Employee Motivation: Removing the Need for Time and Attendance Tracking?

Business profitability is a very tangled, highly interdependent web of different factors. One of the major contributors to either a ballooning bottom line, or a cutback in costs for the same output, is your employee motivation. A mixture of positive and proactive measures to help your employees want to be more productive, as well as 'controlling' strategies that help keep costs tightly reined in, like telephone time clocks for time attendance tracking, seem to work best. Today we check out some simple tips on both the motivating, and the cost-controlling sides of your labour budget.

"The same holds true for work!"

Employee motivation: Simple strategies and home truths

There are seven broad policies and managerial strategies that can help boost your profits, above and beyond the impact that controlling strategies can make. You'll need to do some work to identify how well your business already implements these; however this is a more concise and all-encompassing way to think about motivation.

• Positive reinforcement and high expectations: Let your employees know that you expect the best from them ... but make sure you recognize both their achievements and efforts.
• Effective discipline: If employees see somebody else getting away with doing the wrong thing, they lose their own motivation to do the right thing.
• Treating people fairly: Obviously this one needs some subjective interpretation. The letter and spirit of the law are good guides!
• Satisfying employee needs: These can be safety-related, comfort-related, pay-related and recognition-related
• Setting goals: It is far easier to motivate someone to work towards a concrete eventuality than to just 'do better'.
• Restructuring jobs: Endless restructuring won't necessarily boost profits - but can be a necessary first step before other strategies will work
• Instituting performance-based pay: Extra money is a massive motivator for many people to do extra work!

Controlling labor costs: Easy methods

It can be amazing how much difference simple tools for controlling labour costs can make also. Ensure that you:

• Require medical certificates for sick leave pay
• Institute a telephone time clock system to ensure that employees are paid only for the exact hours they are at work
• Always aim to keep existing employees rather than train new ones
• Ensure that supervisors have the power to note people not working, and that there is some sort of penalty.

5 Cash-Sucking Employee Problems Solved

One of the biggest expenses in most businesses is the labor to keep the business moving, so it follows that one of the areas of expenditure with the biggest potential for unplanned (and unnecessary!) blowouts is also the labor force. There are a huge variety of ways in which your employees can actually be cash-suckers, rather than profit makers. Today we look at 5 of the most common cash-sucking employee problems, and how technology and policies like time attendance tracking can solve them.

1. My employees get very little done in a shift

Employee productivity is a complex web of many different factors. Fortunately, motivation very rarely comes directly from being paid more money; unless you are paying your employees far less that they are worth, it is unlikely that you need to pay them more to motivate them. Far better is to offer recognition for a job well done - this will move slowly at first, but will pick up momentum as people starting working better and being recognized more.

2. I'm sure that time-card padding is rife in my company - how can I stop it?

Time attendance tracking with an employee telephone time clock is a fast, simple way to eliminate time card padding. These systems can also automatically calculate employee hours and overtime, and you can check on the status of your employees by phone at any stage of the day.

3. My worker's comp costs are really eating into the budget

No worker wants to be injured - our base instincts simply don't allow us to deliberately seriously hurt ourselves, simply because somebody else will pay for it. So the key is actually reducing the risk of injury; there is an entire field of research in this area to advise you!

4. It seems that my employees have a culture of using up sick days whether they need them or not.

One fast, simple way to dis-incentivize this is to offer a reward of a half-day pay, per sick day left at the end of the fiscal year. You can also require a medical certificate for any sick days used that people are paid for. If people persist in using up all their sick days, consider moving the worst offenders to a casual employment basis.

5. An employee has constant medical problems that force her to take her entire sick leave, carer's leave and stress leave requirements, as well as unpaid leave.

This can be a massive burden on a company, even if the leave is technically due to every employee anyway. Make sure you enforce the need for a medical certificate for any paid leave, and consider instituting a policy that if more than a certain amount of unpaid leave is required, an employee may forfeit their contract.

With the aid of technology like telephone time clocks, and a little thoughtful policymaking, it is relatively easy to turn many cash-sucking employee problems around.

3 More Cash-Sucking Employee Problems Solved

Employees are a massive expense in a business. Some calculations indicate that an employee needs to be making at least three times their own wage every hour to be profitable to the average company … and if your employees have any motivational or productivity issues, there is little likelihood that they'll be able to perform to that standard. Today we check out common cash-sucking employee problems, and how a range of techniques and technology like telephone time clocks can help.

1. I had to fire an employee that was popular with other staff, and now my productivity has plummeted

Even a telephone time clock won’t save you from the plummeting productivity that de-motivated employees create. Don't try to stop other employees communicating with the fired employee - this will create doubt about your correctness in their minds. If the situation was so bad that you needed to fire the employee, there is every chance that the employees knew all about the problems too, and will eventually come round.

2. Some employees don't always hold themselves to the highest moral standards, and this affects the ones that do

Seeing people get away with unethical behaviour is a major demotivator for many employees. If you know about the behavior, all you do is make sure that it has consequences - a disciplinary hearing, a warning, or at worst, firing.

3. My employees keep alienating customers!

This is one of the most insidious cash-sucking problems. Timecard padding might cost you a few dollars a day or fifty dollars a week, but losing a customer could cost the business thousands over its lifetime. And whereas time card padding can be easily dealt with through telephone time clocks, bad customer service is harder to identify and correct. First, make sure employees know how to handle customers - teach them the basic customer service principles. You could also consider implementing a bonus system, whereby keeping customers happy or getting a good testimonial is worth a bonus.

It is always worth instituting a probationary period, and being extra-careful on hiring also, to make sure these problems don't develop in the first place!

