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      How to Make Time Doctor More Employee-Friendly

      In this article, we’d like to provide some tips on how to make Time Doctor more friendly for your employees. It applies to Interactive apps only.

      Many of the suggestions below have a trade-off. Some of them may be more employee-friendly, but may result in tracking less data. Try different settings to decide what works best for your company. 

      Employee-Friendly Settings

      • Allow time editing so that users can add manual time after tracking times out while they are working (but are not active enough) or when they are not able to track time for some reason, as well as when they have tracked time to a wrong task. You can control it for each user in Settings / Users - the setting is called Can edit time. If needed, you can require approval for each manual time entry. 

      • Blur or disable screenshots. Besides doing it for compliance reasons, you might want to blur screenshots to make regular users more comfortable with their activity being tracked. Would you lose important information by blurring screenshots? In most cases, that’s unlikely - you can still tell what a user was doing by looking at blurred screenshots; the text is blurred but it is possible to recognize non-work-related activities and get an understanding of what the person was doing. Learn how to enable screenshot blurring here. 

        4-2Example of a blurred screenshot. 

      • Don’t autostart the desktop app each day, especially, if employees are likely to turn their computers on some time before actually starting to work.

      • Choose a generous Time Out After threshold. It controls after how long period of inactivity the desktop app automatically stops tracking (times out). Thresholds under 15 minutes usually frustrate and distract users (they see a popup telling them that tracking will time out soon) who happen to do work where it is usual not to have any keyboard and mouse activity for 15 minutes. You can adjust the threshold for Time Out After for each user in Settings / Users. 

      • Avoid setting the Web and App usage reporting to Extended unless it is absolutely necessary. Extended web and app reporting records every single page title visited and each window title of each app used which people sometimes find too intrusive. You can read more about it here.

      Educate

      Educate your employees on how to use Time Doctor and how to use the settings they have available, including:

      • The option to disable auto-start tracking.

      • The option to enable/disable notifications when tracking starts.

      Don’t Micromanage

      • Allow some “unproductive” time each day.

      • Understand that some idle time is normal. You can find more information about this here.

      • Track your own work with Time Doctor. Viewing your own data may help you understand that some unproductive/idle time is normal.

      • Educate your managers on how to use Time Doctor effectively without micromanaging.

      Let Your Employees Know that-

      • You don’t expect to see 100% productive time on Time Doctor.

      • You understand that productivity, as measured by Time Doctor, is only based on websites and apps used. So, it may not correlate with the actual quality of their work or their output volume.

      • You don’t plan to use Time Doctor as a micromanagement tool.