3 Ways Mobile Forms Drastically Reduce Conference Calls

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing

Most field supervisors fill out daily progress reports to keep all the project stakeholders on the same page. It’s usually a handwritten or typed up report with project status updates to address so everyone knows the current status of the project. Typically, this text-only report requires multiple follow-up phone calls and conference calls to make sure everyone understands the current project status. Have you thought about embedding photos, sketches, and videos into your forms to improve this process? A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s even better if you can visually communicate something faster and better in fewer words, right?

Here are some facts about visual communication:

• Visual imagery is processed 60,000 times faster than text [1]
• 65% of people are visual learners [2]
• 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual [3]
• The brain can retain only 7 bits of information at a time. [4]
• Our eyes can register 36,000 visual messages per hour. [5]
• Visual aids improve learning by up to 400 percent [6]

Now that you know why mobile forms with photos, videos, and sketches improve communication, here are three ways that they will reduce your conference calls:

Reduce Conference Calls Between the Office and Field –

Recently, I talked to one of our electrical contracting customers, R.J. Wolfarth of Service Electric and Control, Inc., and he shared the difficulty of getting accurate information from the field to the office and up the chain of command using paper forms without photos, videos, sketches, or photos with markup.
“Using paper and not incorporating specific project details in forms to capture the true, real-time information is like playing Telephone. We received inconsistent information from the project managers daily because we weren’t getting the information directly from the source.” said R.J. Wolfarth, vice president of construction, “By utilizing WorkMax mobile FORMS, we eliminated the project management role on all of our smaller-scale projects. We found that the project managers actually hindered our job-specific milestones because of inaccurate information regarding overall progress. WorkMax mobile FORMS now answers all the questions and delivers the information more accurately than we have ever seen.”

Reduces Status Update Calls to Clients – R.J. also likes to share the photos, sketches, videos, and photos with markup with clients. The mobile forms are available at his fingertips to quickly share progress updates with them. His clients don’t have to open individual photos and video attachments and wonder why they need to look at it. The photos and videos are all in one document, along with any written descriptions.
“WorkMax mobile FORMS enables us to keep the customer fully updated with no gray areas. They no longer require weekly conference calls, because we answer their questions with WorkMax mobile FORMS. We can devote our time to answering specific questions or troubleshooting for the customer versus trying to identify what has actually happened,” said RJ Wolfarth, VP of Construction for Service Electric and Control, Inc.

Reduces Conflict Resolution Calls to Clients –

Building clients’ trust takes time. Clients can be skeptical when you let them know about issues that arise on your projects, especially if the project isn’t in the same town they live in. It’s not always workable for your clients to drive to the job site or jump on a plane to inspect the issues in person. This can lead to lengthy conference calls with your clients to explain the budget increases or schedule delays. When you use mobile forms with photos and videos, you can send your clients marked-up photos and videos to show them what’s happening without being on the job site. Seeing is believing. You can visually communicate information more clearly and quickly with your clients. It also doesn’t matter where the project is or where your clients are. Everything is available to all your project stakeholders anywhere, anytime, and on any mobile device with WorkMax mobile FORMS.

Watch a video or see a WorkMax mobile FORMS demo to improve how you manage your communication from the field to the office to the clients.

References:
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20001014041642/http://www.3m.com:80/meetingnetwork/files/meetingguide_pres.pdf
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/08/what-is-an-infographic-and-ways-to-make-it-go-viral/#33f0f1ba7272
[3] https://justin.vashonsd.org/Resources/HOM/Learning&LeadingWithHabitsOfMind.pdf
[4] Burmark, L. (2002). Book Visual Literacy Learn See. Assn for Supervision & Curriculum. https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Literacy-Learn-See
[5] Jensen, Eric. Brain-Based Learning (Revised). p 55. CA:The Brain Store, 2005.
[6] http://web.archive.org/web/20001014041642/http://www.3m.com:80/meetingnetwork/files/meetingguide_pres.pdf

Win More Bids with 3 Must-Have Employee Time Tracking Features for Progress 

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing

Project bidding is getting more and more competitive each day. The more accurate you’re tracking labor hours and the associated production units completed by task, employee, or crew, the more you can rely on actual costs to build accurate future bids with information from your mobile employee time tracking solution. With an employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME, you will be confident in your historical actual project costs which will allow you to bid more aggressively and ultimatelly win more business. 

Here are the 3 must-have employee time tracking features that are going to win you more bids: 

Personalize Units of Measure to Fit your Business – If your unit of measure for what is completed or produced on your projects isn’t standard cubic feet of concrete laid per day or square feet of drywall installed, you don’t have to worry. WorkMax TIME allows you to personalize the labels for your units of measure to make sure you can accurately track what’s produced on your projects. You choose your units of measure to match what your employees complete on the project. If you’re a honey farmer and you measure the honey produced in each beehive in gallons per day, you have the flexibility to create a unique unit of measure that works for your business. This means you can better estimate what that colony of bees will produce in the future for more accurate and predictable revenue. You can also identify if there are any issues by comparing historical production units to current production units. When you’re creating bids and estimates, you will know you are always comparing apples to apples when you reference similar projects to bid on new projects. The more accurate you can get with your labor hours for your bids the more aggressive you can bid on the project. 

Employees Prompted to Enter Production Units On Task Change – When employees are using their mobile devices to track their production units, WorkMax TIME prompts employees to enter their production units every time they change tasks or activities. Typically, a supervisor is completing a daily log report to discuss progress on a project. Even if they wait to enter what they completed for the day on a Daily Log Report, you’re relying on their memory after a long hard day’s work. They may have forgotten a few things that their crew completed by the end of the day. Throughout the day, your employees can see what they’ve accomplished and it will motivate them to get as much done each day as possible. The sooner they add in their production units, the more accurate the production units are. As a result, your bids are more accurate.

