How to prevent time theft with employee time tracking software

Employee time at work defines how efficiently they perform. Employees reflecting less engagement at work trouble businesses with low employee productivity and operational inefficiency. With organizations shifting to the future of work and more teams working in distributed environments, it is a challenge to measure how teams behave at work and what their productive hours are.

As stats reveal that 43% of employees are not honest about their work hours, you cannot rely on traditional ways to capture employee time. The redundant old ways to record employee hours are not foolproof and often make way for buddy punching and manual time manipulation that misguide the managers. Here the modern approach for evaluating employee behavior and its impact on work is in focus.

Let’s understand what your employees are doing with time and why you need to control it for improved productivity and efficient business operations:

What is time theft and why do you need to detect it

Employees underutilizing their work hours and performing non-work-bound activities cost organizations time theft which leads to inefficiency at the workplace. Growing employee work time irregularities can shrink employee productivity significantly. If left unidentified, disproportionate employee work hours resulting from uneven clock in and clock out time can reflect in financial loss in the long run.

Is time theft illegal and do you need to stop it

Time theft is an unfair employee behavior rather than an illegal practice. It occurs with employees manipulating their work time and login/logout hours. Organizations can better craft a time theft policy to minimize employees stealing or underutilizing time.

What are common types of employee time theft

Instances of employee time theft can range from frequent and exceeding idle and break time. BPO and contact center teams can stretch their Aux time which can impact the call flow. Freelancers and contract-based employees reflecting less than defined work hours can get more billing than the hours worked which leads to financial loss for businesses. Let’s further learn about common employee time theft:

Frequent and exceeding employee breaks

More employee break time leads to less productive hours at work. Calculating exceeded employee break time per day in your organization and the number of unproductive employee hours will make you rethink employee behavior at work. It can further impact workflow and project timeline.

Less than defined work hours

Exceeding idle and break time shrinks employee work time and results in employees working for less than defined hours. Its impact is reflected in unoptimized employee hours and growing inefficiencies at work.

Excessive inefficient activities

Distractions in remote work may lead distributed teams to struggle with focus time. They tend to be involved more in inefficient activities and deliver less productive work. Consequently, their performance gets the most hit.

Increased digital distractions

Remote employees working in unmonitored environments can get distracted by non-work-bound applications and websites which can result in employees taking more than expected time to complete tasks. Chances are their low-quality work invites several reviews to further delay the project and add to company costs.

Irregular clock in and clock out time

Employees joining late at work impacts the balance of teamwork and forces another team member to join in to contribute to the task and make up for the lost time. The same can be the case with early leaving employees. In either instance, it hampers teams’ productivity.

Slacking at work

Innovative ways that employees use to pretend to work are no less and can range from they’re showing up online but not doing any work, to deliberately killing time in unproductive activities. It all leads to growing inefficiency at work.

What are effective ways to prevent time theft at the workplace

The impact of employees' growing unproductive hours impacts client trust and credibility of organizations operating with remote teams. Here the importance of employee time management software to reduce time theft is considerable.

Identify when employees are not working

Employee time monitoring software captures real-time work data with a thin client agent installed on distributed teams’ machines and showcases it with an intuitive dashboard where you can visualize what employees do what activities at what time and measure what employees work and what employees pretend to prevent time theft fraud.

Measure employee work hours

With employee time tracking software, you can detect what employees steal time at work, eliminate buddy punching, and identify how to counter time theft. Find out common challenges in employee time tracking by identifying where employees spend most of their productive hours and controlling unproductive factors like exceeding idle and break time to boost performance.

Find out non-productivity at work

Live Activity Monitoring helps you find out how employee monitoring software tackles time theft at work with data captured against when employees log into work, what task they do, at what time, with what productivity, and when they log out. You get a clear picture of what activities drive or disrupt employee productivity and how to stop time theft for enhanced performance.

Evaluate online usage

Evaluating what applications and websites your remote teams visit is one of the effective strategies to prevent time theft in distributed work. You can control employees' app and web usage by detecting the trend to encourage more productive work and limit distractions to stop employee time theft in your business that causes low efficiency and non-performance for your teams.

Assess employee attendance

Capture what employees show up at work to manage your teams and plan the tasks. Employee attendance data can guide to prevent time theft, as you know what workforce is available at work and what productivity they achieve at the day-end. Further, you can drill down to individual employee time to learn about what teams do what work, at what time, and with what productivity. With actionable work data extracted by employee monitoring software, you can decide on employee time theft at the workplace and how to prevent it.

Analyze work patterns

Employee work patterns indicate how employees spend the day and critically hint at how to prevent time theft in the workplace. Get comprehensive Activity Timeline data based on how teams perform and find out the loopholes in work time. Also, measure if employee actions are aligned with business goals and identify the distractions that hinder the work progress.

Importance of employee time tracking software

Utilizing time tracking software not only helps identify what is time theft and how to prevent it but also supports balancing employee utilization and optimizing focus time to encourage quality-driven productive work. Incorporating employee time management software into your business process dually benefits organizations and employees by helping regain lost employee time and recover financial losses due to it. You get support to improve employee efficiency for more productive work.

Identify employee behavior and time with wAnywhere

wAnywhere employee monitoring software is purpose-built for organizations operating with remote teams. Its AI-powered detection feature enables managers to identify how employees behave at work and what their actions cause inefficiency at work. Visualizing all the employee work data that matters, you can effectively resolve time theft at work and save employees from distractions. Employees getting more focus time perform quality work and better contribute to business goals. Start a free trial today to experience how wAnywhere can help direct employee hours toward more productivity and no distractions at the workplace.