The average hourly employee in the U.S. is making about $33 per hour as of early 2023. That number is up significantly from even just a few years ago.
For this reason, it has never been more important for companies to track employee hours. If companies don’t make employee time tracking a top priority, it could lead to them losing a lot of money each year.
There are lots of different time tracking methods that companies can utilize to keep tabs on how many hours their employees are working. You should learn about the options you have when it comes to tracking employee time and pick out the best one of the bunch.
Here are several employee hour tracking options that you should consider putting to the test.
Pen and Paper
If you have dozens or even hundreds of employees working for your company, using a pen and paper to track employee hours is going to be impossible. It’s also going to be difficult to keep track of which employees are being honest when providing you with their hours in this way.
But if you only have a few employees working for your company, using a pen and paper might be the simplest solution to tracking employee hours. You can have your employees write down when they started working, when they finished, and how many hours they worked in total each day.
At the end of each week, you can then add up the hours that your employees worked and pay them accordingly. It’s the most straightforward system that you can set up for tracking employee hours.
Time Clock
Using a pen and paper to track employee hours isn’t going to be ideal for all companies. It’s inevitably going to lead to mistakes being made in many cases.
It’s why you might want to go with a time clock instead. You can have your employees “punch in” at the start of a shift and “punch out” when they’re finished with a shift. You can also have them “punch out” for lunch, breaks, etc.
Using a time clock is going to produce more accurate results when you track employee hours. But it might also lead to a logjam if you have a lot of employees starting and/or finishing at the same times each day.
Digital Timesheet
It’s 2023, which means your company should be completing as many tasks as it can in the digital realm. This includes coming up with a way to track employee hours through the use of computers.
Setting up a digital timesheet might do the trick. You can create something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet that contains your employees’ names and the times they came to work and left. It’ll help keep things way more organized than a pen and paper can.
Things can get chaotic when you take this approach if people fill out the wrong part of a spreadsheet or push the wrong buttons when they’re doing it. But it’s usually going to be a real timesaver for those who are still tracking employee hours with a pen and paper or even a time clock.
Time Tracking Software
While a digital timesheet might be a useful tool at first, it won’t take you too long to see all its shortcomings. You’re going to have to put a ton of trust in your employees to fill out digital timesheets accurately.
So if you want to take the digital approach to tracking employees hours, how about doing it with time tracking software instead? This small business time clock software is an excellent example of an hour tracker software that will work wonders for your company.
You’ll be able to keep more accurate records when you track employee hours with the right software. It’ll make time tracking so much simpler overall and will keep your payroll expenses in check.
Geofencing and GPS Tracking
If you have employees who are always traveling to different job sites to put in work, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to keep an eye on them. That is, it’s going to be difficult if you don’t use geofencing and GPS tracking to your advantage.
With geofencing, you can surround your job sites with signals that will allow you to know when your employees are on the job and when they’re somewhere else. It’ll make it possible for you to know how many hours of work they’re putting in each week when they’re not in your central office.
Web Browser Plug-Ins
It’s one thing for your employees to be at work. It’s another thing for them to be working.
If your employees spend all day on computers, they might not always be on the job. There may be times when they’re checking their social media profiles or tending to their personal affairs when they’re supposed to be on the lock.
There are web browser plug-ins out there that will enable you to keep up with what your employees are doing when they’re at work. It’ll help you figure out if any of them may be engaging in time theft so that you can do something about it.
Be Sure to Track Employee Hours in the Right Way
If you have any employees who are telling you that they’re working more than they really are, it might be costing you a pretty penny. This is why you should track employee hours as diligently as you can.
By doing this, you’ll be able to prevent employees from getting paid more than they’re owed. You’ll also be able to ensure your employees are always working while they’re at work versus goofing off and costing you money.
Discover more about how to run a tighter ship within your company by browsing through our business-related blogs.