How to prevent different types of time theft
Time theft is a common problem for businesses of all sizes.
But in small businesses it can be most damaging.
When the wages of a single employee are a significant part of your expenditure, inaccuracies can prove costly.
Time theft isn’t always intentional, but it does always make a difference to your bottom line.
This article will look at the different types of time theft and how you can prevent them.
Buddy punching
Buddy punching is where co-workers clock in for each other. Unlike other forms of time theft, buddy punching is always intentional.
That doesn’t mean that employees necessarily consider it theft however. They might ask a friend to help them out if they are dealing with an emergency or delay.
Using smart time tracking through a solution like Findmyshift allows businesses to crack down on buddy punching. Location tracking and photographing employees as they clock in are just two of the ways you can prevent buddy punching with a digital time clock.
Recording the exact location of staff ensures that they are on-site when they say they are, which can also improve safety in the event of any incident at your workplace.
Meanwhile, setting up your Findmyshift time clock to photograph staff as they start their shift stops their co-workers from punching in for them.
Personal activities
This is a less intentional and malicious form of time theft, and one that is somewhat of a natural side effect of the connected world we live in. With phones and smart watches making us contactable at any time, avoiding personal notifications isn’t easy.
We want people to be reached if they’re needed for any reason, and it’s often impossible to avoid personal calls during working hours, particularly around healthcare or childcare commitments.
That said, employees need to ensure they strike a balance and don’t allow personal activities to affect their productivity. There is obviously a difference between being contactable if your child’s school needs to call you and watching YouTube videos at work.
As such, many traditional office settings restrict the websites and apps that users on their network can visit and use. This may not always account for mobile devices, since it is far easier to use them discreetly with another internet connection.
Instead, having a clear policy in place informs employees what is acceptable, what is considered time theft, and the repercussions for failing to follow the regulations you set.
Inaccurate reporting
There are various different ways that employees can make mistakes, whether intentional or not, when reporting their working hours. For some, it’s simply a case of forgetting to log their hours as they work.
That means that when they come to the end of the day or week to fill in their timesheet, they can’t remember exactly when they were working or on what. That leads to guesswork and estimations that might not tell the whole story.
Rounding times up or down also introduces uncertainty into timesheets and makes it easier for minutes and hours to slip through the cracks.
Accurately tracking breaks and meals can prove difficult as well. Employees may take advantage of these by extending their breaks into working hours, or not even realise that they’ve failed to get back to work on time.
Because this form of time theft is often created unintentionally through human error or oversight, giving your employees the tools to more accurately track their time can actually reduce the burden on them.
Employees don’t want to record their time to the nearest minute any more than you want to comb through timesheets looking for inaccuracies. Plus, the act of recording and submitting timesheets itself takes time, further lowering productivity.
Instead, taking that responsibility off your employees will improve accuracy and productivity while freeing them up to do more important work.
If there are shortcomings or mistakes, whether you have an intelligent system in place or not, employees need to understand what the consequences are.
Following through on any actions or sanctions laid out in your policy helps dissuade employees and work through issues they may have.
By ensuring you have a clear policy that you put into action, you can cut down on any intentional time theft. Add to that a smart time tracking software solution like Findmyshift to reduce human error and you’re on your way to a more productive business.