Workforce monitoring is a vital activity in large factories in order to oversee the worker's concentration on their duty and increase productivity. Workforces are kind of moving targets which can be monitored via wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As sensor nodes have a limited source of energy, optimal energy consumption is of crucial importance in these networks. Several protocols for routing are designed in order to consider efficient energy consumption in conjunction with target tracking and coverage. In this article, a new energy-efficient routing algorithm geographic routing time transfer (GRTT) is proposed to use topological information of sensor nodes for target tracking and coverage applications. In this article, a weight called relay ability is defined for each node according to the sensor network topology. These weights are calculated and announced to sensor nodes by cluster heads (CHs). Once a target enters the area covered by sensor nodes, a signal is sent to the CH through the route having maximum predefined weights in the network. Simulations show better results than other tracking routing methods based on the metrics of energy consumption of the network, power consumption, and throughput for GRTT (proposed method), dynamic energy-efficient routing protocol (DEER), virtual force-based energy-hole mitigation (VFEM), nonequal-probability multicast routing protocol (MRP-NEP), and trace-announcing routing scheme (TARS) methods. © 2014 IEEE.