Employee experience, retention and productivity have all changed for the better within Time Doctor’s own engineering team thanks to insights from the platform’s Work-life Balance feature.
As the leading time and activity tracking tool on the market, our goal since launching in 2012 has been to empower people to work productively, wherever they work, through automated time tracking and workday analytics. As a technology-driven company, the performance of our remote-first team of software engineers is critical to our capacity to deliver, maintain and enhance the platform for Time Doctor’s 200k+ users.
At Time Doctor, we believe remote work is the future of business and key to hiring and keeping the best talent. However, our leaders also know that productivity can’t come at the expense of wellbeing.
VP of Engineering, Geoff Ainsworth, said dealing with employee burnout was a consistent issue he’d encountered throughout his career as a technology leader, across both remote and in-office environments.
Geoff said high performers were often more susceptible to burnout because they tended to be more diligent and in demand, and therefore, under more pressure.
He said that while it was easier to sense struggling colleagues through face-to-face interactions in a physical office, supporting people while enabling more flexible remote or hybrid models required sophisticated digital tools.
Analysis of work-life balance and identifying potentially overworked employees is a core feature of Time Doctor’s platform. Geoff said he used the feature to safeguard the wellbeing of his remote team of engineers without intruding on their privacy.
Managers can customize the indicators used to gauge work-life balance based on a company’s specific schedules and expectations in relation to sustainable work. Employees with a high level of potential issues within a certain time frame are flagged within the Work-life Balance widget, and leaders can then take a closer look at the User Dashboards to learn about their behaviors.
Geoff said the Work-life Balance data is now included in management scorecards to more fully assess the overall performance of Time Doctor’s engineering team, in addition to industry standard DORA metrics to measure software delivery.
“It takes seconds to review and generates results that we can use to help with employee retention and productivity.”
In my experience, it's a major contributor to employee turnover and this is backed up by research which states that employee burnout is responsible for half of all turnover — something that I can completely relate to.
“Work-life Balance is a great feature that I would not be without and a real ally in talent retention.”
“In one of my teams, it actually prompted a decision to hire two more engineers. We have only just made the first hire, but I can already see the relief on the team's faces and there is more confidence to tackle the Q4 goals."
The ability to have open conversations about overworking, and the reasons behind it — such as being locked-in due to Covid, children not sleeping through the night, or struggling with a new technology skill — has driven positive change in how our engineering teams are resourced and supported.
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