Making sure that your employees are doing what they should be doing while on the clock is not easy. Nagging your onsite employees about what websites they’re visiting, constantly checking their productivity levels, and anxiously looking over their shoulders isn’t exactly what you would call a fabulous job.
Employee time theft occurs more often than one would expect, and it has consequences such as disciplinary proceedings, getting reprimanded, or even termination. Employee time theft is much sneakier and often harder to catch than an employee stealing company property.
So, what can you do to notice employee time theft and put a stop to it? The answer is implementing an employee tracking system. Apart from successfully preventing employee time theft, you can learn more about all the benefits that this tool can bring to your company by clicking here.
Employee time theft may not seem like a major issue, but in reality, it costs all kinds of companies a lot of money and a lot of productivity loss. In this article, we are going to go over all of the ways in which this software can eliminate time theft as a whole.
What is Time Theft and How It Occurs
In case it’s not clear what employee time theft is, it occurs when an employee gets paid for work that they have not completed or time that they claimed to have been working when they actually weren’t.
Below are examples of the most common types of time theft:
- Buddy punching
- Taking long, unauthorized breaks
- False clock ins and clock outs
- Using their mobile phones while on the clock
- Using work time to tend to personal matters
- Unauthorized overtime
- Amplifying how much time was spent on getting work done
- Napping during work time
- Unnecessary browsing of non-work websites and/or non-work related tasks
It’s important to understand that employee time theft doesn’t always occur maliciously. Sometimes, it simply happens because of poor time management, and for example, memory issues. A forgetful employee can forget how much time they actually spent working or on their break, and accidentally report false times.
However, no matter if it’s done with malicious intent or not, a lack of employee tracker infrastructure has been estimated to cost companies billions of dollars each year.
You may be wondering how an employee extending their break for 10 minutes or falsely reporting on 15 minutes of work is costing companies that much money. Let’s illustrate employee time theft and its costliness with an example.
So, let’s say this imaginary employee Sara. Sara gets paid $20 per hour, and she developed an everyday habit of napping for 15 minutes after her lunch break. Over the course of her workweek, that means that she “steals” 75 minutes per week. When we add it up, this means that 300 minutes per month are wasted, and 3600 minutes (60 hours) on a yearly basis.
That’s more than a week’s worth of work that Sara will get paid for, while in reality, she spent it napping. Her sleeping habit will cost the company around $1200. Now, if you keep in mind that surveys have shown that nearly 50% of employees commit some kind of time theft, you can only imagine how much this type of theft ends up costing a company.
How Monitoring Software for Employees Prevents Time Theft
Unlike the pen-and-paper method or other manual tracking methods, which are the easiest to manipulate, using this tool is a fool-proof system. Something like buddy punching, simply won’t be possible with this software implemented. Depending on which software you use, you will have access to key logs, screenshots, data on which websites and apps they used during work time, and so on.
The best employee monitoring software will help prevent time theft since this tool accurately tracks and analyzes the amount of time spent completing work-related tasks. No matter which software you use, you will be able to have unique insight into how your employee spends their time at work.
Conclusion
Time is the only resource in the world that we can never get back. Hence the saying “Time is money”. Using an employee tracking system will give you the best results if you want to prevent employee time theft – no matter if your employees are working on-site, remotely, or if they’ve adapted to a hybrid work model.
Since most of this type of software is designed to be user-friendly, meaning using it will easily become second nature, even if you wouldn’t call yourself necessarily tech-savvy. It has many other advantages apart from preventing employee time theft. You can find many different types of this revolutionary tool that offer different features and different options.
Therefore, it’s necessary that you do the needed research and find which software is the best for you and your business needs.
