What About Location Tracking On Cell Phones?

Cell phones and mobile devices increasingly utilize GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to track location. With the explosion of “location aware” applications for smartphones, and the rise in the use of GPS devices for navigation, people are growing more and more accustomed to their “smart” devices knowing where they are at all times.

As we are always working to stay on the forefront of development in telephone timekeeping, we wanted to let you know what is on the horizon. We recently launched Mobile Chronotek, and were open to considering new mobile location based technologies as well. With that in mind, we took the time to evaluate the state of location aware mobile technologies, and how they could be applied to the Chronotek system. This research has led us to two determinations:

First- the current location technologies are limited exclusively to the “smartphone” category, which is still a very small fraction of cell phone users in the United States. It is important to note that, for the vast majority of cell phone users without data connected smartphones, location aware services simply don’t work.

Second-Reliability. The Chronotek system is predicated on its ability to be absolutely reliable and accurate. Some of the location aware systems and applications that we tested had great features and were a lot of fun- but didn’t provide the kind of guaranteed reliability we expect from our own service.

So whats the takeaway from this? Technology is always changing rapidly, and at Chronotek we are very proud of how we incorporate these advances into our product. We also remain very committed to maintaining the extraordinarily high standards for reliability and usability that is the hallmark of our system. With these goals in mind, we will continue to monitor the development of cell phone location tracking, and move to incorporate these features when the time is right.

Automated Time Attendance Tracking - An Overview

Many small businesses still operate on an honesty-based system for time attendance tracking, where employees are simply trusted to have the right amount of breaks daily, and that they are working every minute from the time they clock in to the time they clock out. What these companies probably don't realize is that they can have a much more reliable attendance tracking system, at a very comparable cost to the honesty-based system. And that any investment will actually save money in the long run ... as timecard creep can affect even your most honest employees! Here we take an overview of what makes phone time clock systems such a blessing, even to small businesses.

Advantages of telephone time clocks

Compared to either time-punch cards or manual recording systems, there are several inescapable benefits of phone time clocks with a big influence on the bottom line. These include:

• Enabling pay calculations on a minute-by-minute basis, but without increasing payroll complexity or costs
• More accurate time recording
• Reduction of human error- even honest employees are prone to seeing the wrong time on a clock occasionally
• Easily accessible activity data for employees
• Fast and simple report generation
• Exportable data can be moved to payroll systems without manual re-entry in many telephone time clocks

Components of a phone-based attendance system

Your telephone time clock works on an interaction between the following elements:

• Employee ID number
• Reader (which you would pay an access fee for)
• Communication interface - usually your PC
• User interface - which allows you to access data
• Data storage, which may be on a server, or your own platform

Security elements

There are also optional elements such as voice recognition services, GPS location and caller ID. Few people realize that voices are like fingerprints - they are completely unique - and there is no possibility of forging attendance in a system that checks that caller ID of the phone, pinpoints its location with GPS tracking, and ensures that the person calling is the person being paid.

Extra features available with some time attendance tracking programs

Time attendance tracking systems have been advancing just as rapidly as the rest of the technological world! They are now much more than expensive ways to look over your remote employees shoulders. You can:

• Decrease HR's workload by having employees enter project codes for activity tracking
• Check employee status from any smartphone, using interfaces that are designed for mobile devices
• Use manual voice verification techniques
• Get text alerts at check in and check out if necessary
• Send voicemails to remote employees to ensure that everybody receives critical business information.

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.

The Time Keeper

I am the head of payroll for a very large company. We employ over two hundred people whom don’t all work at the home office. We have several different branch offices but payroll comes from just one office; my office. If you have ever had to gather information from the employee time clock you know this is no easy task; especially when there are other offices around the county.

There are many times employees forget to clock in or they are out on the job site without ever checking in at the office. They have to write down their time and sometimes they just forget. This became a big hassle. Finally I got my boss to begin using the telephone time clock where all the employees call in to clock in and clock out. It’s simple and takes less time than actually clocking in the old fashioned way.

At the end of the pay period I can get all the data from all the employees in one click of the mouse. It lets me know exact times to the second and tallies up all the numbers for me. It has made my job so much easier and less stressful. I don’t know how we ever got along before we got the phone time clock system; I would spend the entire day doing payroll while all my other duties piled up.

The employees don’t mind making the call every day and it sure helps us to know who is working where and for how long. There are times when we absolutely need to know who was working on a certain job and all we have to do is check the time attendance tracking data to get the answer. There is no more guess work about it. I don’t stress about doing payroll anymore.

