A local restaurant owner recently invested a substantial sum of money in remodeling and renovating.  The key part of the project was the installation of a massive bar.  He also slightly altered the name of his establishment.  It appears to be an attempt at rebranding.

The attempt may not be working.  On two recent Friday night visits no one was at the bar.  There wasn’t even a bartender.  But a glance across the room revealed that the owner is still getting what he’s gotten for 20 years…an elderly crowd that orders the daily special, but no drinks.

Why haven’t the upgrades been successful?  An educated guess would be that nothing else has changed.  The hours are still 7am to 9pm.  The bar crowd is just getting started when the restaurant is closing.  A hard decision has to be made.  Change to lunch and dinner hours.  This decision may alienate the current elderly patrons who love the tasty, inexpensive breakfast, but vodka and tonics are more profitable than eggs and bacon.  A business can’t be all things to all people.

We have many small business owners who sign up for a free trial on our telephone timekeeping system with great hopes in mind.  They are finally going to put in place better practices that will save them payroll dollars, protect their jobs and help manage their employees.  We work with them to set up the account and are excited to see them start using it.

Chronotek’s management tools offer so much help that it completely changes business owners’ lives – and they continue with the service, not knowing how they got along without it.  But there are those few – the lost sheep.  The few that can’t seem to get the change to take.   A week or two down the road the employee stop calling and we stop hearing from the business owner.   We just can’t let these go….  A follow up call by our support team unearths a common finding.  The small business owner gave up because he couldn’t get his remote workers to clock in and out of our system.  The employees will give a variety of excuses, “I forgot” or “the system was down”(it wasn’t), etc and the owner will give up in exasperation.

Again, a hard decision must be made and successful small businesses will make it.  The employees must follow protocol or be terminated. They won’t be happy, but the very reasons they don’t want to comply is the reason that the business owner needs our system.  The employees have developed their own systems grounded in a poor work ethic and quite possibly, time theft.  Our system clashes with theirs.

Honest employees should have no problem with their clock in and out times being captured accurately with technology or their location tracked by GPS or late alerts sent to their supervisor.  In fact, they welcome the ease over tracking it themselves.

Making the decision to enhance your management strategies with telephone timekeeping should be a very easy one when you understand that it will help you distinguish good employees from bad ones.  You don’t want the bad employees.  They poison the well.  But making the move does necessitate a change. You are different now.

You must act differently to get different results.