Tracking time for your hourly employees is a foregone conclusion for most business owners (or should be). If you are paying a worker by the hour, that worker ought to be accountable and paid accurately for the hours that he or she is logging. How Can It Be Done? The easiest way is the time tracking software. Keep in mind that communication is critical and can circumvent resistance to change. Luckily, the benefits are compelling for workers and employers alike.
Here are the main Benefits of Tracking Time for Salaried Employees list.
Added Accountability for Higher-Cost Employees
While not always true, salaried employees often make more money per hour than their hourly counterparts–which is all the more reason to have insight into where those dollars are going. If your managing editor, salaried at $60,000 per year, is always taking hour-long lunch breaks while keeping a 40-hour a week schedule, that translates to $28.85 slipping out the door on a daily basis, or $6,924 lost annually.
And that’s just 1 employee.
Adding an extra measure of accountability through a time tracking system–particularly when that system is paired with GPS monitoring–is typically sufficient to dissuade most employees from fudging on their hours or spending business hours engaging in personal activities. When your off-site boss can easily glance at the record of your hours and see that you spent an hour at Chipotle five times that week, it’s a lot harder to mentally justify the excursion.
Planning for Change
Many small business owners found themselves in a panic in 2015 when proposed changes to federal overtime regulations were announced that would raise the threshold for exempt workers from $23,600 to somewhere north of $50,000–a massive leap. Without an accurate idea of how many hours workers who fell in the sweet spot between $23,660 and $50,000 were really logging each week, the panic was clear.
At time-and-a-half, overtime is among the heftiest bottom-line business expenses, and effectively doubling the pool of employees that would qualify for overtime could be disastrous.
By monitoring salaried employees’ time, companies aren’t left in the dark when it comes to knowing who typically works over 40 hours per week (and whether that’s 42 hours or 70) and what actions will need to be taken to prevent a enormous increase in costs, whether that’s hiring a lower-level place to relieve some of the more rote tasks those higher-paid positions have on their plates, to adding a new app to automate processes or outsourcing some tasks.
Accurate Insight and Resource Allocation
Have you got an accurate picture of that projects or clients are getting the lion’s share of your employees’ hours? Not likely, unless you are monitoring in real time to determine where you’re getting bogged down, where you are getting the most bang for your buck, and where you might need to allocate more resources. Employee feedback and managerial feedback is one piece of this pie, but it’s notoriously difficult to get a precise picture of where hours are really going based on this feedback independently. As an example, a task that an employee quotes took him or her “15 minutes” may not include the 2-hour-long brainstorm that involved 10 additional employees, the development work that went into creating the final result on the site, or the time the employee spent answering emails associated with the project.
New Inroads to Flexibility
Does an employee need a day off in the end of the week after pulling four all-nighters? The evidence is now in the pudding, for employer and employee alike. Allowing for flexible programs, work from home situations or rewards in terms of well-deserved time off or an additional day of holiday are now completely justifiable. Employers know all too well what it is like to hear how tired employees are at the end of a work week–but it is often impossible to tell whether that’s due to a normal workweek and external variables, or a truly Sisyphean push to complete a project or job. With a time tracking system, it’s far easier to accommodate requests for flexibility and perks such as well-deserved time off.
While salaried employees may initially bristle at the notion of being asked to track their time–or view the movement as a “big brother” initiative, the benefits to employee and employer alike in terms of additional flexibility, reliability, and accountability typically outweigh this initial annoyance and help keep you and your employees (salaried and hourly alike) on exactly the exact same page.