Tracking employee time should be plain and simple, right? However, things can go wrong, if any of the following happens:
- An employee makes a mistake on their timesheets
- An employee decides to cheat the system by purposefully putting in the wrong number of hours
- A manager makes a mistake when verifying employee hours
So, how do you ensure that time tracking is at its most accurate at ALL TIMES?
The good news is, you can improve time tracking by implementing the following 7 rules below:
1. Have An Automated System
“Automating your time tracking system is an effective way to ensure that employee hours are accounted for,” says Leo Frodsham, a business writer at
Research paper writing services and
State of writing. “Instead of relying on manual timesheets and clocking in with paper time cards, automation is beneficial and accurate, from making it easier for employees to document their work time to real-time record-keeping for HR or office administrators. As a result, there’s no need for time clock rounding.”
2. Educate Your Employees
It’s important to have employees understand how and why time tracking is essential to business. You can educate workers (especially new hires) on how time tracking systems work, and how they can use them correctly, so that human error and time theft can be prevented.
When educating about time tracking, keep the following objectives in mind:
- Walk them through your time tracking tool and its guidelines
- Let them know the duration of breaks
- The type of personal business allowed on the job, AND
- How they can correct any errors
3. Have A Simple Process
When using a time tracking system to track employee hours, it has to be simple. You heard right: the system has to be simplified to where it’s easier to understand by everyone involved – employees, HR, office administrators, etc. Therefore, there’s no need for confusing equations or complex project schemes.
4. Don’t Spend Too Much Time On It
Normal logging of daily work should take no more than 10 minutes, meaning that it shouldn’t take hours for managers to analyze the results when they could be doing other things. So, to better manage your time on time tracking, keep in mind these objectives:
- Avoid double data entry by ensuring that employees submit timesheets that have no errors and is organized.
- Create a monthly review process where you collect everyone’s time tracking data in one batch.
- Consider automating logging of employee daily work.
5. Leverage Time Tracking Software Features
Good news! You don’t have to be a tech wiz to use time tracking software. Most time tracking solutions provide multiple, easy-to-use features that let your company run more efficiently, and benefit from timecard reports. With many time tracking software features, you can:
- Know who’s working in real-time by logging in and seeing who’s at work, and who’s missing.
- Have employees clock in by location, to ensure that they’re at the right worksite, AND physically at work.
- With geofencing, today’s solutions can send managers alerts, if employees aren’t at the right worksite, or at work at all.
- Alert employees on any issues, or to tell them to head into overtime or switch worksites.
6. Maintain Trust
“When your company becomes smart on time tracking, you’re actually building and maintaining trust from employees,” says Jett Nosworthy, a tech blogger at
Oxessays and
Essay Roo. “Instead of having employees second-guess how many hours they’ve actually put in with traditional time tracking methods, automated time tracking eases their concerns by being honest about how much time they’ve worked. Thus, they’ll see that they’ll get accurate work reports.”
7. Safeguard Your Data
Accidentally deleting your team’s timesheets can be detrimental, and so is clicking on a button that deletes a year’s worth of data in your time tracking tool.
To avoid these scenarios, make it your job to do the following:
- Backup all your business data, including time tracking data.
- Duplicate employee timesheets and work reports to storage software.
- Do quarterly exports on important data, and save it somewhere outside the software tool. AND,
- Lock your documents, or make them editable or removable for authorized personnel only.
Conclusion
As you can see, by these 7 rules, improving employee time tracking doesn’t take much. When you implement these rules to your time tracking practices, you’ll be able to keep track of employee work hours, and help things move forward without wasting time on something that can be done in 10 minutes or less.
Kristin Herman is a writer and editor at Write my essay and UK Writings. She is also a contributing writer for online publications, such as Write my paper. As a marketing writer, she writes articles about the latest trends in marketing and social media.
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