Track Production Units Per Task – Get accurate production units and know how much has been completed per task during the day from the comfort of your office. Everyone in the field and in the office will know what has been completed throughout the day from any mobile device too. Another reason you want to track production units per task is that your project may have tasks that have dependent tasks or activities. You’ll want to know when the first task is done before your staff starts on the dependent tasks to make sure your project schedule stays on track. By tracking production units per task, you’re also making sure that you’re comparing the same task or activity to the same activities. This helps you create more accurate bids based on how many man-hours it would take to complete a project. 

WorkMax TIME is the only cloud-based mobile employee time tracking solution to combine employee time tracking with tracking production units completed by employee, crew, or task. With WorkMax TIME, you can measure what’s completed by employee, task, or crew to build accurate estimates and bids. You know that you’re building the most accurate bids to win more business by personalizing the production units of measure for your company and prompting employees to update what’s completed as they change tasks throughout the day with WorkMax TIME. 

3 Ways You’re Failing at Optimizing Labor Output With Your Employee Time Tracking Solution

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing

Labor is typically the biggest expense on projects. To make your projects profitable, you not only have to manage your labor hours, you also need to look at what your employees have completed on the job site. Managing your labor hours and what they’ve completed is even more challenging when you have a mobile workforce. With mobile employees, it’s difficult to get progress information as quickly as you need to keep your project on schedule and on budget.
If you’re not tracking production units with your mobile employee time tracking solution these 3 ways, you’re failing at optimizing your labor output:

Track and Measure Production By Employee – Do you suspect that one employee might be carrying the load on a crew and you might have some underperformers slowing down the whole crew? If you’re running multiple projects at the same time, it’s difficult to know if everyone is being as productive as they could be without being on the job site watching the employees all the time. If you’re tracking production units per employee, you can use it as a motivational tool by using historical averages of production units completed per employee on similar jobs and offer bonuses for the employees that are above average performers. Some construction projects have payouts or accelerator bonuses that are paid when projects hit milestones early or complete a project ahead of schedule. By tracking your production units from the employee, you can drive your employees’ behavior and get more done on a project each day. When you measure production units completed by each employee virtually in real time, you’re better able to manage your project to profitability.

Optimize Staffing Levels to Keep Project On Schedule – If you’re not tracking the production units in near real time with your employee time tracking solution, it’s difficult to know when you need to add additional temporary workers or pull employees from another job to keep your project on schedule. If you’re relying on spreadsheets or paper daily progress reports, you’re making future decisions based on old information. When you’re tracking production units in near real time, you know if you’re falling behind on the scheduled tasks for the day and can request additional workers to keep your project on schedule. You’re making decisions right now based on what’s happening right now. Your supervisors will know if they need to bring in additional employees to stay on schedule. If they’re ahead of the production schedule, they could also decide to cut the hours of some of the staff to reduce labor costs. By knowing what’s produced in near real time, supervisors can right-size their staffing levels to keep their projects on schedule. 

Track and Measure Crew and Supervisor Performance – Your supervisors can track the production units completed by their crew each day or whenever his/her employees change their tasks or activities for the day. The supervisor can enter the crew’s production units in near real time so that everyone in the field and in the office knows what’s been accomplished. By tracking production units by crews, you can compare crews against other crews completing similar tasks to see how well your foremen or supervisors are managing their crews. Good friendly competition among the supervisors and crews can motivate staff to be even more productive and keep your projects profitable and on schedule. You might even see more projects come in under budget and completed before your project scheduled deadlines. You can also identify top performing supervisors and foreman and have them share their best practices to get your crews to accomplish more on the job site each day.

WorkMax TIME is the only cloud-based employee time tracking solution that makes it easy to track what’s being completed on the job site without being there from any mobile device anywhere. With WorkMax TIME, you can measure individual employee performance and the performance of your supervisors or foreman to make decisions virtually in real time as employees are completing tasks on the job site. By tracking production units by crew or employee, you can right-size your staffing and know your projects will be profitable before the project is completed.

3 Reasons To Divorce Paper Forms for Mobile Forms

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

You’re constantly frustrated by managing mobile employees when it comes to paperwork. Here are the top 3 reasons, you should ditch those paper forms and simplify your life with mobile forms:

I can’t get my employees to fill out paper forms – When you’re an employee that works in the office and has to collect the forms from your mobile or field employees, you don’t know what you don’t know. The employees and equipment are out in the field moving from job to job and it’s difficult to get all of your employees’ paperwork back to the office and easily track your assets. You probably provide safety training and Toolbox Talks to educate your employees about why it’s important to fill out safety checklists and to fill out your paper safety forms. You know they’ve received training about filling out a safety checklist of their work area, but most of the time you don’t receive the safety checklists back in the office. In the office, sometimes you don’t hear about safety issues until much later. Because you’re not getting your safety checklists back in the office, you end up being reactive instead of proactive with your safety program. If you hear about a safety issue and when you check the safety logs, you’ll often find that what you heard about in passing doesn’t have a corresponding safety or injury report. You are frequently requesting forms after the fact.

Employees don’t fill out the RIGHT forms – Many times when employees are filling out paper forms for performance improvement plans, safety or injury reports, or safety checklists, it can require additional information to mitigate any risk for your company. For example, if you have an employee complete a daily log report and they answer yes when they are asked if there were any injuries on the job today. You might instruct them on the form that they need to call the Safety Manager and/or Workman’s Compensation manager to see if they need to fill out an additional report. They may not have any of the forms to fill out. If so, they would need to fill out an additional injury report and potentially fill out the OSHA 300 log depending on the injury. It might also require some Workman’s Compensation paperwork also. You also run into issues when employees fill out outdated forms which then require you additional phone calls, emails, and text messages to get the new information you’ve added to the current paper form. There are times when you need an employee to fill out more than one form, so even after you get the first injury report form, you have to send additional follow up forms.

