Whether you’re running a small or big company, tracking employee time is a crucial task that you should prioritize. The problem is, it can be a big challenge for business owners and managers to monitor every employee’s time. Plus, there are other vital day-to-day management tasks to worry about.
Time tracking isn’t only essential for creating accurate payroll. This is also helpful for improving and measuring workplace productivity, accountability, and employee morale. At the same time, your department heads can have a better grasp of scheduling and monitoring tasks. To help you effectively keep tabs on your employees’ time, here are some simple strategies you can use.
1. Educate your employees
The first thing you should focus on is ensuring that your team members understand why time tracking is essential. They should also know what you’re expecting from them and how your time tracking process works.
If you’re using a time tracking tool, try to walk every employee into it. Lay out the guidelines for tracking their time. Give them details about what personal businesses are allowed at work, how long the breaks will be, and how they can prevent errors. Ensuring all employees understand these will help you minimize not just misinformation and mistakes but also employee time theft.
2. Use a fully integrated system
Investing in a fully integrated time tracking system is crucial for efficient monitoring of employee hours. At the same time, you also get to make your HR’s work a lot easier. Such software typically offers cloud-based labor and time management. Investing in this tool can help you boost your workforce productivity and business performance.
A good, fully integrated software will enable your HR representatives to easily and quickly approve PTO requests by efficiently managing time-off balances from the dashboard. Besides that, users can create schedules and counter-check them to the actual attendance records of employees.
But apart from time, using good time tracking software also allows you to get an insight into the performance of your employees. You can generate reports for attendance, time, and labor, allowing you to check if you’ll have to change resources to reach project benchmarks.
3. Focus on time theft
The next thing you should look into is employee time theft. This happens when a worker accepts wages for the work they did not do. It can be due to negligence, or it may be accidental or deliberate.
No matter what the reason is, know that time theft is bad news for your business operations. You can lose money and valuable time. Everyone in your team should understand what time theft is and how they can prevent this mistake. You can put the details in your employee handbook.
In case time theft happens, a verbal warning would do for the first offense. The second time it occurs would require a written warning. Multiple violations may also lead to suspension or termination. Pick the discipline that suits your business, and be sure every employee knows about the corresponding punishments for time theft.
4. Always back up data
Losing your employees’ timesheets can cause major disruptions in your business operations. It can result in money and time loss too. The truth is, you cannot completely guarantee that your HR reps won’t accidentally delete an email containing necessary employee time. Accidents do happen.
Avoid such threatening acts by doing a proper backup. Your HR and other department leaders should back up all vital business data. You can add duplicates of work reports and employee timesheets to the cloud. The quarterly reports should be saved somewhere outside the actual time tracking tool. For documents, lock them or make them only deletable or editable by authorized users.
5. Outsource payroll services
Last but not least, you can consider outsourcing your payroll. Seeking help from an external partner will not increase your extra expenses but save you from them. Professional payroll solutions can save you from compliance headaches, money, and time. Providers of these services are trained and experienced in employee time tracking and accurate payroll reporting.
Some even have their own payroll system that can make the work effortless and error-free. Monitoring employee time and creating the payroll is daunting, and miscalculations are likely to happen if your HR team either doesn’t have enough experience or has other crucial tasks to take care of.
Tracking the time of employees can be a real eye-opener for every business. It allows you to keep tabs on work processes, operational efficiency, and even your company’s budget. Just don’t forget to properly introduce your time tracking procedures to your team to avoid misunderstanding and objection.