Imagine. You’re eating dinner in a restaurant on Saturday night. Your wife leaves the table for a minute, you take out your phone and check the Chronotek app. You can’t help yourself. It’s like Minecraft for small business owners. You have hourly, off-site employees and it’s awesome to be able to keep a finger on the pulse of your business at all times. All looks well. No flags for missed, scheduled jobs, everyone is clocking in fine and GPS tracks show them located at the job. You sneak the phone back into your pocket just as your wife returns to the table. As you take your next bite of ribeye, you almost choke on it. Your “best ever” employee, Teddy, walks into the restaurant with his girlfriend. The same Teddy who clocked into work 10 minutes earlier as you saw on the app.
Unfortunately for one of our customers (and Teddy), this is a true story.
We hear similar scenarios all of the time about off-site employees.
Another customer called after he reviewed the punches for one of his off-site employees. A couple of her punches over a 2-day period showed that she wasn’t at the job when she clocked in. Seven clock in and clock outs total, with 5 showing her at the job. She claimed that she was at the job for all 7 punches and had a co-worker witness. We reviewed the GPS tracks for the 2 punches in question. Our customer confirmed that one of the GPS tracks was at the employee’s house. He was a bit perplexed. This was a good employee and she had a witness. Could something be wrong with the phone’s GPS technology? Well, you trust 5 out of the 7 tracks because they show your employee on the job. One showed her at home when she was supposed to be at work . We don’t know where she lives, so out of all of the random places we could have inadvertently and mistakenly tracked her, this one was at her house. Technology is not perfect, but we like the odds that this one is right.
We have asked the question before, Can Your Employees Be Trusted?, only because employee time theft is a real and serious issue. These 3 scenarios have 2 things in common. One is that the employee mischief would have gone undetected without the use of our online clock in, clock out employee management system. Handwritten timesheets don’t give you any visibility into the workday of your employees. Even in the first scenario, Teddy could have said he was on his way to the job, but needed to get a bite to eat first. Fortunately for the owner, he clocked in through our system and that punch was pushed live to the owner’s app. End result, Teddy got busted. No more Employee of the Week plaques for him.
The second common issue is that all of the business owners thought these were some of their best employees. We all want to think the best about people and you can most times, but as we have stated before, “You can expect what you inspect.”
Our online, clock in, clock out employee time tracking system helps detect employee dishonesty, or at least raises red flags on suspicious activity. This points your supervisors and managers to the employees that need extra attention, which optimizes management efficiency. And hopefully you can enjoy dinner without any unpleasant surprises.
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