5 Myths About Management Tools

#1. They Lead to Micromanagement 

The first myth has to do with the perception that management tools are meant to micromanage employees. In fact, they're the complete opposite: a management tool can contribute to making employees more autonomous, as their managers will get the information they need at a higher level, without having to dig into the details.

For example, with Beeye, our goal is to let users plan at a high level without having to dive into the details of each ongoing activity. Planning is done at the project level: no need to know whether an employee spent one hour doing this and 30 minutes doing that. Rather, the goal is to see at a higher level what time has been allotted to a given project or activity, to better manage capacity. If you want to figure out how to efficiently manage your employees' capacity, click here.

An employee working full time on a single project would plan his time by sharing it over 2 or 3 activities (the project itself, and probably one or two standard activities like internal meetings and other operational tasks).

It's possible to fill timesheets at the project level, without having to go into detail for each sub-activity within the project. That way, it's easy to see the efforts that have been devoted to a given project and compare with what had been planned.

Beeye also offers the possibility to track time by deliverable to accommodate companies that work that way. To maintain a higher level view when using this approach, it is recommended to track only deliverables that represent a significant amount of work.

#2. My Manager Doesn't trust Me

When a new management tool is implemented, it can, however mistakenly, give the impression that the manager doesn't trust his employees. Nothing could be further from the truth: in fact, a lot of trust is required from managers when implementing a management tool, since the quality of the data entered by employees in the system is crucial to get anything valuable out of it.

Not to mention, management tools can bring great benefits to everyone. With Beeye, companies can make decisions based on tangible and relevant data and enjoy more visibility on their teams' ongoing efforts. Managers better understand and value the work done by their colleagues, and they can more easily justify when and who they need to hire.

Of course, if managers don't trust their employees, they have worse problems to take care of before setting up a new management tool.

#3. Management Tool are a Time Sink

Your time is precious, and Beeye's goal is to optimize what you make of it.

Of course, it depends on what tool you're implementing, but in Beeye's case, one way to achieve that, is to make data entry as simple as possible. Since data is entered at a higher level, planned and actual efforts can be recorded in just a few minutes — a small time investment compared to the value the information will have when it comes to distributing efforts, understanding project profitability and managing the capacity of your teams.

Since your time is precious, efficiently measuring it will bring you even more value. Here are a couple of things you should keep in mind to optimise your time and your employees' time.

First of all, you should implement a timesheet system that will help you to identify how much time your employees are spending on activities that create value for the company  or that bring in money. If you're not convinced, here are 7 good reasons why you should be using a timesheet.

Now that you're tracking the time spent on revenue generating activities, you should also think of setting up a time tracking process that will help you keep an eye on your employees non-productive time aka time spent NOT creating value. It's imperative for any company (that bills their time) to reduce an employee's non-productive time.