What is Time Stealing?

If you manage a remote team of workers, then you know how hard it is to oversee your employees. Right now, you’re probably calling or emailing each employee to create their schedule and then, at the end of the week, manually sorting through timesheets and hoping all of the information on them is correct. What’s efficient about this process? Pretty much nothing.

How do you know that your employee is showing up on time for their 10am shift? Chances are, you don’t. When you pay your employees for every hour worked, this time becomes critical. And, unfortunately, without accurate time and attendance tracking, you’re probably overpaying. Your business could be losing money by paying employees for time the didn’t work.

For example, if you’ve scheduled an employee to work from 10am to 5pm and they actually arrive at 10:15am and leave at 4:45pm, that’s 30 minutes of time that you paid for when they weren’t actually working. That’s time stealing. If they work 5 shifts per week, that adds up to 2.5 hours a week… and 10 hours a month. Yikes. Now imagine that number spread out across multiple employees in stores and doors across the country. You can see just how quickly the number adds up.

The issue is, unfortunately, not uncommon. In fact, the above example illustrates even less time stealing than the average employee. A recent study by the American Society for Employers shows that the average employee steals approximately 4.5 hours per week from their employer. That totals nearly six full work weeks per year and costs businesses hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Those 15 and 30 minutes here and there add up to big losses over time. That’s a number that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

How can you prevent time theft?

With all of the technology available today, there’s no need to fly blind anymore. When you use a mobile app for time and attendance, you can better track when and where employees are working. Having exact clock in and clock out times means you’re only paying for the exact times when an employee is in the store. This completely eliminates time stealing or inaccurately reported time that happens with a manual timesheet process.

We have learned so much since deploying our own mobile app here at AllWork. Our clients report a savings of between 5-10% on their employee budget. By completely eliminating time stealing, they saved on employee costs and were able to reallocate that budget into important goals for the business.

The mobile app uses GPS verification, which lets our clients know that talent is in the correct location where they are supposed to be working. For example, If you’re a manager based in NY and you have talent all over the country working remotely, you will have complete visibility into your remote workforce. This is remote work made simple.