Top 7 employee productivity tracking software

To save time and improve efficiency across your team, you might have tried implementing to-do list apps or project management tools.

As helpful as these platforms can be, many actually create problems like:

Requiring staff to track tasks and projects manually
Providing data but no actionable insights that you can use to improve
Failing to integrate with your payroll and scheduling tech stack

With the right employee productivity tracker, you can monitor work activity, get personalized tips to improve efficiency, and help your team accomplish more in less time.

Which platform is a good fit for your team? In this article, we’ll cover seven of the best employee productivity tools that can help your team level up and make your job easier.

What to look for in a good employee productivity tracker
Top 7 employee productivity tracking software
Benefits of an employee productivity tracking software

Let’s get rolling.

What to look for in a good employee productivity tracker

Productivity tools often include a lot of bells and whistles. Yet any platform you choose should have these essential elements:

1. Activity monitoring: Don’t rely on employees to input their tasks or hours manually. With automated activity tracking, you can gather productivity data and generate insights much more efficiently.

2. Project forecasting: Productivity platforms that integrate with project management tools can make scheduling and budgeting much easier. Look for an app that works with Asana, Trello, and other tools you already use—so you can complete projects on time and on budget.

3. Insightful reports: You need much more than a summary of how many hours your team worked or a list of who put in overtime. Make sure the tool you adopt includes insights that help you improve efficiency and identify top-performing employees and teams.

4. Employee-friendly tracking: In order for a productivity tool to work for your organization, you have to get your team on board. Look for an employee-friendly tool that gives staff some control over how and when they’re tracked—so they can maintain privacy when necessary.

5. Productivity alerts: Most productivity trackers are designed to help teams improve and level up. But any tool you choose should also be able to alert you to serious problems. Look for a platform that can warn you about employee burnout and overworked team members.

Top 7 employee productivity tracking software

With vendors offering such a plethora of options to track employees’ productivity, which software should you go for?

Let’s answer that by looking at the seven best productivity tracking software that you can use today. We’ll start with our own, Time Doctor.

1. Time Doctor

Used by a broad range of professionals, from freelancers and small businesses to teams at large corporations like Ericsson and BBB, Time Doctor is the ideal productivity management software for any business.

Time Doctor’s unique blend of powerful functionalities like idle time tracking and screencasts, high data security features, and a friendly user interface make it the best productivity tool on the market.

Key features

Let’s have a closer look at some of the platform’s best features:

1. Interactive time tracking

Time Doctor offers the easiest way to manage time accurately.

Employees can track time manually by pressing the app’s start and stop buttons and selecting relevant tasks and projects. With this option, your team gets total control over when their time is tracked.

In addition, Time Doctor offers an option to automate time tracking. With this feature, employees don’t have to worry about starting the time tracker every time they start work or begin a new task.

In automated mode, Time Doctor tracks time and activity from the moment whenever team members power up their devices for the day until they sign off.

2. Detailed reports

Unlike the complicated features of similar remote monitoring apps, Time Doctor offers detailed productivity reports in a minimalistic and intuitive user interface.

The different productivity metrics that Time Doctor can auto-generate for you include:

Timeline report: See the time employees spend on tasks and breaks.
Projects and tasks report: Determine how much time employees take to complete tasks and projects.
Hours tracked: See how many hours your employees have tracked time per day, week, or month.
Activity summary report: Get real-time reports of any employee’s active time.
Web and app report: Track the time team members spend on different applications and websites.

3. Productivity ratings

The sites and apps your employees need to use for work depend on their roles and projects. For some team members, an app may be essential for a task—but for others, it may be considered unproductive.

Most productivity software classifies social media sites and specific communication tools as unproductive for all employees.

However, that’s not the case with Time Doctor.

Time Doctor doesn’t automatically classify sites as productive or unproductive. Instead, it allows managers to choose whether they want to classify sites as:

Productive
Unproductive
Neutral
Unrated

Productivity reports of employees are generated based on these four unique productivity ratings.

4. Idle time tracking

With Time Doctor, you can track the idle time of your employees.

What’s idle time?

Idle time is a minute or second where there are no keyboard strokes or mouse movements detected on the employee’s computer.

Idle time tracking ensures that your employees don’t log their inactive time as work. It can also ensure that you only bill clients for your team’s active time.

Note: Time Doctor does not support keystroke logging. It only monitors whether some keys are pressed or not to protect user privacy.

5. Screencasts

Time Doctor allows you to capture screenshots of your employees’ computer screens at random intervals.

This is a handy optional feature as it encourages both in-house and remote employees to stay away from distracting sites at work.

Screencasts allow managers to:

See and download the (selected) screencasts.
Change the timezone.
View screencasts with no/low user activity.

Productivity tracking technology

Time Doctor tracks the websites and mobile apps that employees use during work hours. Managers can receive a report with this data—but only about 20% of the benefits of this software come from the monitoring features.

The other 80% come from empowering your staff to manage their own time more effectively and from providing you with higher-level insights into how your organization spends time.

Additional features

User-friendly interface for easy productivity tracking.
Offers both manual and automatic employee time tracking modes.
Track time without an internet connection.
Create and assign different projects to your employees.
Powerful payroll management system to pay employees and bill clients.
Offers dozens of integrations with project management tools like Trello, Jira.
Monitor all the website pages remote workers visit during their remote work time.
Strict privacy and data security policies.
Responsive customer support team.
Powerful mobile app for Android devices.

Pricing

Time Doctor gives you a 14-day free trial that doesn’t require any credit card info. Paid plans start as low as $5.90/user per month.

Customer ratings

G2: 4.4/5 (320+ reviews)
Capterra: 4.5/5 (490+ reviews)

2. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is another good option for tracking the productivity of your employees.

It offers employee productivity monitoring features like screenshots, reporting, and URL tracking.

Though Hubstaff has some unique features like task management and geofencing, its productivity reports are very limited. Consequently, you can’t go into the granular details of how employees spent their time at work.