Paper Forms are Late or Missing – Does your HR or payroll team always feel like they are behind the eight ball when it comes to getting new hire paperwork quickly from the field? Typically you’re rushing to manually enter the new hire paperwork into the HR or accounting system because you receive it after the new employee’s start date. This late paperwork compounds more of your headaches because you have to figure out how to get the employee’s hours entered correctly for the hours they worked before you even knew they existed. You also have to assign the job costs to the right projects and cost centers to get accurate job costing. This means that you have to call, email, or text the employee’s supervisor and ask him to send you the information to manually enter it into the accounting/payroll system. 

There are also many times when you get a last minute job to complete a work order for a client. Because you have paperwork orders, you have to send employees to the customer’s location as soon as possible with verbal or instructions by text message. They may or may not even have the right tools or equipment with them to fix the customer’s problem because they didn’t receive the detailed paperwork order before being dispatched to the client’s location. Your employees are not showing up not as prepared as they could be because there’s not an easy way to get the paperwork order to the employee before they get to the customer’s location.

With all the extra work paper creates for you, it’s time that you look for a new way to manage your mobile employees and forms. It’s time for the BIG “D” word, DIVORCE! It’s time to break up with paper and put in those divorce papers. If you want to know how you can increase your safety or form completions and get them to your office staff in real time, you should check out our Harvest Energy Services Success Slideshow. They increased their safety form completions by 200% by making paperwork easy with mobile forms. WorkMax FORMS also has nested forms and conditional logic that will present follow-up forms based on responses in the current form. To improve the number of forms completed and get them to the office in a timely manner by combining WorkMax TIME with WorkMax FORMS. With WorkMax TIME + WorkMax FORMS, you can prompt your employees to answer questions and that will automatically present the needed forms on their mobile devices when they Clock IN/OUT. We know employees want to make sure they track their hours worked accurately, so they’re much more likely to give your office staff the data they need from the field when you tie the forms to the Clock IN/OUT.

Employee Time Tracking & Business Forms: 3 Ways Paper is Crippling your Office Staff

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing

This week’s blog was submitted anonymously by a very disgruntled Payroll Manager. She’s just couldn’t hold back that she’s lost that loving feeling for paper. Though she’s tried to explain to her bosses about it, she’s having a tough time getting through and wanted to see if other office managers or payroll managers are experiencing the same thing. Let me warn you that she really lets loose and goes into graphic detail about how paper is physically affecting her, so be prepared. If you have any tips on how she can get her business owners to consider automating her employee time tracking, business forms, or asset tracking, you can reply to the email you received today.

We really hope your relationship with paper hasn’t affected you as negatively as it’s affected her. We knew it was frustrating dealing with paper for employee time tracking, business forms, and asset tracking when you’re managing a mobile workforce, but we had no idea it had gotten this bad.

Here are the top 3 reasons why the office manager who shall remain anonymous has lost that lovin’ feeling for paper:

1. Laryngitis – I feel like I’m constantly losing my voice because of all the calls I have to make to collect paper timesheets and forms from my mobile employees and supervisors. Even after I get the paper forms and timesheets back in the office, I am STILL missing signatures or critical business information on the paper asset tracking logs, timesheets, or HR forms and have to make even more phone calls to my guys in the field. Somedays I have no voice left at the end of the day from all the phone calls and feel like I’m swallowing glass. Because most of our employees are mobile and in the field, the burden is put on me and the other office staff to get all the information from the field. We’re constantly frustrated with incomplete information for employee time tracking, business forms, and asset tracking. Our bosses don’t like change and keep sticking with broken manual processes and paper forms.

2. Carpel Tunnel and Tenosynovitis – I have carpal tunnel from typing so many emails to my mobile employees and Tenosynovitis from texting my field employees because I can’t read their handwriting. Whoever taught them penmanship should be fired. If I wasn’t in so much pain from all of this typing, texting, and mouse clicking, I’d send each school board member a letter that they need to do a better job teaching penmanship in schools. My field employees think I can read chicken scratch and hieroglyphics. Imagine that. They might as well also call me the all-knowing Wizard of Oz while they’re at it. I’m also about to lose my index finger because of all the mouse clicking to create job folders to save photos, scanned forms, and videos into the right folders on the server to keep all the documentation organized. Don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is that I have to first read chicken scratch and then I have to spend hours manually entering the employee time tracking information into the payroll and accounting systems. The several hours it takes for me to do manual data entry for the employee time tracking and payroll, doesn’t even include the hours I spent entering paper safety forms or other HR forms into other business applications. It’s 2018 and I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling for paper. We are not even in a love/hate relationship, I hate paper and manual processes and my poor hands can’t take it anymore.

3. Stress Fractures in My Feet – I have stress fractures in my feet from walking from job site to job site replacing old paper forms and timesheet forms with updated timesheets, business forms, and asset tracking logs. When we can’t find a piece of equipment, I’m even sent to the job site to try and find it. You don’t even want to see the bunions I have on my feet too. I’m tired and my feet hurt. I want digitized mobile forms that can dynamically update and customize forms across all devices in a matter of a few clicks across all of your mobile devices and PCs. All of our mobile employees have smartphones, so I want us to finally break up with paper to start working smarter not continue to work harder. My old body just can’t take it anymore.

If you’ve also lost that loving feeling for paper for your employee time tracking, asset tracking, or business forms, there are definitely more fish in the sea to help you solve managing your mobile workforce and mobile resources. With WorkMax TIME, FORMS, and ASSETS, you can harness the power of mobile technology to simplify managing your mobile people, forms, and things. We’d love to help you get your loving feeling back with managing your mobile workforce and making your life easier. Please let us know if you’re ready for a change and are looking to simplify managing your mobile workforce with a mobile solution for employee time tracking, mobile forms, and asset tracking.

To learn more watch our Demo on Demand Now.

5 Key Time Savers Missing In Your Employee Time Tracking Solution

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

When looking for an employee time tracking solution, you want to make sure that you’re getting a solution that is going to be as efficient as possible and save you the most time. Here’s a list of the Top 5 Features that you’re missing in your employee time tracking solution. 

