The hidden cost of not tracking employee time

Time tracking is one of the most important ways to manage any organization no matter the type and size of the business. Failing to do so is costly in that it leads to numerous other hidden costs, which are both to the organization and employees. Here we will discuss those hidden costs and stress how crucial it is to control and markup employee time. 

• Payroll Errors :Of all the concealed repercussions of failing to tracking employee time accurately, one of the simplest but most typical is payroll errors. In the case where employees use traditional methods like filing of paper time sheets, then the payroll is normally off-revised. This can lead to underestimation which makes the employees feel like they are being underpaid, and this is not good for morale, or overestimation which negatively affects the financial health of the business. It also generates legal risks or lawsuits and dents the reputation of an organization besides generating whistleblower complaints. Hence the use of efficient tools to tracking employee time can help exclude such mistakes and reward employees with correct and timely pay. 
• Time Theft: The other major disadvantage associated with the failure in tracking employee time is time theft. Lump defines time theft as when employees waste company time engaging in personal business. Within its text it describes them as taking extended breaks, excessive personal phone calls, or even cheating on records. Lack of structures within organizations to monitor employee time means that it is hard to find out such problems. It is equally disappointing to know that businesses have a significant negative impact in terms of productivity and, by implication, money. This is because effective solutions for tracking employee time can reduce time theft, due to proper accountability in workplaces. 
• Employee Health: Employee time could also not be tracked negatively impacting their health. If a nurse has no fixed working schedule or if overtime is allowed without supervision, it can cause sleepless nights, stress, and probable chronic health complications. If employees are forced to work long hours because there is not adequate tracking of time, then the health of the workers will deteriorate. This minimizes production while enhancing the truancy rates. Monitoring the time employees use in the workplace assists organizations to develop schedules that give the workers adequate time off so that they have quality work-life balance. 
• Employee Turnover: Another hidden cost that organizations face due to a failure to tracking employee time is the cost of employee replacement. Many employees quit owing to concerns about their working conditions, such as shift, unfair promotion or demotion, or shift break due to time measurements. Replacing an employee can cost anywhere between 50% and 200% of the employee’s annual wage depending on the employee’s position. These issues are addressed since tracking the time that the employees spend on their work offers organizations a standard and just way of handling the schedules and the amounts of work employees are assigned to do. This creates a healthy working culture and lowers the efficiency of turnover. 
• Employee Job Satisfaction: Intriguingly, even though tracking an employee’s time is an essential aspect, it is the most sensitive one. Inaccurate tracking of its employees through the software implemented negatively affects job satisfaction. This is not good news for any organization because if employees’ sense that they are being overly managed or not trusted at all, they will also develop high stress levels and lose loyalty to the employer. To prevent this, the usage of time tracking systems with good interfaces, and easy to read time entries should be implemented. They should be oriented to the increase within efficiency and effectiveness and free from excessive performance control. Time tracking is also beneficial in another way in the right exercises it strengthens the company’s human resources and increases overall job satisfaction. 
• Data-Driven Decision Making: There are core categories of data that get lost in organizations due to poor tracking of time for employees. While held meetings and tasks’ timing are not recorded and controlled, businesses cannot understand and improve meeting knowledge and task performance. Timely tracking helps in understanding how time is utilized, and this assists organizations to realize wastage, plan and redesign time and enhance on projects durations. It emerges that the optimization of activity records enables organizations to undertake data-drivers’ decisions. 

Advantages of Proper Time Management Applications 

There are several benefits that include the use of effective time-tracking programs. They help eliminate cases of under or overpayment of employees and assist in correct project planning, scheduling, and use. By tracking employee time accurately, organizations can: 

• Reducing Labor Costs: Getting the time recording landscape right on weekly pay is useful to businesses in terms of flagging up discrepancies and unauthorized work. This eliminates the cases where there are many unnecessary labor hours that end up being paid for by the company. Habits of regular records of the employee’s time help the business organization manage its staffing, the right resource acquisition, and the minimization of the general costs of human capital. 
• Overtime Management: Measuring the employee time, and particularly, the number of overtime hours helps the business plan work schedules better and avoid spending money on overtime pay. Overtime should be avoided where possible and when the tracking of employee time results in it being paid less than overall payroll costs and offering impressive annual savings. 
• Efficient Scheduling: When you have properly tracking employee time, scheduling becomes routine and easy to accomplish. Being that historical data helps in the preparation of weekly working schedules, business establishments ensure they create different shifts that are consistent with those busiest hours. This helps in ensuring that adequate number of employees is hired so that there is no over hiring during time which is not busy, and there is not likely to be a need to hire more employees during a busy period. 
• Boosting Productivity: But tracking employee time also shows where there are ways to make improvements for unproductive time. The areas of time waste that need to be minimized so that separable inefficiencies can be prevented are ones that are not essential to a business. It empowers more effective decision making in the longer term because the collection of data and reports provide excellent value from tracking employee time. 
• Ensuring Compliance: Recording one’s time for work conforms to labor laws as one of the essential functions tracking the time of its employees serves as a core value. Tracking ensures that businesspeople do not incur legal costs, penalties or litigation costs relating to labor laws infringement. It also relieves businesses from common and often serious penalties that result from failure to adhere to the law. 

Conclusion

In view of the above, the tracking employee time is not a mere rigmarole but rather a strategic process. Omission of this practice has allowable cost that influence the payroll processing, working efficiency, employee’s wellbeing, and organizational effectiveness. These costs thus can be prevented by organizations by properly investing in dependable time tracking solutions and sensibly applying the same thereby heralding a healthy organizational culture and strong prospects. Recording employee time should be a goal for any workplace that wants to survive the current challenging business climate.