03 Mar 3 Different Ways To Get Your Employees To Clock In
As a business, you need to know when your employees clock in and out of work. This helps you see if people are attending work on time or not. Problems occur in businesses when employees are constantly late as it eats into your productive hours. Someone that’s only ten or fifteen minutes late can have a negative effect on the business – especially if they do this every day. They turn up late, then spend more time getting ready for work, disrupting other workers while they do it. This is one of the reasons you need a clocking-in system; to understand who keeps being late, allowing you to address the issue with the employees themselves.
Another reason is that it stops cases where employees don’t show up to work. If you have a large business with loads of employees, it can be easy for one to not show up without people realizing it. This is a problem because they will still get paid, but they won’t have any paid leave taken away. So, they can sneak a day off here and there, but then still take paid annual leave as well.
Keeping both of these things in mind, what are some of the ways you can get your employees to clock in and out? Here are three different concepts, each with some pros and cons:
Card Scanning
Card scanning adapts the classic way of clocking in with a little timecard at work. Back in the old days, workers would have a car that they put into a little thing that stamps it with the time they arrived. The same would happen when they leave, and it lets employers know that they’ve been at work at the right times. With card scanning, you do the same, only every employee has a card that’s digitally scanned and provides information to a database that your HR team can manage.
The upside of this is that your employees need to physically be at work to clock in. The downside is that it can easily be manipulated. Work friends can give each other their cards, making it seem like they both clock in at the same time, but one actually stayed at home. However, this can possibly be prevented by making your clocking-in system an access system. So, to gain access to the building, they need to scan their card. This will make it easier to spot people who scan two cards at once.
Apps
Apps are perhaps the most widely-used way of clocking in at work these days. Every employee can access an app that lets them ‘sign in’ at work. Every day, they ‘sign in’ when they get to work, notifying you of their presence. It’s a very cost-effective way of doing things and it’s harder for people to get fellow employees to clock in for them.
The downside is that people might just clock in when they’re at home or late for work. But, this is also preventable. There are things like Sling Time and Attendance Tracking that lets you put location locks on the app. In essence, people can only access the app and clock in when they are close to the business premises. This would completely eradicate cases where employees clock in from home to make it seem like they’re at work on time.
Biometrics Scanning
Finally, you have the most advanced clocking-in method yet. Biometrics scanning follows a similar concept to card scanning, but it uses things like fingerprint readers. When an employee shows up for work, they scan their fingerprint to clock in. The fingerprint gets matched to the same one in the database, alerting you of the time when someone showed up for work.
In all honesty, this is the most complete system as it is impossible for someone to scan another person’s fingerprint for them. The employee must physically be at work to clock in. There is a slight downside to this, and it’s that biometrics can be expensive. You need to invest in a reliable system to avoid instances where fingerprints don’t scan. Likewise, it can take a while to scan everyone’s fingerprints so they’re registered in the database. So, as a concept, this is the best, but in reality, it can be hard to implement.
Your business should have a system for people clocking in and out of work every day. It helps you understand who arrives on time, and who might be skipping work without telling you. Any of these three systems will work, but they all have some pros and cons. It’s about assessing which one you think will be the best for your company.
About The Author
Jeremy Bowler
Jeremy Bowler is a full-time copywriter of five years specialising in business and finance. Jeremy graduated from the University of Chester with degrees in business accounting and finance. He’s an avid traveller and has taught English in Nepal, Malaysia, and Japan and has produced copy for Neil Patel, Entrepreneur and Metro amongst many other high-end publications.
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