MANY WAYS TO COLLECT TIME

Take advantage of the ultimate flexibility by collecting labor hours in real-time, after-the-fact with digital timesheets, or both real-time and after the fact digital timesheets with WorkMax TIME. You have the flexibility to use a combination of the time collection methods for employee time tracking to meet the needs of your whole organization. Time can be submitted by an individual employee or supervisors can track a crew’s time with a smartphone or you can set up a mobile tablet kiosk at your client’s locations. Your office staff can use a kiosk to clock IN/OUT or they can do it from their desktop, laptop, or mobile device. WorkMax TIME makes it easy and offers you many options to fit the needs of your organization to save you time processing payroll.  

MANY WAYS TO ASSIGN OR ALLOCATE TIME

Most project-based businesses want to track what their employees are working on. Other employee time tracking solutions only offer you one workflow to allocate time. If you don’t allocate and collect your employees’ time in real time and have your employees allocate their time in real time, you don’t have an option to do it later. It’s NOW or NEVER with other employee time tracking solutions on the market. With WorkMax TIME, supervisors or individual employees have the flexibility to quickly allocate labor hours to the right activity in real time or after the fact. Supervisors can even allocate time for their whole crew in real time or after the fact to save time and be more efficient and accurate with their job costing. 

PREASSIGN PROJECTS AND TASKS/COST CODES

Depending on the size of your company and level of detail with your cost codes, your employees could be wasting hundreds of hours a week scrolling through a list of thousands of irrelevant tasks or cost codes. Save your employees time by preassigning tasks to a project to limit the list of tasks and projects for them to select from when they are clocking IN and/or changing tasks throughout the day. This means that employees will only see the projects they are assigned to and the tasks related to their duties to save them time and make it much easier to get them to adopt a mobile employee time tracking solution. The easier and faster you make it to track job costs the more accurate your job costs will be.  

KNOW WHO HAS AN ASSET & WHERE IT IS

Tired of spending too much time trying to find where your equipment is? How many phone calls, text messages, or emails does it take to find out who has the equipment or tools you’re looking for? By using an employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME combined with WorkMax ASSETS for asset tracking, your employees can easily capture asset usage and you will know who has your assets, where they’ve been used and where it’s all at. Save time and reduce asset losses with WorkMax TIME + WorkMax ASSETS. 

KNOW WHAT’S COMPLETED ON THE JOB WITHOUT BEING THERE

Most employee time tracking solutions out there don’t allow you to be able to track production units to know what’s happening in the field and what’s being accomplished. With WorkMax TIME, it’s easy for your employees to track cost codes or tasks with production units from their mobile devices with the correct production units. To save time and get the right production units completed on your projects, WorkMax TIME sets up the right units of measure ahead of time so that you ‘re comparing apples to apples for all of your projects for your entire organization. With accurate production units with the right units of measure, you can confidently know what your employees have accomplished and quickly communicate it with your clients.

Find out how you can upgrade to the top solutions to manage all of your mobile resources all in one place with WorkMax TIME, ASSETS and FORMS, view our video or watch our Demo on Demand Now. 

3 Employee Time Tracking and Asset Tracking Lies By Omission by Paper

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

Time is critical when you are managing labor and equipment intensive projects. You can’t afford to make decisions in hindsight because it can delay your project schedule and drastically escalate your project’s cost. When you rely on paper to manage mobile or remote employees, you’re limiting your ability to make decisions in real time based on what is happening in real time. It makes it difficult to take corrective actions to mitigate any financial impact when you’re making decisions based on day old or week old and sometimes month old information regarding the project status. Your paper forms, paper timesheets, and paper equipment logs are omitting a lot of information and as they say, lying by omission is still a lie. When you’re using paper forms, paper timesheets, and paper equipment or asset tracking logs, there are so many lies by omission that force you to constantly make your decisions based on outdated or inaccurate information.

Here are the 3 biggest lies by omission that are hurting your business’ efficiency and profitability:

Paper Lie #1 – My Employees Are On the Job Site 
Paper time cards are never going to be able to tell you this. Sometimes you can rely on supervisors to verify this, but depending on the size of the project, the supervisor may not even see all of his employees each day. You’re relying on employees to get to the job on time and document it on their paper timesheets. According to the APA, employees overestimate their time by 4.5 hours per week due to late arrivals, leaving early, and extended breaks and lunches. You’re overpaying your employees and aren’t getting your full 8 hours of productivity from them. By using WorkMax TIME’s GPS, Geo-Fencing, and Facial Recognition, you can confidently know where your employees are when they’re clocking IN/OUT and know that it’s the right person that you’re paying for the work that they performed that day.  

Paper Lie #2 – I Know What Was Completed Today Without Being There

People typically procrastinate and rush to fill out their timesheet at the end of the week and frequently write down inaccurate hours, tasks, and rarely track production units. Unless you’re at each customer location all day long, you’re never going to be able to answer with confidence which tasks were completed with paper timesheets. With WorkMax TIME, it’s never been easier to know what’s been completed on the project because WorkMax TIME makes it’s so easy for your employees to track tasks and production units from their mobile devices. By pre-assigning specific tasks to employees based on their skillset and pre-assigning the correct unit of measure per task, you can confidently know what your employees have accomplished and easily communicate it with your clients. 

Paper Lie #3 – My Tools and Equipment Paper Log is Accurate 
People hate filling out paperwork. They don’t understand why it’s important and they feel like it just slows them down from getting their “real” work done. When you’re using paper or even spreadsheets to track your tools and equipment, it’s nearly impossible to know where all of your tools and equipment are. Employees share tools when they’re doing similar work and think the other person is going to check the tools and equipment back into the equipment manager. Supervisors don’t know with confidence where their tools and equipment are and have to make multiple phone calls, send text messages, and emails to locate the tools and equipment.

