All in Good Time

I was trying out the free demonstration at ClockSpot.net and I suddenly remembered a story my friend shared with me.

Simon is a general manager faced with punctuality problems. Many employees, from managers to staff, came to work at least 20 minutes past 9am but would start winding down half hour before 6pm. He said an average employee costs the company $80 a day and that 50-minute lost time per day means his company is paying $8.33 every day for nothing. And that’s $183.26 per month based on 22 working days. That an alarming figure, a medium-sized company with 50 employees will lose $9163 a month! Once he did his calculations, he hatched a plan. He went to work very early every day, sat at the receptionist counter to greet every employee that comes in. He hoped to show appreciation to staff who arrive for work on time and to serve as a very subtle warning to those who were late. He was crossing his fingers that the latecomers will pick up the hint.

I don’t know if his plan worked, but I thought he might want to consider a
Web Time Clock application. I’m considering one for my company. My team is great and I don’t have a punctuality problem like Simon. I don’t wish to lose productivity and money that way. However, I have another challenge.

The nature of advertising and design business is such that we are always racing against time during a client’s campaign period or during peak seasons like now (year end). During such times, we can be working round the clock with the creative folks staying in the office until the wee hours. If they leave at 5am to to go home to shower and catch 40 winks, I honestly don’t expect them to come back into the office by 9am. When the project ends, I allow them to take some time off to compensate for the long hours. I am flexible but like my administrator cum accountant said, we still have to keep track of work hours even though we do not observe the 40-hour work week. So, to know how many hours they can take as “time-off”, we must know how much extra time they have put in. It is just too tedious and cumbersome to fill in Time Sheets manually to record the overtime spent against each project they are on. To me, it is extremely unproductive for myself or my administrator-accountant to spend a few hours a month to check the data.

So, I’m looking into Clockspot, an online timesheet application that is accessible anywhere, that acts as a Web Time Clock via web clocking or as a Phone Time Clock.

The Phone Time Clock is a great concept, especially if there are many team members who spend a lot of time out of the office and away from a computer. Besides our account servicing teams running around visiting clients, I am sure there are many other industries where bosses are looking for cost effective and easy ways of keeping track of their employees.

Generally, this Web Time Clock is great for businesses with multiple offices or scattered employees or hired freelancers. Most importantly, it is also a paperless solution! This means, whenever my admin lady wants to know the staff work pattern, projects, calculate time-off and even generate payroll, she just need to login to get her work done. For our off-shore experts, they can login to clock in their work hours, report work progress and check on new tasks.

Besides the convenience, the additional reasons that had my administrator-accountant so smitten was the fact that there are no setup fees, no long term contracts, and no cancellation fees. With the base rate at $10 per month, every manager at $5 and employee at $2, the cost is very manageable and reasonable to any small-medium companies.

Simon faced a challenge where he was battling lost time and lost money. My people don’t like filling in Time Sheets and I find it a waste of resources to counter check and work out their time-off or day-off. So, it looks like that I have to make my people happy by endorsing the requisite form for ClockSpot sitting on my table.

[tags]web time clock, clockspot[/tags]