How to Accurately Track Employee Hours
It is important to be precise when tracking how many hours your employees are working. Click here to learn about how to accurately track employee hours.
It’s absolutely essential that you pay your employees for all hours worked. If you don’t have an effective way to track hours, you might be at risk of shorting your employees or getting shorted yourself.
There are also laws in place that require you to track employee hours in order to account for overtime pay and other benefits.
We’re going to look at some ways that you can accurately track employee hours today, giving you a look at a few of your options. Hopefully, the ideas below give you a better grasp on how to keep accurate track of the labor that takes place in your office.
Let’s get started.
Employee Time: How to Track Employee Hours
Small businesses with only a few employees may be able to get by with manual entry or a rudimentary time clock. Manual time clocks are effective, but only if your workplace is one with five or ten employees.
You might ask that employees sign in and out when they come in and leave or designate the responsibility to one of your staff. Note that manual entry requires a significant amount of trust in your staff, but that’s typically not an issue when you’re working with a small team.
At the same time, manual entry creates more paperwork and makes it more difficult to prove different entries if issues ever come up. Time clocks are the “punch card” method, which came into use in the late 1800s.
Time cards are a little more reliable than manual entry, but they require some equipment and you’ve got to keep buying cards on a regular basis. These devices are more sophisticated than they were back in the 19th century though, so they might do the trick if you have the right kind of business.
Biometric Options
Fingerprint and facial recognition time clocks are some of the most reliable options on the market. It’s nearly impossible to clock in under someone else’s name with biometric trackers.
Software advances also allow you to use this kind of tracking for remote employees or individuals. A lot of businesses find value in letting employees work from various places, so versatile time clocks are a big advantage.
One beautiful thing about biometric clock-ins is that they come with software that allows you to manage your employee information. There aren’t any papers to fill out and you’ve hardly got any organization to do.
People clock in, they clock out, and all of the data you need is neatly organized for you.
Employee Incentives and Time Clock Features
Another big advantage of using software to track employee hours is the fact that most platforms have numerous add-ons. These help to make work a little more personalized.
In addition to clocking in, employees can use platforms to request time off, give feedback, or participate in incentive programs. More comprehensive options also serve as workstations for employees that operate on computers.
Things like calendar dates, word processing tasks, and cross-company communication can take place on your platform.
Upper management with lots of employees might also enjoy the ability to give attendance point system rewards. It’s easy to track and reward punctual employees when you only have a few people in the office, but that changes when you’re dealing with more than one thousand people.
Attendance points and rewards are a great way to incentivize attendance and the use of your time tracking software. The attendance tracking software will streamline those points and rankings without any hiccups.
Things to Avoid
In your search to streamline your business, you might step on a few toes. This is the last thing you want to do, as distrusting your employees leads to a whole host of problems that are difficult to undo.
Try to avoid smothering your employees with surveillance software and other measures that indicate your distrust. Monitoring employee workflow with cameras and computer surveillance technology will create a different atmosphere in the workplace and you can kiss your employee satisfaction goodbye.
The more you sanitize your staff’s freedom, the less productive they’ll be. Employees aren’t animals that you need to watch over, they’re independent and creative individuals.
Do your best to optimize your hiring process so you don’t need to worry about people who are milking the clock or taking advantage of your business. At the same time, make sure that you’re offering a measure of trust to your staff. There are certainly better ways to prevent time theft (or actual theft) than constant surveillance.
Further, the decrease in time theft that comes with surveillance will be met with proportional employee dissatisfaction.
Customer Service Compromises
Another thing that’s essential with any time clock software is customer support.
There might be a number of free or cheap options for your business that don’t offer much in the way of support. Note that issues or hiccups with your software could result in a lot of challenges for you and your staff.
If things go down, you’ve lost all records of your hours and other employee metrics. That’s when you need a professional from the company to step in and solve the issue for you. The last thing you want to do is just start from scratch.
So, as you look for different hour tracking services, make sure you take some time to talk with their representatives. You should get the feeling that you’ll be in good hands if anything were to go wrong with the software.
Looking for a Great Attendance Tracking Software?
Hopefully, our look at managing employee hours was useful to you. There are a number of excellent ways to track hours, though, regardless of whether your business is big or small. We’re here to help you explore your options.
Contact us to find out what we can do to offer great tracking software and help you better manage your employee time.