According to the Annual Theft Report 2016, The National Equipment Register (NER) estimates the annual cost of equipment theft to be around $400 million and the average value of a stolen piece of equipment is $29,258. If you don’t know where your tools and equipment are it’s likely you don’t even know it’s missing and missing equipment and tools drastically drives up your project costs. Two of the top reasons that contribute to the high rate of equipment theft is the low risk of getting caught and poor equipment and site security. Without an easy-to-use mobile asset tracking system in place, you’re at a high risk to have your tools and equipment lost or stolen. Learn more about how WorkMax TIME + ASSETS allows you to know who has your tools and equipment in real time and where the equipment is. WorkMax TIME + ASSETS makes it easy to manage your mobile assets and mobile employees with mobile-to-mobile asset transfers. You can confidently know from your mobile device or computer in the office where your assets are and who has them at ALL times to limit any potential asset losses or thefts. 

There are so many limitations when you’re running your business with paper forms, paper time cards, or paper asset or equipment log. Let’s stop with all of these lies by omission that paper feeds us every day and finally break up with Paper. Once you cut your ties with paper for mobile forms, employee time tracking and asset tracking, you can be free to move to a more modern integrated solution to automate managing your mobile workforce all in one place with WorkMax. Your life will be simpler and your projects will be more profitable and efficient. 

To learn more about WorkMax TIME, ASSETS, or FORMS, view our video or watch our Demo on Demand Now. 

3 Ways You’re Losing Money with Time Clocks, Punch Cards, and Timesheets

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

Are you still using a time clock, punch cards, time cards, or paper timesheets? Whatever the reason you’re using a time clock, punch card, you need to know that there are some major drawbacks to using them for your employee time tracking. Here are the top 3 reasons that time clocks, punch cards, paper time cards or timesheets are dwindling away your profits:

1. Buddy Punching on Time Clock
If you’re using a time clock or punch card for your business to track your employees’ time, then you’re leaving the door wide open for your employees to clock in their buddy at work when they’re not there and they are definitely not working. Whether they are clocking in their coworker early because they got stuck in traffic or clocking them out after they left work, all of this time adds up and is costing your business money and affecting your bottom line. With a mobile workforce, that’s why you need to replace your time clock or punch clock with a mobile employee time tracking solution with facial recognition to know who is clocking in and out from their mobile devices. With facial recognition with WorkMax TIME, you can eliminate buddy punching and reduce your labor costs.

2. Travel Time to/from Time Clock 
If you have a limited number of time clocks or punch clocks at a large office or a large job site, you’re paying your employees for unproductive labor hours. After they clock in, they have to walk or drive to where they’ll be working for the day. As an employer, you are obligated to pay your employees for this travel time, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Depending on the size of your company, 5 minutes per day at $20 per hour for 100 employees adds up to $43,333.33 annually. If you had an automated employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME for your business, you can save $43,333.33 annually because employees clock in from their mobile devices on the job site and you have a GPS location of where they are when they clock in. No more wasted labor expenses when employees are traveling from the Time Clock or Punch Clock to your employees’ work area or job site. 

3. Overestimated Time with Timesheets or Time Cards

With paper timesheets, employees can overestimate their time by showing up late for work or leaving early or take long lunches or breaks. Your employees’ time is your money and is eating away at your profits. Many times with paper timesheets or time cards, employees fill them out at the end of the week and have to rely on their memory. This leads to employees overestimating their hours worked for the week. This can also put your employees into overtime and cost you even more money. The APA estimates 49 minutes per employee per day is overestimated. Click here to see calculate how much overestimated time could be costing your business. With an automated employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME, you know where your employees are when they are clocking IN/OUT and you know that it’s the right person clocking IN/OUT. The GPS feature and facial recognition give you the assurance you’re not overpaying your employees for the work they did for you. WorkMax TIME also captures their hours worked in real-time from mobile devices so you’re not relying on their memory for their hours worked that week. You can be confident that you’re paying the right employee for the right hours. 

To learn more about WorkMax TIME’s automated employee time tracking solution that’s available on any device from anywhere for the most accurate labor costs, check out our video or view our demo on demand.

3 FLSA Employee Time Tracking Mistakes Corrected with Better Communication

By: Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

It’s surprising how quickly an employee time tracking error can snowball into a much larger and much more expensive issue if you’re not following the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). One of the seven FLSA fails for employee time tracking revolves around accurately tracking employees’ time when they are taking breaks. Last month, a Memphis meat packing company learned this lesson at a pretty high cost, but the same principle can apply to any industry. They asked their employees to end their lunch breaks five minutes early to go back to work without paying them for their five minutes of work. During those five minutes, they asked their employees to wash their hands, stand in a foot bath and to change into their uniforms. These were important tasks that the employees needed to do their job; the problem was that their work was uncompensated.

So, you may be thinking, okay, the employees didn’t document their time correctly and five minutes can’t be that big of a deal, right? You might think it would amount to a few thousand dollars. Well, we’d both be wrong. The five minutes a day for each of the days the 272 employees worked added up and also put some employees into overtime. This resulted in a Department of Labor award of $127,830 in back pay and liquidated damages to the 272 employees for violating the FLSA. All of this could have been avoided if the HR team had clearly communicated and educated the supervisors and employees about the rules for employee time tracking for breaks. In addition, there are two other FLSA errors related to employee time tracking that can easily be avoided with clear communication and education for your employees and supervisors to avoid costly fines and unanticipated wage payments for back pay and overtime. Here are a few things that your supervisors and employees can do to make sure that you’re paying your employees what they have legally earned for all their hours worked:

 1. Working On Break – If your supervisors or managers interrupt an employee’s unpaid break to ask them to return to work, many times employees forget to change their clock in time. They’re used to writing their lunch hour from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm and don’t update their employee time records to show they actually started work again at 12:55 pm. Supervisors should remind employees to clock back in before they start working if the supervisor asks them to come back from lunch early. The other option is to not interrupt their lunch break and ask the employee to see you when they’re done. We all know taking breaks makes employees more productive and happy.

