Do you think that your employees are not working appropriately at their working hours or filching time from your company? I’m asking this from you because, there are several examples of time thievery done by employees. And office time theft is a commonly occurring issue, though it might take years to discover that an employee is using office time for personal work, but let me tell you, the longer it goes on, the more it costs to the company!
Beside that according to the Statistics Brain reports, time theft done by employees costs companies $50 billion per year. Further companies frequently overlook the significant impacts of this issue. For instance, there are 10 employees who carry out this process in your company, then approximately you'd lose $125 a week, up to $6,500 a year in total. But you can save all your business money by mitigating the theft of time. And thankfully, there are ways you can eliminate theft of time and spot it. But how do you avoid workplace time theft? Below, in this article, you will get to know about:
How Employee Time Theft Occur?
How To Prevent Time Theft?
What is Time Theft?
Time theft is when an employee received pay for work that he or she has not actually served. Time thievery is not specific to any position or field. The theft of time mainly relates to hourly employees. There are more ways of performing time thievery for casual employees than there are for regular employees.
How Employee Time Theft Occurs?
When you look at the timesheets of your employees and think that something doesn't stack up, you might be right. Perhaps there was less work done than you anticipated. Or you might find that one employee never seems to complete their work on time.
Here are a few factors to watch out for in their activity if you seriously doubt employees are thievery time in the office with the help of computer monitoring software.
Misrepresenting their time worked.
Some of the most common ways employees perform time thievery in the office are to log in early and log out late. Specifically, if you are using pen and paper for employees to record log-in and log-out times; Then numbers could easily be misrepresented without being readily verifiable.
Taking longer breaks than allowed by their shifts
For employee satisfaction, working breaks can be great and can also improve efficiency. But is it a general way of time thievery, is taking longer breaks than authorized. So, if you observe that employees are stretching their breaks for significant amounts of time, you might need an appropriate way to track working hours.
Buddy punching
Buddy punching is when an employee with another employee logs in or out, probably because an employee has not yet arrived at work or missed out early. Buddy punching seems to be more likely to occur when you manually log hours (via pen and paper) or when you use an old-fashioned time clock 'punch'. These analog devices are simpler to manipulate than most digital applications for time clocks.
Getting distracted by the internet
Surfing the internet can be the main distraction, especially for employees who spend most of their workday gazing at a monitor. Employees who spend time in this manner will waste their working hours in browsing social networking sites or other sites that are not relevant to work.
How To Prevent Time Theft?
After having an overview of what is time theft and how it occurs, the essential part is to know the various ways to prevent time theft. Therefore, let us have a look at it!
Use monitoring software
You will better detect employees performing time theft by keeping a close watch on employees' arrival and leaving. You configure their timetables, so you know when they're going to come to work and leave.
But while using the employee internet monitoring software the process gets quite easier to manage and observe the time thievery activity. With the monitoring tool, you can easily detect where employees are working or not. Moreover, this software will also help minimize the time spent on personal activities or on sites that distract them. Many apps allow employers to monitor their time to the minute when working on various tasks. You may also watch the computer operation of employees by screenshots or URL reports.
Summing Up
After an agile guide on what is time theft, how it occurs, and how to prevent it, I will only suggest an employer should cautiously address this sensitive topic. In order to root out time theft, employers should normally stop implementing an offensive or excessively disruptive activity.
