Why Time Theft Is More Important Than You Think

Time stealing is becoming more common in businesses all over the world. As the prevalence of mobile devices and the internet grows, more employees are being distracted and waste 15 minutes here and there throughout the workday.

While this may not appear to be a problem at first, the cost of paying people for work they didn't do can have a significant impact on your bottom line over time.

That is clearly what we will talk about in this article. We will discuss the following topics:

1. Define time theft.

2. Methods for detecting it;

3. And, most importantly, how to avoid being cheated out of time.

So let's get started with this article.

What Is Time Stealing?

When an employee paid for work that they never did, this is known as time stealing. Goldbricking is another name for it. And, while an employee can manipulate the system in various ways, time stealing boils down to someone claiming wages they don't deserve.

It encourages lower productivity if continued for a long time. Also, keep in mind that one employee's actions can impact all of their coworkers. As a result, prolonged time stealing has become the new normal for any team.

As team morale declines, everyone becomes less accountable for their assigned tasks, resulting in missed deadlines, subpar work, and financial losses. The longer you ignore time stealing, the more serious it becomes.

Now let us move to our next topic;

How Can Time Stealing Be Detected?

Here are a few points that show the probability of your worker stealing time:

1. Availability issue

Due to a heavy workload and poor time management skills, some of us may find it hard to keep up with all of our coworkers. However, if an employee is frequently unavailable, you should check in with them, especially if they have fewer responsibilities. Late responses could indicate that someone is drifting away, fooling around, and squandering their time.

2.Inappropriate work quality 

It is as self-evident as the midday sun. Distractions occur often, resulting in poor work quality. An employee who does not produce satisfactory results despite working longer hours than others may be dissatisfied with their assigned tasks and prone to drifting off.

3. Misuse of responsibility

It's nice to take a break from responsibilities now and then. People who avoid taking the lead all of the time, on the other hand, may lack the motivation to work. As obvious as it may seem, goldbrickers avoid taking on responsibilities in order to avoid being held accountable to authorities for unfinished projects.

4.Unawareness

For the GenXers and GenZees, being absent-minded is nothing new. However, if you find yourself correcting the same errors in their tasks, it's likely that they aren't paying attention to the required parameters. Worse, they aren't even listening to you because they are preoccupied with something else.

How Can You Prevent Time Stealing?

Without further ado, I'll get right to the point. There are two options for dealing with this problem:

1. Organic way

2. Easy way

Organic way

How could we overlook the fact that the office environment is a great contributor to yawning and dozing off among employees? Your workplace ignites a fire in your belly, steers motivation like a morning coffee, and fuels your vision, and ignites a fire in your stomach.

Are you unable to relate? Many of us are unable to do so.

A happy, healthy workplace is a rare commodity. Here's a secret:

1. Encourage collaboration on your property. Allow people to take on more responsibilities and engage in mindful activities. Encourage everyone. Work hard and have fun!

2. Enhance communication among all, regardless of cultural differences, generational differences, job roles, or anything else. Ascertain that no one feels left out.

3. Make your workplace more pleasant. The color and layout of your workplace have an impact on how your employees act and work.

4. Accept constructive criticism from your peers with open arms. With their inputs, be communicative rather than combative. Always value the viewpoint of a third party.

Easy way

Employers must keep a close eye on their employees' activities due to the ever-changing trends in modern workplaces. With the majority of them working from home, determining and increasing productivity has become a difficult task. Use monitoring tools. 

However, it is now a requirement for creating a safe and transparent workplace that promotes fair play.

Here are the features that an employee monitoring tool should have:

1. Employers who are unfamiliar with such tools will appreciate the intuitive dashboard and simple setup.

2. Automated Screenshots to capture regular staff activities in real-time without invading their privacy;

3. App & website tracking done to identify potential malware and assess sources of distraction.

4. Automated Email Reports for designated employees to save time sharing individual employee information;

5. Graphs of productivity to analyze workflow and team activities over the course of a week or month;

6. Idle Time, keyboard tracker and Working Hours Tracking to determine how much time employees spend working during the day;

And there are plenty more.

