June 30, 2021

 

Every business’s most valuable resource is its human resources. But your employees are only as valuable as the work they put into your business.

That’s why keeping accurate track of your employees’ time on the job is essential. As an employer, it helps ensure you only pay for the hours your workers have put in. For your employees, it helps ensure they get paid for all the hours they’ve worked. 

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, investing in the right employee time clock and software system can help eliminate one of the biggest plagues in the workplace — buddy punching.

 

 

What is Buddy Punching and Why Should You Invest in Eliminating It?

Buddy punching is a practice in which an employee punches in or clocks out for a fellow employee. Sure, it may be a few minutes here and there, but buddy punching should be called what it really is — time theft. This is because, at the end of the day, employees who buddy punch are paid for the time they didn’t put in. While buddy punching may look like a harmless practice, it can cost employers about $373 million every year.

Even a small business, can stand to lose a lot if you don’t put measures in place to curb buddy punching. Let’s break down how much buddy punching can cost you in a year as a small business. To do that, here are a few facts to help calculate how much you can lose in wages:

• On average, employees in the U.S. get away with about 4.5 hours of unworked wages each week (according to the American Payroll Association).
• The federal minimum wage (in the U.S.) is $7.25 an hour.

Taking these two factors into consideration, if one of your employees steals 4.5 hours of time in a week, that comes up to $32.63 a week.

Not much right?

However, if that employee consistently gets away with 4.5 hours/week for the whole year, they’ll ultimately cost you $1,566. And if you have 10 employees who buddy punch, that figure could be as high as $15,660 annually. For a small business, that’s a huge unnecessary expense to ignore.

What causes employees to resort to buddy punching?

One of the main reasons is because they know they can get away with it. If your employee time tracking system has loopholes your staff can manipulate, unscrupulous employees will take advantage of it. This is usually done when an employee:

• is running late
• wants to leave work early without the supervisor knowing
• wants to miss an entire shift

Any manipulation of the actual hours worked can be considered a form of buddy punching. No matter the reason or who does it, buddy punching is not as innocent as it may appear. It costs the company a lot in terms of productivity and revenue. Besides the money aspect, buddy punching also has the negative impact of eroding trust in the workplace.

Employee Time Clocks that Help Reduce Buddy Punching

Now that you’ve seen the impact of buddy punching, let’s quickly look at how an online time clock can help you mitigate the practice. The main premise of employee time clock system is to ensure accurate recording of the hours spent on the job.

PayClock time & attendance management software paired with Lathem’s biometric employee time clocks - CloudTouch fingerprint reader and FaceIN face recognition  clocks -, corrects the big problem of buddy punching. With these biometric clocks it is next to impossible for one employee to punch in or out and be identified as another person recording their time. 

Lathem's CloudTouch model CT2 time clock fingerprint and thumbprint scanner utilizes optical fingerprint scanning technology to achieve excellent image quality and superior reliability and sends the individual's print information to the biometric engine for precise verification of identity. The technology in FaceIN's face recognition dual camera system performs a 3-D analysis of the 60 facial points that are unique to each employee, so there’s no mistaking one employee for another. Employee facial points are recorded and stored as data algorithms in the time clock, so facial data cannot be reproduced as a photographic image.

These employee time clocks, coupled with PayClock time & attendance software, also helps to curb buddy punching because of the transparency that comes with the system. The software allows employees, managers and HR personnel to review important time punch data right on the screen of the time clock. This high level of transparency helps discourage employees from buddy punching. 

What about remote employees?

It’s no secret that the way people work has changed. Most businesses have shifted to remote work, with many pledging to keep it that way indefinitely. Ensuring that your employees putting the required hours can be quite tricky. That’s why you must leverage an online employee time clock system that gives you the option to track their time remotely using a mobile time clock app on their Smartphones. A Mobile app that will only record the employee's punches if their smartphones have the GPS location recording enabled. The recorded GPS coordinates are sent to the online time clocks software and convey the location of the device when employee clocks in or out. It will display the identification of the employee's smartphone device and the geographic area of the employee's time punch along with radius area of accuracy. This helps to eliminate the potential for inappropriate clocking in and clock out and time theft.

What is an Online Employee Time Clock System

An online time clock is a system designed to make it easy for employees to punch in and clock out using a time clock connected to web based time clock software. Besides making it easy for you and your employees to keep track of the hours put into work, an online time clock system helps ensure that time spent on the job is accurately recorded. Research shows that companies lose as much as $7.4 billion lost per day due to unrecorded work activities. That’s 7.4 billion reasons to invest in an efficient employee time clock.

Besides helping you save money, employee time clock system brings many other advantages. Here are a few significant ones:

Helps You Stay Compliant with Workplace Laws

According to the Fair Labor Standards Act(FLSA), you’re required to keep accurate records of employee work hours for at least two years. Not only that, but to be compliant, your records must be easily available to government representatives for inspection. While you can use paper timesheets or punch cards, these are susceptible to inaccuracies causing you administrative headaches. This is where online time clock systems come in. No matter the industry, they make it easier for you to store and manage employee data, resulting in you meeting the FSLA’s compliance standards.

Reduce Payroll Errors

Another advantage of online time clock systems is they can be integrated with your payroll software. As a result, payroll errors can be reduced. And as you know, payroll errors lead to other bigger problems like:

• underpaying or overpaying tax
• pension problems
• employee dissatisfaction
• IRS penalties

Helps Gather Data On Attendance Issues

One of the biggest headaches HR personnel face is tracking employee tardiness, absenteeism, and other employee attendance issues. Again, this is another area an employee time clock system is advantageous over other systems. It helps automatically record attendance data and generates user-friendly reports to quickly identify employee attendance and absenteeism.

Factors to Consider When Considering an Employee Time Clock System

There are several factors to consider if you’re to get the best out of yours. Here are some of the most significant ones:

• Ease of use. One of the most significant factors to consider when implementing an online time clock is the ease of use. With a PayClock online employee time clock system you can perform functions such as calculate labor hour totals, generate reports, and export all your data for payroll processing. You can manage multiple employee timesheets within the software and the best part is you can do all this from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.
• Accessibility. For both management and employees, your time clock data must be easily accessible. Easy access that allows for self-service where employees and their managers can quickly review time cards and other information.
• Integrations. To get the most out of your online time clock, it must seamlessly integrate with your payroll applications.
• Low or no maintenance. A solution (like PayClock) that offers total support ensures that you or your IT department aren’t burdened with the tasks of maintaining and updating your time clock system.
• Security. With cybercrimes on the rise, data security has become of paramount importance in ensuring compliance and protecting employee data.

With these features, keeping track of all your hourly employees’ hours, no matter how many employees, becomes easy. They also help ensure you reduce the opportunities your workers have of buddy punching.

Investing in an Employee Time Clock System

Buddy punching is a practice you can’t continue to ignore. If not curbed, it could cost you a lot in productivity and revenue. That’s why investing in one is no longer an option. If you’re ready to upgrade from a legacy system or an ineffective online time clock system, work with us. We’ll help you streamline your system.