What is the valuable thing your employees could steal? Staplers? Paperclips?
The answer doesn’t even include laptops or monitors: The most valuable thing employees can steal is time.
Time is every organization’s most valuable resource because it hires people to complete tasks, who are only working limited hours. Every enterprise, SME, and everything in between needs to optimize its use of time to maximize ROI on investments and increase revenue year-on-year. In some cases, time theft could also be against the law, meaning serious consequences for employees.
Luckily, this article contains several ways to police this time theft in a way that employees will find agreeable, reasonable, and often engaging.
Understanding Time Theft
Time theft can be a divisive term, but it is relevant in most workplaces and can be hard to spot. The best starting place in identifying and reducing time theft is by knowing the most common forms.
- Extended breaks: Employees take longer breaks than allowed, reducing productivity.
- Buddy punching: One worker clocks in/out for another, faking attendance.
- Personal tasks during work: Employees handle non-work activities, wasting paid hours.
One of the biggest increases in time theft is remote work. Employers need to be especially vigilant around this issue for employees who don’t work in the office.
Why Time Theft Hurts Businesses
The next question employers and leaders might ask is: Why do we need to worry about time theft at all? The answer is that it hurts businesses across many levels, and the more it happens and is tolerated, the more it becomes ingrained and difficult to reduce.
These are the ways time theft hurts businesses:
- Financial losses from reduced productivity: Lost revenue negatively impacts productivity, leading to greater revenue loss.
- Negative effect on team morale: Morale can ebb and flow, but when it reaches a certain point, through issues like time theft, it can be challenging to restore.
- Potential for client dissatisfaction: When employees record time incorrectly, clients take the brunt of the resulting loss of staff availability, creating a culture of unreliability.
It’s crucial to be aware of these points to understand the gravity of the results of time theft and begin to set policies and expectations to manage this issue.
Clear Policies and Expectations
Organizations with clear, transparent, and easy-to-understand policies set expectations for employee behaviours around time theft.
The first advantage of policies is that they establish attendance expectations for each employee in every twenty-four-hour period and rules for breaks, so everyone is aware and can follow guidance on the same footing.
The next policy must cover performance standards, such as tasks to complete in a working day, with quotas if appropriate. And they should also cover the timeliness of completing these tasks, teamwork values within a team, and the quality of work.
Employees must understand workplace policies to ensure compliance, fairness, and consistency. Clear, simple language, visual aids, and easy digital access make policies more understandable, improving engagement, accountability, and overall organizational success.
Leverage Technology for Accountability
Another essential tool in the battle to reduce time theft is technology to promote accountability for staff actions and time management. These tools record data that makes it clear who is doing what and for what period of time, making it easy for employees to prove they are committing the correct amount of time and easy for managers to prove if rules are broken.
Firstly, consider the technology you need: Time-tracking software and biometric systems automate attendance verification, prevent buddy punching, ensure accurate records, and strengthen accountability.
Next, consider fairness when monitoring employee activity. Technology tracks productivity transparently, respecting privacy, encouraging personal responsibility for time and task management, and preventing misuse of company time.
A leader can achieve the balance of oversight with employee trust by implementing monitoring carefully. This approach promotes transparency, builds confidence, and ensures fairness without the types of micromanagement that can promote resistance.
Foster a Culture of Trust and Engagement
Reducing the potential for each employee stealing time from the employer isn’t all about rules and consequences. Another essential aspect involves promoting a culture where employees trust and engage with their employer so they feel naturally inclined to be honest about their time management and task completion.
One of the first aspects of this approach is to encourage open communication about workloads. The second is to recognize and reward productivity publicly, whether through polished recognition pieces, meaningful incentives such as weekend getaways, or paid time off. The third, and perhaps most crucial, aspect is building organic, meaningful relationships between managers and employees to reduce misuse of time.
These approaches take some time and effort but can be more effective at reducing time theft than any consequences for rule-breaking, because they can alter the way employees perceive time theft and encourage them to avoid it.
Conclusion
Time theft matters. Beyond any other resource that employees could steal, time is the most valuable because it translates into revenue. So if employees are stealing time, they are stealing motivation, productivity, and money.
However, the most effective approach to reducing time theft is a balanced approach via HR, between individual accountability for employees, promoting engagement and trust between them and management. Enterprises and SMEs must adopt proactive strategies to reduce time theft. Reactive approaches will be ineffective as they will be too little too late, as a time theft culture may already have taken hold.