 2. Work Before/After Shift- If an hourly employee’s normal shift is 8 AM to 5 PM and you ask them to come early to work or stay late, make sure you’re telling them to clock in when they start work and clock out when they end work. One of the seven FLSA fails for employee time tracking is that employees don’t include the time they work before their shift starts and/or after their shift ends. Make sure that you’re always encouraging your employees to accurately tracking their time. When supervisors have an automated employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME available from their mobile devices, they don’t have to worry about employees going into overtime. They can see in real time how many hours their employees are working. 

 3. Paying Travel Time to/from Shop to Job Site – For many industries, you may need employees to go to a location away from their assigned job site for the day to pick up or drop off items. When employees are traveling from the shop to pick up to tools or equipment, make sure they are including the travel time from the shop to the job site for accurate employee time tracking and FLSA compliance. If you ask your employees to drop off tools at the shop after their regular shift hours, remind them to make sure they clock out after they drop off the tools to shop. Driving to pick up items to perform their job or that are duties that are part of their job is considered work and your employees need to be legally paid for their time. According to the Department of Labor, you are required to pay employees for time spent traveling during normal work hours.

So many of your employee time tracking issues can be easily be taken care of by clearly communicating with your employees and supervisors that you want to pay them accurately for all the time that they work. Make sure your hourly employees know that they need to be on the clock whenever they are performing work. If not, these employee time tracking oversights can quickly snowball into very expensive Department of Labor investigations where you could be forced to pay back pay, overtime, and fines for violating the FLSA.

For companies with a mobile workforce, you should consider using an automated employee time tracking solution to build in some a more systematic approach to solving your FLSA employee time tracking issues. It’s tough to get all of your employees and supervisors on the same page when it comes to tracking time. By using WorkMax TIME and WorkMax FORMS together you can prompt your employees with questions before they clock IN/OUT for the day to ensure they are correctly tracking their time. Check out our next blog to learn how you can use WorkMax TIME with WorkMax FORMS to build in checks and balances for the ultimate time tracking accuracy.

To learn more about how WorkMax TIME can help you avoid costly Department of Labor FLSA fines, view our video or watch our demo on demand. 

Are You Guilty of These FLSA Employee Time Tracking Violations?

By: Shannon Corgan, WorkMax Director of Marketing

With so many priorities for your business, it’s difficult to know that you’re following all the rules for tracking your employees’ time to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and avoid fines from the Department of Labor. There are seven common FLSA mistakes. Are you guilty of any of these Seven FLSA Fails for Employee Time Tracking?  A few of these mistakes were the reason that this month a pool builder in Houston, had to pay $115,786 in back wages to 68 employees for FLSA overtime violations. They made an FLSA faux pas by paying flat salaries per week or flat rates per job to drivers, mechanics, finishers, and others regardless of the number of hours their employees worked. They didn’t pay overtime when these employees worked more than 40 hours in a week. Additionally, they did not have an employee time tracking process in place to capture the actual number of hours the employees worked per day and per a week. That’s a FLSA recordkeeping no-no.

So, how do you make sure you’re not the next one on the list for a Department of Labor investigation? Let’s take a look at three ways this Houston pool builder, could have kept the Department of Labor away:

1. Paying Non-exempt Workers Hourly Rates – Just because you’re paid for a project based on project milestones or project completion, it doesn’t mean you can pay your non-exempt manual laborers the same way. In the construction industry, some of your jobs are paid per job, but the way that your business earns your income does not affect the way that you are responsible for paying your employees to comply with the FLSA. If you do, it’s going to get you into hot water with the Department of Labor when you have non-exempt workers.

2. Track Employees’ Time Daily and Weekly – Get accurate start and stop times and make sure you’re tracking your employees’ time on a daily and weekly basis for accurate FLSA recordkeeping. It’s your responsibility as an employer to track your employee’s time per day and per week and to pay your non-exempt manual laborers their hourly rate and any overtime when they work more than forty hours in a week. If you don’t, you may be part of the next Department of Labor investigation. The Department of Labor can recover back wages and also assess you a penalty of up to $1,100 for each willful or repeated violation for overtime. You can read the full list of all of the FLSA recordkeeping requirements here. 

3. Paying Employees Overtime for Over 40 hours Worked – If you’re not accurately capturing your employees’ time on a daily basis (with accurate start and stop times), it’s tough to get accurate weekly totals for overtime calculations. When you have non-exempt employees, according to the federal overtime provisions contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act, non-exempt employees must receive overtime pay at least one and a half times their hourly regular rates of pay. According to the Department of Labor,  you don’t have to pay overtime for work on Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays unless your employee worked more than 40 hours in that work week. This is based on the federal regulations covered in the FLSA. Some states may have additional wage and hour legislation that may require you to pay overtime for other circumstances other than the federal FLSA regulations.

Using an accurate employee time tracking solution like WorkMax TIME is sure to keep the Department of Labor off your back. You can capture daily clock INS/OUTS of all of your employees on paper, but paper doesn’t give supervisors and payroll staff back at the office the visibility into what employees are doing in real time when they are not at the job site. You can’t be proactive and see in real time who forgot to clock IN/OUT for the day to accurately track the hours they work. WorkMax TIME handles complex overtime tracking and calculations and automatically calculates your employees’ overtime, so there are no issues with not paying your employees when they work over 40 hours in a week. You also get a more accurate accounting for the hours that were worked with WorkMax’s real-time data capture. Additionally, when you’re using paper time cards, there is always the element of human error. Your payroll employee could miscalculate the hours worked and make a mistake with overtime calculation. All of that is eliminated with WorkMax TIME.

To learn more about how WorkMax TIME can help you avoid costly Department of Labor FLSA fines, view our video or watch our demo on demand.

