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In business there's probably not much more important than the time it takes to complete a task. Tracking employee time has a long history. Check the history of time clocks in Wikipedia, you'll learn that the founding companies of IBM made the first mechanical punch time clocks, and later there were more sophisticated devices like proximity, badge swipe or biometric time clocks. What it does not tell you is the how slow the marketplace has been to adopt new "technology" in time tracking. Why? Because what's tried, true and proven is difficult to replace from the standpoint of 1) cost 2) risk and 3) inertia.
Today, after fifteen years of the Internet revolution, the next wave, "web-based" technology, is calling your name. But before you begin to evaluate where web-based applications are appropriate or sensible, we need to ask some questions about how your manual data processing is working (or not) for your organization.
Data collection:
Why are you using manual data collection methods? What are the advantages? Are there data loss problems?
Authentication:
Are there data forms or other documents being used and do they require signatures? In manual systems, signatures legally provide data authentication. But from an operational standpoint does a signature truly authenticate data? What are the risks and costs of unauthenticated data?
Processing:
In your organization, does the processing of time and work data lead to somebody getting billed, paid, costed, fined, suspended, or terminated? Given that one or more of these can result, is business as usual okay?
Reviews and Corrections:
Does this data require reviews and approvals? Does it require rejections or corrections? What are the costs to review this information manually? And what happens when managers have no bandwidth to do so? What data falls off the table? What gets missed? What decisions do not get made?
Where Does It Need To Go:
Does the data need to be sent somewhere else on a scheduled basis or to meet a deadline? Are there "built-in" corrections and adjustments that are unavoidable because the process is slow?
As you probably know, there are several areas of pain in manual time tracking.
The Five Pitfalls of Manual Time Tracking
1.Data Collection: "Slow Is Unsteady and Loses The Race"
In the physical world of manual time keeping, data integrity problems come in the form of lost, damaged or destroyed time cards or timesheets. There are unavailable fax machines, busy signals, faulty delivery at the other end, snail mail or worse. You might think manual data collection is inexpensive, but it has hidden costs in time and money. Problems in the beginning (time data capture) infect later stages of the process such as....
2.Authentication: "Buddy Punching" Problems and John Hancock
Not having an iron-clad method of authenticating an employee's time is a problem. In time and attendance tracking, having an employee's friend punch his time card when he's late or leaving early is a real problem. And at the end of a week or time period, employees can sign fraudulent time cards or that of their buddy. And they have little incentive to do a good job here. The more lax they are punching the clock, the more they and their supervisors have to initial time cards with corrections, and the whole process grinds down to become slower and more costly. What's worse, with more lapses in punching clocks in real time, employee and supervisor memories become more severely tested. Fraud is not always the culprit. Accuracy starts to suffer. In the United States, physical signatures carry a lot of weight legally. But beside providing legal cover, they often foster an environment of white lies and fibbing that gets further endorsed by managers who have little choice but to go along with the system.
3.Processing: Policy and Rules
Many organizations rationalize that they manually process policies and rules because they are so variable and complex. Generally, these approaches do not scale well and do so at great expense. Another problem with manual rules processing is that it often takes place in payroll departments after supervisor approvals.
4.Approvals/Rejections, Review, Oversight
Manual approval of time cards requires supervisors to monitor employee overtime or double time in their heads, if at all. Or worse, they might not be able to monitor more complicated rules or calculations at all. With manual time cards, it is time consuming for supervisors to monitor time and attendance daily, often opting for end of week reviews of time cards, initialing corrections for the "missed punch," the "I forgot to punch" and other incidents that need to be corrected. Of course, memory failure at the end of the week often conspires to hurt attendance accuracy.
5.Sending It Somewhere Else
After all is said and done, time, attendance and task data is collected for various reasons, all of which are very important. Manual processes require certain "built-in" inefficiencies to work properly. Most payrolls build in three to four days of slack because of slow data collection, slow approvals, and double data entry. Some even have employees "guesstimate" their hours for the last two to three days of a time period creating even more need for corrections.
Conclusion is:
At every step of a manual time tracking process there is inefficiency: data loss or distortions, lack of authentication, arduous administrative processing of rules and policies, supervisors having to spend time babysitting time cards more than managing, and extra cost and effort to process payroll more slowly.
We should expect that web-based automation of time tracking will be helpful. But the actual benefits when understood within this framework will be quite surprising.
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