Don’t you hate it when you’re not entirely sure if your employees are telling you the truth about when they come and go from the job site? From personal experience, there’s nothing worse than not being able to fully trust your team because one person decided they found a way to “beat the system.” Let’s break down some options that we’ve seen companies use all around the United States and beyond, as well as the pros and cons for each.
There are a few different options that your company could depend upon ranging from blind trust to automated solutions, but today we’ll focus on three distinct ones. First off we have the self-reporting of employees using a simple pen and paper system where employees write down, using their personal watch, what time they came in and what time they left. Obviously, this option leaves open a plethora of way to defraud the system, even unintentionally. The biggest glaring issue to me is how do we make sure that all employees use the same time since watches tend to differ from one another. An easy answer is to install a digital clock in the office. Now you’re left with employees that might feel pressured to write earlier clock in times and later clock out times. How do we stop that from happening? It’s a very hard issue that can only be caught by having the foreman or their managers verifying each and every single entry on a daily basis. That is time wasted on the managers part, on the faithful employee’s part, and it all ends up costing the company money for no reason.
The second option here comes in the form of time clock systems that keep time in sync and makes sure that employees can’t modify their times without raising quite a few alarms. The issue with those is that they break often, especially when you have hundreds of employees. Another issue is they tend to cause a queue because it takes a few seconds for each person to push in their time card.
The last option we want to discuss here is a simple and accurate mobile-device-based time management solution that takes care of the issues of long queue and self-reporting in the previous options discussed. By having a mobile app that can check your workers in and out based on when they’ve actually arrived at the work site makes it so that no one is able to cheat the system so long as they have a phone. Of course, there are still ways to defeat the security measures here, but they are more glaring that trying to go around other time clock systems that are out in the market.
Time and attendance management are complicated things to accurately track because some employees ruin for everyone else, or the time clock system is not entirely accurate. They are ways to fix the system, and we have reviewed three options which are
- Self-reporting on paper by employees
- Self-reporting by using a time clock system, and
- Automatic reporting using a mobile solution
At the end of the day, you can go with the cheap and easy ways or the more accurate tracking with a mobile solution that does all the heavy lifting for you and your team. Either system work, but most companies we work with like to have accurate information they can pass on to their financial and risk management departments.