Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Preventing Time Theft: Boosting Efficiency and Getting Better Results
Time theft is one of those phrases that almost sounds loaded from the get-go. It enrages managers, because it represents a failure of management to keep employees where said employees need to be as well as lost resources. Bringing allegations of time theft to employees offends the basic sense of honor, and can make everyone worse off. But time theft is a point that needs to be addressed to make the business everything it can be.
While there are some who will say that time theft extends to absolutely everything from coming back from lunch a few minutes late to checking a Facebook (News - Alert) page in the middle of a workday to even clocking in for an employee who isn't there, it's worth making some clear distinctions about what is and what isn't considered theft. Most often, issues of time theft are issues of minutes—a break counted as working time, a bit added to the end of a shift or at the beginning, or slipping out of the office to carry out some personal business. Few of these are a big problem done occasionally, but when added up over an entire office, or an entire industry, it can be huge: some estimates put time theft as representing $400 billion in lost productivity annually, so there's a clear reason to control such.
There are plenty of possibilities for facing down time theft, though, from the mild to the draconian. The traditional time clock is one option, but can be cheated. Biometric time clocks requiring a fingerprint or similar sample to ensure the person in question is actually checking in can be potentially representing a bigger expense to put in than would be saved preventing the time theft, not to mention unnerving to the employees.
A tool like Monet Live's Workforce Optimization in the Cloud, though, can be an excellent difference-splitter; discrepancies between hours declared and hours actually worked can be better measured, adherence to planned schedules can be properly tracked, and with tools like Monet Screen Capture, it can be easier to make sure that employees are working as opposed to anything else.
But even these must be executed carefully; if employees are treated like criminals, the ensuing response will likely not be positive. The biggest issue with time theft can be that it assumes guilt, and immediately puts the employee on the defensive to prove he or she is not actually a thief. When it comes to time, this is even worse; no one wants to accuse someone of clocking out late without need only to respond with the difficult to prove, like “what about that lunch hour I spent at my desk?”. Since productivity is the measure, it's also important to consider just what gets done; approaching a top performer about an extra six minutes one lunch break may seem like a way to address time theft, but it's also a good way to lose a top performer to the competition.
In the end, it's important to balance risk against return. Automated solutions can be a huge help in preventing many of the incidental time thefts that can occur, but going too far in pursuing pennies can result in bigger losses of dollars later.
Edited by Maurice Nagle