebrate employee wins, they should also keep an eye on employee progress and reward them when they need to.
Managers can easily keep track of their employees' progress with all of the tips we've talked about so far. Track progress on different projects or individual tasks to see when employee productivity improves.
Rewarding project progress will make people more likely to work hard and be dedicated in the future.
Hubstaff is a time tracking software platform that connects task and project tracking with real-time data - giving teams clear visibility into how work gets done.
Instead of relying on standalone task trackers, Hubstaff adds context to every task - showing how time is actually spent across projects, teams, and workflows.
With Hubstaff, teams can:
When combined with Hubstaff Tasks, teams can align task management with time tracking — making it easier to plan workloads, allocate resources, and keep projects on schedule from daily execution to long-term planning.
If you want more predictable deadlines and clearer visibility into work, it starts with better time tracking. Hubstaff brings time data, productivity monitoring, and automated payments into one workflow — helping teams stay accountable without adding complexity.
Try Hubstaff to bring time tracking, productivity monitoring, and automated payments into one streamlined workflow.