Why employees don’t use the task tracker — and what to do about it

The story repeats almost word for word. A manager gets tired of tasks getting lost, picks a task tracker, pays for the seats, holds a team meeting. For the first week the cards move. Then people log in less and less, and tasks go back to being handed out by voice and in the work chat. A month later only one person opens the tracker — the one who bought it.

It’s not laziness. There are five reasons

1. Employees have no reason to open the tracker

An office worker sits at a computer all day, with the task tab open next to their email. A sales assistant, a cook or a site foreman works with their hands. To open the tracker they have to stop, pull out a phone, find the app and remember the password. For what? To learn what they’ve already been told.

2. Double work

Doing the job is one thing. Logging in to mark it done is another. You get paid for the first, not for the second. So the second gets put off “until later,” and cards sit in the “in progress” column for weeks, long after the work is finished.

3. A foreign language

Boards, columns, labels, checklists, watchers. If you’re used to it, it’s all obvious. For everyone else it’s an interface where you’re afraid of breaking something. A person who’s afraid of tapping the wrong thing simply doesn’t tap.

4. Real life happens outside the tracker

Nobody creates a card for an urgent task — it’s said out loud or typed into the chat. A couple of weeks in, the tracker holds half of the tasks, and not the most important half. People stop trusting a system that knows half the story, and so they stop looking at it.

5. The manager goes around it too

This is the most common reason and the hardest to admit. Creating a task in the tracker takes a minute. Saying it in a voice message takes seven seconds. In a rush, the second wins, and employees quickly figure out where tasks really live.

What people usually try — and why it doesn’t help

• Make it mandatory. Works for two weeks, while someone is watching.
• Dock people’s pay. People start ticking tasks off instead of doing them. And whether such deductions are even legal is a separate question.
• Switch trackers. A new interface doesn’t answer the question “why should I open it?”
• Appoint someone to enter everything into the system. It works, but it costs a salary and is always half a day behind.

Three conditions under which tasks get done

Strip away the product names and one simple rule remains: a task has to arrive where the person already is. Three conditions follow from it.

1. Assigning a task takes no longer than saying it. If filling it in takes longer than a voice message, the manager will send a voice message.
2. Replying takes a word or two at most. “Got it,” “done,” a photo. No statuses, no columns.
3. The picture comes to you. A manager shouldn’t have to go around people or a board to find out what’s done. Once a day, a short report: done, in progress, overdue, who’s silent.

For most small companies, “where the person already is” means a messaging app. That’s why tasks in WhatsApp get done better than cards in a tracker, even when they’re less neatly written up. We’ve written separately about how to bring order to them: seven rules for assigning tasks in WhatsApp.

Check yourself in five minutes

If the answer to the first question is “two” and the answer to the third is “about ten,” you have a tracker, but you don’t have a system for tasks.

And if you do need a tracker

You need one where there are projects with stages and people at computers: design, development, marketing. You don’t have to give it up. Just stop demanding it from the people it doesn’t suit, and give them another way in — a messaging app. We’ve broken down how the two approaches differ in our Zere vs Trello comparison.

That’s exactly what Zere is about: a task is assigned by voice or text, the assignee replies in a word or two, and in the evening the manager gets a report. How it works.