3 Ways Paper is Drastically Driving Up Labor Costs That Mobile Forms Fix
By: Shannon Corgan, WorkMax Marketing Director

You already know the Top 10 Paper Forms Challenges because you live and breathe them every day and you know that you’re sacrificing the accuracy that you want with paper forms, but have you sat down to think about how Paper is affecting your labor costs? Here are three ways you’re driving up your labor costs by continuing to use paper forms instead of mobile forms: 

Wasted Time Distributing Paper Forms – When you get a paper form back in the office, more than one employee needs access to the information. This requires additional work to get the right forms and documentation to the right people in your company. This involves scanning the paper form into a digital format and naming the file. Your office staff has to set up a good way of organizing the forms by the employee that submitted the form, by form name, by the client name, or by job location. When you’re saving these digital forms, you really only have one way to organize and find them. Additionally, if there were any photos, sketches, or videos taken that support the paper form, all of those have to be saved and carefully named to hope you can find them if you ever need them in the future.  Once your office employee has the digital form with all of the supporting documentation, he/she has to remember which project managers, safety officers, accounting employees, and management staff he/she needs to email the information. If you have 40 service workers that complete 8 work orders per day, it would take your office worker about 3 minutes to scan the paper form, save it, name all the files, and email it with all of the supporting photos, videos, and sketches. If your office worker’s hourly rate is $15 per hour, this manual process is costing you $62,500 per year. WorkMax mobile FORMS, you can capture and embed all the photos, videos, and sketches in your mobile form. There are no separate photos or video files to save and name. As soon as the mobile form is completed and synced, it can be set up in advance to send particular forms to all the right people inside and outside of your company automatically. If you ever need to find a form at a later date to send, it is easy to find the form based on any of the fields that are on the form. You can find it by the employee that completed it, the date they completed it, the project name or location, or the form name using all of the criteria to find it instantly. The possibilities are endless.  All the photos, videos, or sketches are embedded in the mobile form, so you have everything you need and to easily distribute completed forms today or 10 years from today.

Time Delays – Managing a mobile workforce and collecting all of the critical business information to run your business can be quite a challenge. First, you have to make sure you have enough paper copies of the forms at all of your remote work locations to ensure that the employees are providing you what you need. If you don’t have a job trailer at each job location with a printer, that means that someone has to deliver all the forms to all of the job locations. In addition, once the forms are completed, one of your supervisors has to collect all the forms and return them to the home office or each of the employees are adding time to their time cards driving the forms to the home office. It’s surprising how quickly the cost could add up. If you had each of your 40 mobile employees going out of their way to drive paper forms to the home office with an extra 30 minutes of labor time once a week at an hourly rate of $20 per hour, you’re driving up your labor costs by $20,800 annually with paper. Imagine if you had your employees driving to your office every day to pick up their work orders rather than driving directly to the customer’s location when it’s closer to their home. By using paper for your daily progress reports, you could also be driving up your labor costs. If daily progress reports aren’t getting back to the home office until late in the day, you could be paying premiums to add additional labor to the job for the next day to keep your project on schedule. WorkMax mobile FORMS eliminates any time delays getting information back to the office. The mobile forms are submitted in real time from any mobile device from anywhere and at any time. Your mobile forms have the most up-to-date fields to collect all the data on the forms. This means you no longer have employees delivering paper forms to the job locations. The supervisors and employees don’t need to drive to the office to turn in their completed forms or pick up their work orders.

Extra Labor Hours Documenting Photos, Photo Markups, and Videos – When you have your mobile employees documenting the status of their projects, it’s always helpful to capture photos with the ability to mark them up or videos to show the work that they’ve done. When you’re completing progress reports or work orders, your employees fill out the paper form and take pictures and videos. They can’t mark up the photos without printing them out, marking them up and scanning the photo with markups into a digital file. At times file sizes of the photos or videos can be too large to email or send via text messaging. When this occurs, the employee has to go to the office and connect their camera or mobile smartphone to a computer to download the images.The pictures and videos have to then be organized by each project, name them and date them. If they are using cameras in the field, they have to download the photos onto a computer and manually send them to the office with descriptions. All of these steps to provide the best documentation to your customers, but all these manual steps add more labor hours to your budget. The paper forms and photos are separate files and to see what’s really going on in the field, you have to open each individual file. If your employees don’t stay on top of organizing this data in a timely manner, you could have missing photos and videos or photos and videos saved to the wrong projects. It’s a lot of extra time for your field staff and your office staff to manage the process. If you paid an office employee $15/hour and she spent two hours a week organizing all the photos and videos and associating them with the right projects from all the forms and photos sent from the field, it may only cost you $1,560 per year. But when you look at the one hour per week that your 40 field employees with an hourly rate of $20 could be spending either in the office downloading the images and photos and videos because they couldn’t email them, you are wasting $41,600 in labor costs. This doesn’t even include the labor hours for the time these employees have to commute to the office to download the photos or videos. This $41,600 labor cost could be eliminated with mobile forms and allow your employees to be doing more billable work. With WorkMax mobile FORMS, there is no need for all of these extra steps. WorkMax mobile FORMS embed the photos with markups and videos as part of the work order or daily progress report forms to automatically organize everything for you. You can see all of the work orders with all the detailed photos with markup and video documentation you need to easily find what you need. WorkMax mobile FORMS allows you to find all of your forms by form type, project name or number, by location, or work order type. If the fields are in your forms, you can do a global search by any criteria to find what you need quickly to reduce your labor hours.

To learn more about WorkMax mobile FORMS, view our video or see a demo-on-demand video now!

