3 Mobile Employee Time Tracking Myths Debunked

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

For the last 15 years, we have been working with small and large construction companies to help them move from time clocks, timesheets, and spreadsheets to a mobile employee time tracking solution. Many of the same misconceptions we encountered 15 years ago are some of the same ones we hear today. These false assumptions hold true across all industries with mobile workforces. Though there has been some slight improvement in the IT spend by the construction industry, 46.7% still spend less than 1% on their IT budget according to the 2017 ConTech Report. 

Here are 3 of myths about mobile employee time tracking solutions debunked: 

 

“My employees are not techy enough to track time on a mobile device.” According to Pew Research, 95% of Americans own a mobile device and 77% own smartphones. This is a 35% increase in smartphone ownership since 2011. If your employees are 18 – 29, 94% of them have a smartphone and 89% of Americans between 20-49 have a smartphone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median age of a construction worker is 42.6 and the median age for all employed workers in the US is 42.2, so almost all of your employees own a smartphone and are very comfortable using it. When we started introducing mobile technology to the construction industry 15 years ago, we added hundreds of customers by convincing them to buy a mobile employee time tracking solution because using it was as simple using an ATM with a PIN code. Today, practically all of your employees are familiar with entering a PIN code on their smartphones and can take a selfie so there’s no good reason why you can’t get your employees to track their time on their smartphones or from a company-owned tablet. It’s just a few clicks on the WorkMax TIME app for your employees to clock in and take a selfie to utilize the facial recognition feature. WorkMax employee TIME tracking is also offered in Spanish to overcome any language barriers. 

 

 

“It’s too expensive to buy mobile devices for all my employees to track time.” Well, according to Pew Research above, most of your employees already have an iOS or Android smartphone, so you don’t have to purchase anything to track your employees’ time. iOS has 53.6% of the market share in the US and Android has 45.79 %. That means that 99.39% of mobile devices have an iOS or Android operating systems that support mobile employee time tracking.  When you look at the amount of money you would spend for an employee time tracking solution compared to what you would save based on our ROI calculator, the cost is negligible. We’ve had some clients report a 2926% ROI when they used WorkMax TIME and WorkMax FORMS to manage their mobile workforces’ employee time tracking and mobile business forms. 

 

 

“My employees are always accurate with their time tracking.” According to the American Payroll Association, your employees overestimate their time worked by 4.5 hours per week. The overestimated time worked includes arriving late for work, taking long lunches and breaks, leaving early, having a buddy clock them out after they have left their work location or having a buddy punch them in before they’ve arrived at work. The over-reported labor issues can be avoided with an automated employee time tracking solution with GPS, geofencing, facial recognition, and accurate task tracking. You can confidently know that your employees are in the right location when they are clocking in or out for the day and know when they’ve gone outside the geofence. You’ll have no concerns about buddy punching when you use the facial recognition feature in WorkMax TIME to track your employees’ time to achieve the most accurate labor hours. You can also see efficiency trends by comparing how long it took them to perform similar tasks or jobs in the past.

 

To learn more about how WorkMax TIME can help you reduce labor costs and be more productive, view our video or watch our demo on demand.