3 Ways to Remove the Fudge Factor in Employee Time Tracking
By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

Did you know that according to the American Payroll Association, hourly employees overestimate their time worked by ten minutes every day? Employees clock in/out early or late and/or take long lunches or breaks. Time is money. The more your employees exaggerate their time, the more money your company is losing.

In addition to employees exaggerating their time, three-fourths of employers are losing 4.5 hours’ worth of wages each week due to buddy punching, according to the American Payroll Association. Just to clarify, when we’re talking about buddy punching, we’re not talking about when co-workers punch each other. It’s when an employee’s buddy clocks them in when they aren’t there. I thought buddy punching was a common term, but I guess not. I just read a buddy punching blog and one of the comments asked if buddy punching was about workplace violence, so I thought I’d clarify it.
Buddy punching and employees’ overestimation of their time is even worse when you have a mobile workforce where employees are not working in the office all day long and/or working at different locations each day or starting at one location or client site and ending the day at another one.
Buddy punching and overestimated time allow employees to fudge their time. You may be asking yourself, what can we do to remove the fudge factor when employees are tracking their time?

Here are 3 Ways to Remove the Fudge Factor with Employee Time Tracking: 

Photo Face Capture – Trust but verify has always been a management mantra of mine. If you are using a swipe card, punch clock, or paper time card with mobile employees, you’ve never really had the ability to verify that the actual employee is the person swiping in/out or punching in /out. If you’re not working at the same location or have a different schedule as your employees, it’s difficult to know when they’re coming and going unless you’re working side by side with them all day. With WorkMax TIME’s Photo Face Capture, supervisors, managers and payroll can make sure the right person is clocking in/out each day and eliminate buddy punching. With WorkMax TIME, the photos can ONLY be taken at clock in/out, to make sure employees don’t store photos to use when they’re not working.

GPS – Without GPS location services, you won’t know if you’re employees are clocking IN/OUT when they while they are still on the premises or clocking out after they’ve left their work location for the day. With WorkMax GPS location services, you know where your employees are clocking IN/OUT. With paper time cards or spreadsheets, you don’t know when and where they are entering their IN/OUT times. They could be at pub down the street when they stopped work for the day. With WorkMax TIME’s GPS location services, you can know that your employees are clocking IN/OUT each day while they are still at the office, on site or at the client location. No more fudging time cards by clocking out offsite from their work location.

Real-time Clock IN/OUT– With paper time cards and spreadsheets, employees tend to fill out their time cards at the end of the work week. If they are scheduled for the same shift every day, they fill out their scheduled shift times, not the actual times they arrive and leave work. Employees estimate their IN/OUT times and according to a 2015 Software Advice Survey, 43% of employees over exaggerate their time worked. With an automated employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME, employees’ hours are calculated and accurate up to the minute without employees’ estimating or rounding their time worked. Employees can no longer fudge the hours they’ve worked because WorkMax TIME captures actual clock IN/OUT times in real time. This way you’re only paying employees for the exact number of hours they’ve worked.

 

Now that you know the three ways to eliminate the fudge factor when collecting and managing employee time tracking, get started today and see how an automated employee time tracking solution will reduce your labor costs and increase payroll accuracy.  

 CLICK HERE to see the  ways to capture accurate TIME.