Happily, EmpMonitor can handle all of these tasks and more. With our clever features, you can track your employees' whereabouts in real-time and see how their work is progressing. EmpMonitor can be used in the corporate, healthcare, finance, legal, and other services in mind.

So, before wrapping up this article, we are sharing an effective video for analyzing your employees performance by using EmpMonitor.

To watch the video, click here

Wrapping It Up!! 

Time theft is no laughing matter. Many employers have seen an increase in employee productivity and creativity over the years simply by managing their employees' time and dedication to their jobs. And there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of workplace time cheating.

Hope this article helped you!

What Is Time Theft And How To Tackle It?

Do you think that your employees are not working appropriately at their working hours or filching time from your company? I’m asking this from you because, there are several examples of time thievery done by employees. And office time theft is a commonly occurring issue, though it might take years to discover that an employee is using office time for personal work, but let me tell you, the longer it goes on, the more it costs to the company!

Beside that according to the Statistics Brain reports, time theft done by employees costs companies $50 billion per year. Further companies frequently overlook the significant impacts of this issue. For instance, there are 10 employees who carry out this process in your company, then approximately you'd lose $125 a week, up to $6,500 a year in total. But you can save all your business money by mitigating the theft of time. And thankfully, there are ways you can eliminate theft of time and spot it. But how do you avoid workplace time theft? Below, in this article, you will get to know about:

1. What is Time Theft?

2. How Employee Time Theft Occur?

3. How To Prevent Time Theft?

What is Time Theft?

Time theft is when an employee received pay for work that he or she has not actually served. Time thievery is not specific to any position or field. The theft of time mainly relates to hourly employees. There are more ways of performing time thievery for casual employees than there are for regular employees.

How Employee Time Theft Occurs?

When you look at the timesheets of your employees and think that something doesn't stack up, you might be right. Perhaps there was less work done than you anticipated. Or you might find that one employee never seems to complete their work on time.  

Here are a few factors to watch out for in their activity if you seriously doubt employees are thievery time in the office with the help of computer monitoring software.

Misrepresenting their time worked.

Some of the most common ways employees perform time thievery in the office are to log in early and log out late. Specifically, if you are using pen and paper for employees to record log-in and log-out times; Then numbers could easily be misrepresented without being readily verifiable.

Taking longer breaks than allowed by their shifts

For employee satisfaction, working breaks can be great and can also improve efficiency. But is it a general way of time thievery, is taking longer breaks than authorized. So, if you observe that employees are stretching their breaks for significant amounts of time, you might need an appropriate way to track working hours.

Buddy punching

Buddy punching is when an employee with another employee logs in or out, probably because an employee has not yet arrived at work or missed out early. Buddy punching seems to be more likely to occur when you manually log hours (via pen and paper) or when you use an old-fashioned time clock 'punch'. These analog devices are simpler to manipulate than most digital applications for time clocks.

Getting distracted by the internet

Surfing the internet can be the main distraction, especially for employees who spend most of their workday gazing at a monitor. Employees who spend time in this manner will waste their working hours in browsing social networking sites or other sites that are not relevant to work.

How To Prevent Time Theft?

After having an overview of what is time theft and how it occurs, the essential part is to know the various ways to prevent time theft. Therefore, let us have a look at it!

Use monitoring software

You will better detect employees performing time theft by keeping a close watch on employees' arrival and leaving. You configure their timetables, so you know when they're going to come to work and leave. 

But while using the employee internet monitoring software the process gets quite easier to manage and observe the time thievery activity. With the monitoring tool, you can easily detect where employees are working or not. Moreover, this software will also help minimize the time spent on personal activities or on sites that distract them. Many apps allow employers to monitor their time to the minute when working on various tasks. You may also watch the computer operation of employees by screenshots or URL reports.

Summing Up

After an agile guide on what is time theft, how it occurs, and how to prevent it, I will only suggest an employer should cautiously address this sensitive topic. In order to root out time theft, employers should normally stop implementing an offensive or excessively disruptive activity.