How This Operations Manager Uses Time Tracking To Increase Efficiency

Look up what an agency operations manager does, and you will probably find something like: we find ways to optimize systems and processes to make our team’s life easier and more efficient. 

It sounds simple on paper. It’s not so simple in practice. 

Our agency, Talk Shop Media, isn’t the first to wrestle with how to make operations more efficient while increasing profitability and keeping our team’s workload manageable. 

We’ve found the solution is right in front of us — data 📊

Here’s my advice for operations managers on how data can become your golden goose and improve every corner of your agency. 

The search for a new way to understand work output

The thing about running an agency is that knowing where your team’s time goes isn’t a nice-to-have data point — it’s a must. However, Toggl’s Agency Time Tracking Benchmarks Report 2023 found that as an agency’s size increases, the number of tracked hours actually decreases. 

There’s a big problem with this. 

Without this data, there is no way to understand the health of your client accounts or the revenue each project is generating. 

As an agency, we’ve tried many different ways to understand internal efficiency. For over a decade, we’ve tracked time by logging the hours spent on client work at the end of the week. But, this system relied on an archaic process:

• Our team logged hours manually
• Each week, I trawled through 1,500+ items on a timesheet (for all the ops managers out there, I know you’re empathizing with me on this compliance disaster)
• 15% of our workforce wasn’t logging their working hours, so I had to chase them, which took a lot of time

Tl;dr: it was a mess 🫣

The fundamental challenge for operations managers is making it simple for team members to track and store this data. I knew without this data at Talk Shop Media, it would be almost impossible to understand how we were spending our time, what client accounts were the most profitable, and how to balance workloads. 

After switching to Toggl Track, 90% of our team — from junior staff to mid-management — now logs their time. 

It didn’t happen overnight — here’s how we got this level of buy-in 👇

Bending time tracking to the way we work (without adding work)

The old way of collecting data doesn’t work. 

It’s not scalable. It takes a lot of time. And in our case, it also required a person to manually calculate data points like profitability. 

We knew for a new system to work and become a core part of our culture, time tracking needed to happen without adding to our team’s workload. This required three things: 

• 💻 Flexible options. Data collection needed to fit into how our team worked, not the other way around. Our team tracks time using a browser extension, mobile app, desktop app, or web app — whatever works best for them. If they want a total off-hands approach, they can even use automated time tracking, letting the app track their laptop activities and convert them into time entries 
• 📅 Calendar events. Our team has weekly meetings and events. Instead of tracking these manually, we integrated their Google Calendars to quickly turn them into time entries 
• ⌛ Small(er) tasks. We also work on tasks that take less than 15 minutes but still need to be tracked. Toggl Track now does this to collect accurate data about how long tasks actually take

Toggl Track’s calendar view. Users can copy them as time entries as a single event or in bulk

We now spend 50% less time on time tracking compared to our old way of working, saving our team 60-80 hours per month that’s spent doing client work instead. 

Collecting this data has also opened up a whole new way of managing operations to maximize our monthly retainers. Let’s talk about that a little more 👇

Maximizing the traditional agency retainer model with data

Like many agencies, we work with clients on retainers. It gives us guaranteed work and our clients a recurring payment amount every month. A true win-win. 

I don’t need to tell you this model only works if team members work efficiently. It’s not just about the hours — it’s about understanding the health of our accounts and measuring the gap between what we’ve sold and the resources we’ve actually used.

I knew our focus had to be on data points around client account health like billing, profitability, and time allocation. But data also needed to give insights into our people:

• Are work schedules fair?
• Do they manage the workload?
• Can we spot early signs of burnout (and extinguish it) before it impacts our team’s wellbeing? 

The only way to know is with data — because data doesn’t lie. So, we began to use custom reports built from time tracking data to give us some crucial insights 👇

🌡️ End-of-month reports for a financial temperature check

The data we collected over the entire month gives us a detailed insight into our agency’s billing and profitability. It tells us how much time our workers track, how we compensate them, and how it translates to our overall business health. 

Of course, the parameters of what’s healthy depends on your agency. 

One of the main indicators we use is percentage profitability — if an account sits in the 50-60% range, we consider it profitable (and a win) at the end of the month.

Example Analytics charts in Toggl Track to show profitability and billable distribution

📋 Detailed reports for every client in our database

We check monthly to see if client retainers need to be adjusted to keep charges fair and accurate. 

Without time tracking data, it would be impossible to calculate this. For example, if we’ve sold 22 hours/month to a client, we can run a report from data to see how many hours our team has worked, the progress of a project, and who is working on the account. 

This monthly data can also measure profitability based on:

• 🏃 Account efficiency. This data measures the estimated time we set for a project against the actual duration. We use this one quite a bit as it helps us see if the work we do on a project matches the amount of hours we sold the client on their retainer
• 📊 Billable/non-billable rates. An important aspect of tracking your team’s output is understanding that not every minute of their work can be billed. According to the Agency Time Tracking Benchmarks Report 2023, agencies of our size have a billable utilization rate of under 50%.  Collecting accurate data helps us distinguish between billable and non-billable hours and measure against our KPIs

This last data point is especially important for project profitability. For example, one of our billable to non-billable hours KPIs is for junior-level employees to keep the split to 80:20. Detailed reports help us monitor their output to ensure they are staying within these parameters.

🧑‍💻 Project dashboards for department heads

Each department head can get a granular look at where their team spends the most time and which accounts need more attention.

For example, half way through the month a team lead might check to see how a project is going and see 50% of the retainer hours are used. They can then use this data to strategically decide where to invest the rest of the retainer hours that’s best for the specific project and the client. 

Various types of project reports in Toggl Track

❣️ Team health report for work-life balance

The final report we run isn’t about profitability or productivity — it’s all about team health. 

Tracking this data is very important to us and we constantly monitor everyone’s workloads to make sure their plate isn’t overflowing. By tracking who is working excessive hours and where their time is spent, we can take steps to alleviate burnout. 

The internal data we collect helps us quickly spot any signs of overwork or burnout so we can address it. Tackling this early enables us to maintain productivity and safeguard our team’s wellbeing.

Example team health report in Toggl Track

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These four reports, underpinned by accurate data, now help our agency drive profitability, account health and employee happiness. 

By slicing and dicing the data points we spend all month collecting, we have an extremely quick and valuable way to understand how we are doing across our entire agency. From overall revenue to individual accounts and team wellbeing, it’s all there — ready to use to help us continue to do great work!

As an Operations Manager at Talk Shop Media, Hannah helps the agency’s team improve operational efficiency, profitability, and make better strategic decisions for client accounts. Talk Shop Media’s team of 50 focuses on creating inspiring ideas driven by goal-oriented results, positioning itself at the forefront of the evolution in PR and communications​​.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post. Interested in contributing content to the Toggl blog? Email Kimberlee at kimberlee.meier[at]toggl.com.