Mobile Forms Solve Top 3 Paper Accuracy Issues 

By: Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

For businesses with a mobile workforce, most struggle with getting accurate documentation from the field. Most businesses started with good old paper forms, they continue to use them without stopping to take a look at what it is costing their business in terms of accuracy. Sometimes business owners take for granted the labor hours that are expended processing these paper forms and the additional labor hours that are spent because of the problems associated with paper forms. Getting accurate information from the field to the office is critical to keep your business compliant, to expedite billing and invoicing, and optimize your efficiency. Here are top three accuracy issues related to paper forms:

Missing Information on Forms –There are a few reasons why it happens. Unfortunately, when you’re relying on humans, there’s always human error. You may have an employee that’s not detail-oriented, but they’re great at their job. Out in the field, it’s more likely that your employee is going to get distracted and overlook a field on your paper forms. It could also be that they don’t understand what you’re looking for, so they would rather leave it blank than put in the wrong information. Getting accurate information is important when it comes to completing work orders and safety forms. The longer it takes to get all of the right information to bill or invoice your clients, the longer it takes to get payment from them. When it comes to safety, you want to make sure you have all the fields on the safety forms filled out to be compliant with OSHA reporting timeframes. All of these issues with paper forms can be solved with a mobile forms solution. With WorkMax mobile FORMS, you can make fields required on a mobile form to make sure you get all the right information on a form to be compliant, ensure the accuracy of work orders to expedite billing, and save your office staff time. They no longer have to waste their time on phone calls, texts, and emails to field employees to get the missing information on the forms.

Can’t Control the Data Format – One of the biggest issues with paper forms is that you can’t control how employees enter the information on the paper form. When employees misunderstand the information you’re asking for, they write in what they think is the correct response. The end result is that you’re STILL not getting accurate information. With paper forms, you’re always trying to fit your forms on one page to save on paper costs and increase your chances that your employees fill out the whole form. It also makes it difficult to do any reporting on the information on the form because the data that employee enters isn’t in a standardized format. Also, doesn’t it seem that as soon as you print a form, it is out of date? Don’t you feel like you’re constantly having to print and redistribute forms because you frequently have to update them? With WorkMax mobile FORMS, you can instantly update pick list options or fields on a form, so that your employees are filling out the most current form and you get the data you need. With WorkMax mobile FORMS, you can use many types of different field types to control how employees enter information into a form to improve data accuracy. WorkMax mobile FORMS lets you set up pick lists, multiple choice pick lists, and formula fields for accurate calculations to provide you with the most accurate information.

 Illegible Handwriting – Everyone hates filling out forms, because it takes too long, right? This causes people to rush when they’re filling out forms and their handwriting becomes unreadable. They also rush because they also feel like they have higher value job duties that are related to their productivity to perform. They want to get back to what they deem is their work for the day. Very similar to the missing information on forms, if you can’t read it, then it’s just as bad as having no information at all. With Workmax mobile FORMS, the only handwriting you have on a form is their signature, and it doesn’t matter if you can’t read that. WorkMax mobile FORMS takes care of all of the problems of illegible handwriting on paper forms because all of the text fields are typed in, so there’s no messy handwriting.

Federal Overtime Rule from 2016, Is It Dead for Hourly Employee Time Tracking?

By: Shannon Corgan, WorkMax Marketing Director 

Have you been wondering what’s going on with the 2016 Department of Labor (DOL) overtime rule that was supposed to go into effect December 1, 2016?

The current minimum salary an employee can be exempt from overtime pay is $23,660 a year and the new overtime rule would have made the salary minimum $47,476 a year. This means that 4.2 million workers between $23,660 and $47,476 annual salary could begin earning overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. Currently, the 4.2 million workers between the current minimum salary threshold and the newly proposed minimum annual salary threshold of  $47,476 are currently exempt from receiving overtime pay.

Within hours of the new overtime rules effective date of December 1, 2016, a federal court injunction was issued. Finally, the DOL decided in June 2017 to stop fighting the federal court injunction for the new overtime rule. Most of the pushback to the new overtime rule came from businesses. If the new overtime rule was put into effect, businesses were concerned about the financial impact of paying overtime for the first time to employees that were previously exempt from overtime pay.   

On July 26th, 2017 the DOL issued a Request for Information (RFI) to ask employers and employees to offer feedback regarding the new overtime rule proposed in 2016. Comments were accepted until September 25, 2017, but you can still read the comments that were posted. In reviewing several hundred of the over 140,000 comments, many of the comments posted on the RFI overwhelmingly favoring an increase in the salary threshold to $47,476. Here’s one of the most common posts to the RFI:  

“Back in 1975, President Gerald Fords Labor Department set the salary level for overtime exemption at the equivalent of about $58,000 in today’s dollars high enough to cover more than 50 percent of full-time salaried workers. The Obama-era rule set it at $47,476 high enough to cover about 34 percent of full-time salaried employees but lower than the level that it was in the 1970s. That’s why the salary threshold should be at least $47,476; and without indexing, the overtime pay rule will continue to erode and not keep pace with inflation.

When fully implemented, this updated rule extends overtime eligibility to 4.9 million more working people and makes it harder for employers to deny overtime to another 7.6 million working people who are already eligible.

I urge the Department of Labor to implement the new overtime rule, keep the salary threshold at least $47,476 and keep the indexing to protect the rights and wages of working people. The whole point of having national standards is to ensure decent basic standards for all workers. The updated overtime standard is already linked to the lowest-wage Census region. Workers rights and wages should not be undercut even further by weakening the salary threshold.”

With the DOL no longer fighting the federal court injunction of the new overtime rule and their Request for Information regarding the overtime rule, where are we now and what can we expect? It’s most likely that the DOL will go back to the drawing board and propose an increase in the salary threshold above the current minimum of $23,660, but it’s doubtful that they will raise the minimum salary threshold to $47,476. Additionally, they will also give employers more time to comply with the new overtime rules compared to 2016. During Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing in March, he thought the correct threshold might be around $33,000 and stated the expansion of the 2016 federal overtime rules went too far and exceeded its authority. Based on the Labor Secretary’s statement in his Senate confirmation hearings and looking at the comments from the RFI, we should all expect to see some changes coming in the near future, so you should start your planning now. 

To learn how to simplify your overtime calculations and automate employee time tracking, view a demo or watch a video.