Compass: real estate brokerage

Hey Beau! Tell us a bit about Compass.

We’re a technology-focused real estate brokerage with over 17,000 agents and employees. We are both a brokerage of unparalleled agents and a tech company reinventing the real estate transaction experience.  

Managing 17,000 people sounds intense. How does time tracking help with that?

It’s all about keeping collaboration smart and effective. We need a tool that enables us to accurately understand how our employees spend their time in more than 20 markets across the United States. Before finding Timely, our understanding of how our teams spent their time was based on scant data, educated assumptions, and instinct. With Timely, we can determine where we have excess capacity, so we can support markets whenever we are understaffed, and reprioritize work that is the highest leverage to the business.

How would you describe Timely to other enterprise companies?

After running pilots with several other time tracking tools, Timely is by far the best time tracking tool available for enterprise companies. Period. The ease of use allows those tracking their time to focus on the requirements of their position, instead of tediously keeping track of daily activities. Time tracking with Timely takes no more than five minutes per day. Simply put, Timely combines the efficiency of a background time tracking application with the privacy of a more manual time tracking application.

What made you choose Timely over other enterprise solutions?

We actually ran trials of five time tracking tools across various departments and markets. By far and away, Timely was the most popular time tracking tool due to its Memory feature, which automatically collects computer activity for employees, and its central focus on employee privacy.

Timely combines what is efficient about automating time tracking without sacrificing employee trust. Its rich insights have helped our managers deliver quality employee support:

“Timely helps me more concretely understand what my [direct reports] spend time on, and provides useful insights when talking about productivity and time management with employees during 1:1s.”

– Compass People Manager

Our employees also really value the simplicity of the tool, which made adoption and team onboarding straightforward:

“Timely was easy to learn, and is easy to use. It makes the process of time tracking very smooth.”

– Compass employee

What about implementation? How do teams across Compass actually use Timely?

During our pilot, four different employee-facing teams used Timely to track their time: Agent Experience Managers, Enterprise Technology Associates, Office Administrators and Transaction Operations Specialists. Each team’s leadership was able to create “clients” (i.e. buckets of time) that allowed employees to classify time spent on activities that were department-specific. In all, approximately 350 employees used Timely to track their time.

We asked employees to track customer-facing interactions, internal meetings, projects and administrative tasks in Timely in order to understand what percentage of employee time was spent in direct support of our customers, and what the volume drivers of those interactions were.

We also extracted data from Timely in order to provide week-on-week reporting to our Senior Leadership Team so that Compass’ leaders had actionable insights into which markets and teams were over- or under-utilized.

What are the biggest benefits of Timely?

The data produced by Timely provides clarity that will help Compass understand how to improve the customer experience and move towards scalable support solutions. Automatic time tracking has also helped us identify tasks that are ripe for self-service or automation (in turn freeing up time for employees to focus on more valuable, higher skill-set tasks).

Are there any standout features your team can’t do without?

The Memory feature is absolutely the most useful tool for our employees' work! Compass employees adore that they can trust Memory to track all their computer activity without automatically sharing it with the company. Everyone stays in control of their data.

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Our People Managers also adored Timely’s reporting functionality. It was incredibly easy to set up Managers as “team leads” so that they could have insight into their team’s activities and proactively coach direct reports based on the trends their time tracking data illustrated.