While the occasional long coffee break or early departure might seem minor, widespread misuse of company time can significantly hurt your business’s financial health. If you’re not closely monitoring employee hours, you could face major financial losses. Employees have developed numerous methods to exploit the system.
Using timesheets to record employee hours can lead to significant payroll fraud. Timesheets can be easily manipulated, allowing employees to report hours they didn’t actually work or round up minutes to increase their pay. Time clocks and automated time-tracking software are your best defenses against timesheet fraud.
Time clocks record exact start and stop times, ensuring accurate tracking down to the minute. Automated time and attendance systems calculate total hours worked per pay period, reducing errors and preventing fraud.
Buddy punching occurs when one employee punches the time clock for a co-worker who is late or absent. This issue is more prevalent with paper timesheets. Biometric time clocks, which scan fingerprints, can solve this problem by ensuring that only the actual employee can clock in or out. Each fingerprint scan is unique and stored in the time and attendance software, preventing buddy punching.
Extended Breaks, Late Arrivals, and Early Departures Break abuse, arriving late, and leaving early are common forms of time theft, costing employers significant amounts of money annually. According to the American Payroll Association, the average employee steals about 4 hours and 5 minutes every week, equivalent to six weeks of lost time annually. For a worker earning $10 an hour, this results in $2,340 in lost wages each year. Time clocks and automated systems can accurately track employee hours and help eliminate these losses by monitoring check-in and check-out times more effectively.
Employees can be distracted by various activities during the workday, leading to decreased productivity. These distractions include:
The internet is a major source of time theft. Social media, in particular, can severely impact productivity. A study by Nucleus Research found that workplace productivity drops by 1.5% when employees have access to Facebook, with 61% of employees using the site for about 15 minutes per day. Common online activities include:
Ghost employees are a blatant form of time theft. This occurs when an employee clocks in, leaves without doing any work, and then returns at the end of the day to clock out. Another type involves managers creating fake employees, adding them to the payroll, logging their hours, and embezzling their paychecks.
Employees who work in the field, such as drivers, landscapers, and home health aides, pose unique challenges. They might make personal stops or not show up for work without proper oversight. Without effective monitoring, these employees can easily go off the radar
Solutions to Employee Time Theft
To combat time theft, businesses should implement robust time and attendance systems, use biometric verification, and ensure strict monitoring practices. This helps maintain productivity and safeguard the company’s financial health.
Solutions from Pyramid Time Systems:
Manual Punch Clocks: https://www.pyramidtimesystems.com/manual-punch-clocks/
Software Based Time Clocks: https://www.pyramidtimesystems.com/software-based-time-clocks/
Read/View More:
What is Time Theft and How Can You Prevent it
Time is Money: Addressing Time Theft in the Workplace
What Is Time Theft And Why Should You Care? | Ethics At Work
TIME & ATTENDANCE TIME CLOCKS
Pyramid Time Systems
45 Gracey Avenue
Meriden, CT 06451
(888) 479-7264
Customer Service – Phone: 888-479-7264 • Email: customer_support@ptitime.com
