I think you're trying to solve two problems with one solution, and I don't think that's going to turn out well.
Problem 1: You don't trust your employees. Maybe it's because your employees are untrustworthy, or maybe it's because management doesn't treat them well. Good solutions to both scenarios have been offered (pink slips for the former, repair management-employee relations for the latter).
Problem 2: Efficiently gathering data on employee time. I've been out of the big-shop world for a long time now, so I don't have a silver bullet to offer. I will note that the system I worked under when I was an employee would work under just about any data-entry system, paper or digital: the party chief fills out the time tickets for everyone on his crew. That way there are no intra-crew time discrepancies to track down come payroll time, and the generally less housebroken crew members can't muck up the system.
Problem #1 - it has nothing to do with trust, as an employer, he has to pay his employees based on a recorded time they rendered work. Whether they missed 60 minutes, 6 minutes of 6 seconds then the appropriate deductions in pay should be applied. Why? Because the reverse is also true, if they rendered OT then they expect to be paid such additional amount right? It has to work both ways, not just a 1 way only.
There was a time in our company when the lean months meant not much work, my boss opened & closed the company at 9-5. No OT was required.
If you leave the office earlier than this then you get corresponding deductions even if all you did in the office was arrange paper clips! 😀
Dont Worrry About Time Clock for Employees
Concern yourself with the daily "effective rate" rather than a few minutes here and there.
Guy A gets more done in 8 hours than Guy B can get done in a week. So in this case Guy A can pad his time sheet 15 min no problem, Guy B should be gone.
If you are concerned about getting screwed over financially by your staff then effective rate is the elephant in the room.
Effective rate is where its at because if a crew or CAD tech wants to screw you on time they can, most are masters of it and know the nuances of how to play the time game.
Forget time and focus on MEASURED daily results, they can't f with that as easily as time.
As a side note, based on Jim's observations, In my company, I use more or less a merit pay system. That is to say, when you start working here, you don't get 'the going rate', but something less. Based on performance, which includes showing up on time, not taking 2 hour lunches, being a team member and so on, your pay increases accordingly or not at all.
The slower an employee is to come around and be a performer and a contributing member the slower the pay raises come. Sometimes I have to give raises every month until they achieve the going rate, sometimes I have to show them the door.
I do like the idea of the supervisor tracking the time in this situation, especially if a client is paying.
Back to QB timesheets. The supervisor can enter each persons time according to job they are on, again they can do this via the net if you so desire or you can do it in house by using a paper copy that has been submitted.
QB 'makes you' account for every minute that you will pay an employee, so you will need internal 'jobs' to put unbillable time, such as travel, shop time, etc. You could also leave a time period as 'unbillable' under the client for a true job cost.
The trick with QB is to set up your paper time sheet in the same manner that you will enter it in the system, otherwise it is real easy to miss a time entry.
Best response!
If you want something really simple for the guys, try Traxtime by Spud City, a very affordable and bare bones product that does a very good job at tracking time in a flexible way, with clean time stamped reports too.
I would suggest you approach it in a straight business talk fashion: "guys, we need to do a better job at tracking our time, it will help out our business, our clients, doing so should generate more work and probably more money for us all" sort of leader's speech.
Most people are honest by nature. If guys are being nonchalant on their time sheets, this is just the tip of the iceberg that you are seeing. And a complete review is required. Management is often the culprit of many of its demises, like it or not. This thread is a good reminder for us to ask ourselves questions about our management styles, company's training records, safety performance, equipment maintenance, absentism, and staff turnover rate. Those are key indicators of a company's well being.
The hard line kings & peasants won't work. Some of the comments read here take us all back to the feodal times.
Good employees tend to work for good companies.
6-10 Minute Increments - Ha, Ha, Ha
I worked at an engineering firm with that kind of breakdown, and I would say it added 15 minutes to the workday to do the daily paperwork. And it is work, and one must be aware of all day long.
It requires that you also have all kinds of office and non-productive time codes. Field crew has to load up the truck, 12 minutes overhead time code. Flat tire needs an overhead time report. Download data at the end of the day, overhead or breakdown to various jobs?
Then you have to figure out how to handle travel time between various jobs.
What is the charge when the CAD monkey calls the crew chief in the field to straighten out some complicated breaklines on a job that has a promised noon delivery?
No overtime allowed, period? Then how much sooner must crew leave job every day to avoid that one day a week traffic backup?
Do you have a full time time administrator? You will need one. Or will you the boss spend your job productive time counting the pennies and nickels?
This type of time management adds workday hours, not workday productivity.
So go ahead and add to your productive employees burden. However they will spend more time complaining about the slugs giving them even more to do.
By the way, don't forget to buy every employee a personal time logbook, with a page for each day.
Paul in PA
Check out "Ebility" . It syncs great with QuickBooks and allows for individual entry of time at various increments.
> ok understand, so how do you do that, you keep track of that yourself? Then compare that to their timesheets?
>
> What happens if we are lucky enough to have the workload to have five crews, would you do that then? Got to be a better way to clock in, enter your time for each job, and clock out out every day. Have it all add up and the employees don't think they are being scrutinized for their time.
Have the crew chief fill out the time sheet form for his crew. This way you only need to trust 5 guys instead of all of them. If the crew is doing a few jobs in one day and they stop at a drive thru for lunch on the way to the next job, just give them that free lunch, there is always one guy in the crew that if you take off 30 mins of his time, he will sit in the shade for 30 mins, slowing everyone else down. Which will cost you 1 hour or 1.5 hours of payroll depending on the size of your crew. If they stop and sit down for lunch have the crew chief take off that time. We round up or down 15 mins, over the course of a year it balances out.
There are certain time tracking apps that business owners would usually prefer more to increase their productivity. I Use time tracking software from Replicon, it is a great alternative for other manual apps. As this clock works manually, but the software which I'm using is a cloud-based program.
It works in the background automatically logging the time spent on different applications as well as documents and websites. It is available for Mac and Windows and all of its features are more user-friendly.
6-10 Minute Increments - Ha, Ha, Ha
:good:
Good post, Paul. I think I offended renegade because I couldn't keep my snide remarks to myself, but you spelled out most of the the problem exactly.
I worked for a firm in the '80's, when we went through rough times. We, the field crews, always came in on time, loaded up the trucks and went out on the job. Sometimes we would go through the drive-through @ McD's or somewhere for snacks or lunch. But we went to the job and did what we were assigneed come hell or high-water. (We didn't get paid to do office work, so if we didn't go out it would be time of without pay). When the rough times hit, they tried to crack down on us. No more wasting 5 minutes going through Wendy's drive-through, no more long lunch breaks, etc. What they didn't get is that we didn't stop and sit for 10 minutes for morning break, or waste a lot of time doing things outside the job.
It's disconcerting to be a field crew member that goes out and busts hump every day, and to come in and see different office guys chatting, having coffee, or doing mundane things....and getting complaints about the lowest-paid field crews losing them money. They forget that almost every hour we charged was to projects. They billed our real working time. No "overhead". The only time they lost money on our work was when they underbid jobs, not when we stopped for water or refreshments to have on the way to the job site.
