The ripple effects of widespread resignations — amid growing demand for remote jobs, transparency and wellbeing at work — continued to be felt in 2022 and will likely shape 2023 too.
Every year, it becomes more and more imperative to adopt digital tools that help both employers and employees create a more accountable, flexible, and collaborative workplace.
We know many of our customers have made great strides towards these goals thanks to our continuous improvement of Time Doctor’s features, as well as our relentless efforts to keep you informed and inspired about how to sustainably boost productivity and better manage teams — no matter where they work.
Here’s a recap of our achievements last year and how they benefit you…
Time Doctor’s best-selling contribution to remote work know-how
There have been millions of words written about why switching to a remote or hybrid model can benefit businesses, but we saw a fundamental gap in people’s knowledge. How do you practically manage your operations in a remote workplace?
Our co-founders, Liam and Rob, began researching a few years ago to find an answer to this question. They went behind the scenes of dozens of remote-first companies and interviewed their leaders and other experts.
In 2022, they shared their most useful learnings by releasing the Running Remote book, which reached the #1 position on Wall Street’s Best Seller List. The definitive playbook for companies that are serious about scaling their operations, Running Remote offers:
- Proof of why productive remote work is about more than your tool stack, and depends on a philosophy we call asynchronous management.
- How to master the fundamentals of asynchronous management including deliberate over-communication, democratized workflows and detailed metrics.
- How to run teams on autopilot to scale operations and ensure employees are less stressed and overwhelmed by new remote ways of working.
Streamlined management, and employee insights, were big-ticket new features in 2022
Enhancements to Time Doctor in 2022 focused on features and integrations that make it simpler to manage remote and hybrid teams, as well as changes that help individuals proactively apply insights to improve their own performance without any managerial prompting.
Our top seven improvements in 2022 include:
1. Real-time Email Notifications alert managers to attendance issues
Email Notifications have consistently been a top feature for Time Doctor customers, but in 2022 we took things up a notch by enabling users to set up a real-time email that is sent immediately when on one of these three conditions is met:
- An employee didn’t start working within the usual timeframe
- A team member didn’t start a shift at the scheduled time
- Someone adds manual time (so it can be reviewed/approved in a timely way).
Real-time visibility into attendance is critical when you have obligations to maintain certain staffing levels to meet your customer needs — for example, outsourced customer service providers. Bringing greater automation to attendance tracking gives managers more time to make changes before attendance issues have a downstream impact.
2. Employee dashboard now even more helpful and inspiring
We pride ourselves on being the most employee-friendly time and activity monitoring software on the market. That’s why we continued to invest in improvements to employee-focused features in 2022 such as:
- Renaming the employee view to ‘My dashboard’ and adding tips into each widget available on the dashboard to improve users’ understanding of the data and how they can apply it to improve their performance. Additionally, users now see an overall productivity tip on the main ‘My dashboard’ screen — these brief ideas help reinforce best practice time management approaches among other helpful productivity tips.
- Updating the ‘My working patterns’ widget that provides an overview of an employees’ timeline, which helps them spot potential issues like overworking, not taking breaks, spending too much time switching between tasks, and spending too long on certain tasks. Users can drill down into the specific tasks/activity completed at any point in their timeline directly from this widget.
3. New integrations for payroll and project management
In 2022, we added to our growing list of over 60 integration and add-on options by making it possible to integrate Time Doctor with:
- Payoneer, a payment platform that specializes in managing digital payments in the e-commerce and creator economy space.
- CaseCamp, a project management tool for projects, coding and teams.
Integrations make life easier for everyone across your organization because critical data is shared without effort. In particular, integrating Time Doctor with payroll software is a huge efficiency booster because it enables:
- More flexible and streamlined payroll processes for global teams
- Accurate timesheets that support faster payroll generation
- Simpler matching of varying currency and payment methods
- Easier ability to identify and manage custom pay periods
- More reliable, error-free payroll by eliminating manual data entry
- Time savings by being able to generate payroll based on pre-defined groups/departments/projects set up within Time Doctor (rather than by individual).
4. Support for Chrome OS, reflecting uptake of Chrome devices
Also new in 2022, and due to popular demand from our customers who are increasingly using Chrome devices at work, our software engineers worked tirelessly to enable users to install Time Doctor as a Chrome OS application.
Currently this feature is available in Beta mode and is applicable for interactive users only. Time Doctor can also be installed on the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
5. Better ways to capture and approve all worked time
We’ve closed some gaps when it comes to recording manual activity and online meetings to further simplify time tracking — making Time Doctor even more accurate and easy-to-use. Changes include:
- Faster addition of manual time when a user is working away from the computer: A period of on-screen inactivity causes a pop-up to appear for users that asks ‘Were you working?’ Now this pop-up is also triggered when the computer is locked or put into sleep mode, saving users time from manually entering this in the Edit Time feature and making sure record-keeping remains accurate by selecting the task they were working on within the pop-up itself.
- New approval workflow functionality: You can configure Time Doctor to require that manual time added by any user must be approved before it will appear in reports. On the new ‘Approvals’ page, managers and admins can sort through manual time entries and approve or deny them as needed, and individual users can see whether their manual time was approved and by who.
- Keep tracking time during your virtual calls/chats: You can now configure Time Doctor’s settings to ensure that time spent on tools like MS Teams, Zoom, Webex and Google Meet does not trigger inactivity alerts but continues to accurately track time. This feature can be set-up for individuals or company-wide.
6. Screencast access permissions and audit tool for admins
How you set up Time Doctor to meet your needs has been improved by the ability to:
- Define who can access screencasts: Control access to screen recordings depending on who needs to see them. For instance, in the interests of privacy and reducing micromanagement you might decide that only admins can view screenshots. Or you might want to limit visibility to a person’s immediate team members and manager, and exclude admins. Both options are now possible!
- See who’s been changing settings: A new on-demand report can be generated to show user access management — meaning you can audit updates to your Time Doctor user base such as when users are added/deleted or company settings are changed.
7. Greater reporting precision for billable hours
Updates to our on-demand reporting capabilities mean users can now request a custom built report that categorizes employees’ time spent on projects and tasks by whether they’re billable/non-billable and productive/non-productive.
The Billable Hours Report is an especially handy feature for business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and contact centers that are hyper-focused on resource efficiency and reducing overheads. Competitive BPOs need precise insights to determine how they can optimize workflows and team management, or adjust their offerings, in order to increase billable hours.
Upcoming Time Doctor features to look forward to in 2023
Our priorities for product development in 2023 center on empowering you with even more nuanced data and easy ways to apply insights, to create further opportunities to streamline your team’s efficiency and performance for continued success.
Here’s a glimpse of our product roadmap this year:
- A major update, Time Doctor Breaks, will allow admins to create custom paid breaks that employees can select and manage from their own desktop apps. This new feature will provide more clarity into workday activity plus help you comply with local labor laws and compliance obligations without complicated workarounds..
- Features that make it easier for individual employees to create the project/tasks they’re working on, relieving the burden on managers and bringing greater precision to reports.
- An executive-level dashboard that supports company-wide decision making by enabling leaders to quickly and visually compare productivity across different teams and departments (rather than only analyzing data at the individual level).
- A Firefox browser add-on to make our valuable integrations easily available for web app users on this popular browser, similar to our current extension for the Chrome browser.
There’s never been a better time to start using Time Doctor if you’re looking for nuanced data, that’s easily accessed and understood, to drive productivity and performance improvements in your business.
Swing momentum in your favor in 2023 by requesting a demo of Time Doctor now.
Amy Owens is a product marketing enthusiast with a passion for writing content that communicates the features, values, and benefits of products.