Do You Underestimate Your Employees?

Hourly employees can do more of their own time management than most companies ask of them. Give them three things to own: clocking in on a system that records time accurately, reviewing their own timecard, and requesting time off in the same app. Supervisors and payroll spend less time fixing records, and employees feel trusted to manage their own work.

Engaged Employees Stay Longer

In cleaning, construction, and other hands-on industries, it's easy to treat hourly work as a set of tasks and nothing more. With a tight labor market and rising labor costs, that's expensive. People who have a say in how they work, and the tools to do it, are more productive and more likely to stay.

Time is a good place to start, because every employee deals with it every day.

1. Let Employees Record Their Own Time

Most companies either ask employees to write down their hours, or ask supervisors to do it for them. Both are hard to get right. People round to the nearest hour, forget when they took a break, or fill in a week from memory. Supervisors who enter time for their team are doing them a favor, but they're also doing a job that takes them away from the work.

Hours that aren't recorded accurately also throw off job costing. A building you think is profitable may not be, and one you're ready to give up on may be doing fine.

A better approach is a time system that records who, where, and when automatically, as the employee clocks in. The employee does it themselves, the record is accurate, and nobody has to argue about it later.

2. Ask Employees to Review Their Own Timecard

With a mobile time system, checking your own timecard takes a few seconds a day. Mistakes caught early are easy to fix, and they never become a paycheck problem.

Ask employees to review their time daily or weekly, and supervisors to approve their team's time every day. Payroll gets cleaner data, fewer prior-period adjustments, and fewer disputes.

3. Handle Time Off in the Same App

When time off lives in a separate system, or on paper, requests get lost and shifts go uncovered. Since employees and supervisors use the time app every day, it's the natural place to request and approve time off, and to check leave balances.

A Simple Plan to Start

1. Move clock-in to a system that records who, where, and when as it happens.
2. Turn on alerts for missing punches, so employees can fix their own time.
3. Ask supervisors to approve time every day.
4. Move time-off requests into the same app.
5. Show the changes at a shift meeting, in every language your team speaks.

Give Your Team the Tools

Findd customers use Findd Time and Labor so employees clock in with a selfie on their own phone or a shared tablet. If they forget to clock out, the app lets them submit the missing time for their supervisor to approve. Employees request time off and check their leave balance in the same app, and supervisors approve it all from their phone.

Questions About Employee Autonomy

Won't employees make more mistakes if they manage their own time?

Not with a system that records time automatically. Employees fix what's missing, and a supervisor approves every change.

What's the role of the supervisor?

Supervisors approve time and time off every day, and spend the rest of their time on the work and the people, not on data entry.

Where should we start?

Start with clock-in. Once time is recorded accurately as it happens, reviewing timecards and requesting time off follow easily.