Keeping it Simple

I am the payroll clerk for a busy cabinet making company. Most of the employees work away from the main office and it’s always a stressful task of gathering time cards in order to do the payroll. It is very time consuming and aggravating to have to figure out how many hours each person worked when they don’t actually come into the office and clock in or out. Most of them just write down their time and turn it into me; there are always those who forget to do that or forget to write down their time and they simply guess. After several years of fighting with the workers I insisted that my boss find a different system for keeping time. That’s when I suggested the telephone time clock system and I’m happy to say he listened to me and had it installed.

The old employee time clock system, which was really never used with our company, was not a system that made sense. If one of the workers needed to be thirty miles out of town to work on a job, it made no sense for him to come into the office and clock in on the time clock and then head to the job site. With the new system we have now, workers simply call the number they are given whenever they reach the job site as well as when they leave for lunch or leave at the end of the day. It is an excellent tracking system that has made my life so much easier and has eliminated 99% of the stress involved in doing payroll.

The telephone time clock works for our company because it keeps track of not only the time an employee works at a certain job but also where that employee is at any given moment during the day. We have over one hundred employees and can be working up to twenty different jobs every day. It’s almost impossible to keep up with where everybody is but with this system all I have to do is punch in their key code and it tells me the location of that employee when he/she called in. This system is an excellent tool to use to measure the length of time that employee spends on certain jobs which helps us to give our clients estimations as to how long it will take to complete a job. I’m very thankful my boss listened to me and made my job much easier to deal with.

Getting my Hours Straight

I work for a company that goes on the honor system for doing payroll instead of having a time clock system. We were to keep track of our hours and turn in our slip at the end of the pay period. For as long as I was doing this it always caused some kind of problem. I wrote down the time I walked in the door, what time I took lunch, and what time I left for the day. I never added more minutes to my time; I never even rounded up like so many other people would do. It seemed like every pay period they had some kind of question concerning my time. It was a never ending battle and I was getting very tired of it.

A friend of my husbands who owns his own business told me about the telephone time clock that he uses in his office. The employees just call the number associated with their employee number and their time in and out is recorded. At the end of the pay period the payroll clerk can have all the data sent to her and all the guess work is eliminated. It’s still based on an honor system but at least the information is in black and white and is hard to dispute.

I brought all the information to my boss and they finally installed the time attendance tracking program for us to use. It has been six months since we began using it and not once has there been a problem with my check. My life is so much less stressful now that I don’t have to keep up with my own time; I just make my call and forget it. More small businesses should consider using this type of program for keeping up with employees times; it’s been a wonderful addition to our office.

Farmer Reaps Profits with Telephone Time Clock

Here’s what Robert, a satisfied customer and California farmer, recently shared with me:

“As a farmer specializing in fruits and vegetables, I manage considerable acreage across several farms scattered throughout central California. At peak times during the year I have hundreds of people working under me, with the accompanying rise in administrative time for all tasks, including time attendance tracking for workers at various locations.

“Most of my employees are temporary, and at harvest time our work schedule becomes very intense, with variable hours of work per day. This creates a burden for my field supervisors, especially since they also have to travel between multiple distant locations while managing people, produce, transport, and some customer interactions. At that moment time really is money for me as it is for many growers who count on their harvests as their chief source of income. These are the weeks in which we need to maximize our direct money-making opportunities! Struggling with administrative tasks like time-keeping can be aggravating since of course the records must be totally accurate!

“We farmers who grow plants do not have the luxury that traditional plant managers have to create and enforce a regular schedule! Mother Nature dictates when strawberries or lettuce or other crops must be harvested—and often with little notice. There are days, for example, when we need to rush to harvest for one reason or another, perhaps changes in weather. At other times conditions force us to extend the hours and continue until dusk.

“Although my supervisors are very capable, we recently realized that the time had come to delegate the time-keeping task in order to make better use of their skills and time while actually improving the system—without adding another person to the payroll. In other words, we became more profitable almost overnight with a new kind of employee time clock!

"“We have found that the incorporation of Telephone Time Clock has solved our problem almost like magic. We simply installed or made available a phone on each farm, and upon starting and finishing work, each worker calls into the central number to identify himself or herself. That’s all there is to it. This generates a reliable, far more accurate record than manual records while eliminates misunderstandings as well. My foremen are especially grateful because it frees them to do the kind of tasks that they like best instead of pencil pushing.

“News travels, and several neighboring farmers starting to consider how incorporation of the system for next season. I wish them all the success that we have enjoyed!”

Thanks, Robert, and happy harvesting!

Home Business Solution

I have a small but profitable home business in which I employ three other people. I have never had a typical employee time clock for my employees to clock in with. I’ve just always written down their times on a piece of paper and then calculated their times at the end of the pay period. Recently, however, I decided I needed a better way to keep track of their time so that I always have a good reliable method to keep on record and to make pay day a lot less stressful.

I installed what is known as the telephone time clock that allows my employees to call a number to clock in and out of work. The data is stored for me off site and sent to me electronically when I am ready to do payroll. I no longer have to worry about if I wrote down their times or not; the phone in system is much easier and a more professional way to do my bookkeeping.

This system is an excellent time attendance tracking method that allows my employees to take it upon themselves to call into the system when they come on the clock and go off the clock. They can call from anywhere and since my home business encompasses the fifty acres of land I own, it’s nice that they can go straight to where they need to go without checking in with me first. They just call into the system and then go straight to the work site. It has saved a great deal of confusion and frustration for us all.

I think this is an excellent alternative to the normal time clock so many companies utilize. I can see how this system will become very popular among business owners who rely on their employees to be on work sites that are away from the office.