Author: Gurmit Dhaliwal, CEO
For most businesses, managing the attendance of your workforce can be challenging. Without complete trust or regular supervision, not knowing employee activity can be a major problem. Employees can check-in early, take longer breaks or check out of their shift early.
Lack of supervision becomes more problematic when your workforce is located across multiple sites. Without automated attendance tracking, it’s a nightmare to try to verify where employees actually are, where they need to be, or if they even show up.
In an ideal world, we would be able to trust that all hours worked match the schedule exactly. However, the level of trust varies from organization to organization. According to the American Payroll Association (APA), “time theft” (when workers exaggerate hours on their timesheet) affects almost 75% of US businesses.
Fortunately, with today’s technology, there are ways to reduce and even eliminate direct supervision effort, all while ensuring you have a highly accountable workforce.
What Is “Trust But Verify”?
For workforce attendance tracking, it becomes critical to implement a “Trust But Verify” approach. Trust But Verify is based on two principles. First, that you trust your employees. Second, as a failsafe, you have a reliable attendance verification method in place to ensure this trust is not violated by anyone.
A Few Ways To Adapt “Trust But Verify” For Your Business
- Minimize supervision effort
Stay up-to-date on all shift statuses by getting real-time alerts on any missed or late check-ins, early check-outs, etc. This significantly reduces the need for supervisors to manually check each and every scheduled shift. Also, it frees up their time to focus on more important business needs. - Minimize labor fraud
Ensure employees get paid only for the hours they actually work. An automated system will match the actual check-in/out times with the schedule. This verification will eliminate situations of time theft and protects your bottom line. - Reduce compliance and contracts risk
By implementing a real-time alerts system for attendance violations, you cover your customers with certainty. You’ll be able to address any situations like no-shows and maintain strong and trusting relationships with your customers. It also ensures you are compliant with contracts.
Utilize Software To Save Money On Staffing
A good Trust But Verify approach in regards to attendance monitoring would be technology that allows you to track workforce attendance using GPS location verification to ensure you know in real time the status of all your shifts. With this type of technology, you and your staff will be automatically notified of situations such as late check-ins, early check outs, no shows and many other conditions. As well, the GPS location verification ensures employees are only able to clock in from designated work locations.
The Trust But Verify approach will dramatically reduce workforce planning and management effort, making it so supervisors only deal with exception situations instead of having to worry about the attendance of all employees. This will increase reliability, eliminate fear of no-shows, and drastically improve payroll and billing data, making sure your staff are paid for the time worked, and your clients are billed based on verifiable information.