Controlling the Time

My husband and I own a rather large construction company. We have many different projects going on at the same time and many employees who are assigned to remote sites away from our office. Sometimes the jobs we do are out of town, which makes it impossible for our employees to actually clock in. Keeping up with payroll was a real hassle especially when many of our employees work a great deal of over-time. A year ago I took care of that big problem by using a telephone time clock system. This has eliminated 99% of the stress associated with payroll. Our employees simply call to clock in and out and their time is recorded and sent to me daily.

Running a business is difficult and when you have well over a hundred employees the difficulties multiply daily. Time attendance tracking lets us know exactly when and for how long each of our employees are working. We even added some additional information to each of our employee’s time clock profiles that tells us the rate of pay they make. This system has made our lives so much less stressful and has made payroll a much more pleasant task. It used to take me an entire day to figure out time sheets; now I just print off the information from the phone time clock and most of my work is done.

I highly recommend this time-saving product for any company, especially if you have employees that work off site from your main office. The telephone time clock system that we began using has been the difference between hours and hours of tedious work and just clicking a few buttons and having all that information in one report. We’ve also saved thousands of dollars in over paying our employees who were simply guessing how many hours they worked. Now we know exactly how many hours have been worked and all the guessing is behind us.

5 Important Time Management Strategies for Employees

If we were able to put a tiny, automated on/off switch inside every employee's head, and run checks on how many hours of the day they are focusing on work for, the results would probably astonish both employers and employees! Even if Facebook is blocked from work computers, there are high levels of supervision and employees must leave their phones somewhere away from their workstation, there is plenty of unproductive time at work … and most businesses don't have anything close to this strictly controlled atmosphere. Nor would they want to! Today we are looking at simple, proactive solutions to the productivity dilemma (including telephone time clocking), plugging some obvious holes so that brain breaks are no longer company-killers.

Activity logs

These are as close as we can get to having that magical automated on/off switch inside the brain. Logging the amount of time spent on each activity, not just for the entire day at work, helps identify slow spots and difficulties. When we have to write down how much time was spent on something, we are much more accountable for it. Manual systems can work well, but automated systems, like a micro-version of telephone time clocking, are the ideal solution.

Telephone Time Clocking

According to rounding rules at both federal and state levels, rounding might be permitting your employees to be paid for up to fifteen minutes a day when they aren’t even on the work premises. Implement systems like telephone time clocking to plug this obvious productivity hole.

Prioritization

Effective managers use this tool all the time -- get the most important thing done first. If your employees don't have all the information necessary to decide what tasks on their list are the most important, managers should be helping them decide. This can be done at weekly, daily or monthly meetings.

Managing Interruptions

Interruptions can be even more devastating to a company budget than manual time cards and their daily fifteen minute inaccuracies. We havetelephone time clocking as a set process to manage the signing in dilemma -- but no set rule for dealing with interruptions. It simply has to become a part of company culture that employees interrupt each other as little as possible. Questions can be left at a central spot rather than asked as they come up, for example.

United States Timecard Laws

In a highly developed society, you'll find that legislation and regulation in many areas is increased. Business is an area of society that is hard hit with regulation, and people can study business law for years and still not have a comprehensive understanding … and that is only the legal system for one country! You may not realize the extent of laws that relate to timecard provisioning and use in the United States. Today we are looking at the laws themselves, and how telephone time clocking can help employers comply with their obligations with a minimum of fuss, effort and financial investment.

Federal versus state laws

We are looking at federal laws with regard to timekeeping for employees today; however, many states have laws that are stricter than those imposed at the federal level. You must always go by the stricter principle, so check with a local employment law expert to ensure that you are complying the relevant standard.

Types of timekeeping

Almost any type of timekeeping is permitted under federal law, as long as it is an ACCURATE representation of the time worked by a particular employee. So, even the most low-tech methods, like pen and paper are allowed. Of course, you will have process and operational considerations when you choose a method of timekeeping -- low-tech isn’t necessarily best. Telephone time clocking is one of the most accurate, indisputable methods available. Methods may include:

• Pen and paper
• Timecard punch machine
• Electronic badge readers
• Scanners
• Telephone time clocking

Who are the laws directed at?

Employees that are entitled to overtime pay are the target of most timekeeping laws in the U.S. However, employees that are exempt from being owed overtime still need to keep accurate time records for sick pay and leave purposes.

Who is responsible for the accuracy of the records?

Given the fact that low-tech methods of timekeeping are perfectly lawful and it isn't reasonable to ask a manager to record every employee coming and going, it is the employee's responsibility to make sure timecards are accurate. Unfortunately, there are too many ways in which they can be inaccurate by just a little bit … costing corporations a lot of money!

Rounding

According to federal law rounding on time cards is allowed, as long as it doesn’t unduly benefit the employer and it balances out over time. The problem with this policy is that there is no way to know (without extensive monitoring) in a manual timecard system whether it actually does balance out. Telephone time clocks overcome this difficulty for employers.