Bryan Dear’s Blog

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafarer on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you reach your destiny.     - Carl Schurz, 1829 – 1906

I have worked with many people who I genuinely admired who could never arrive on time whether it be a professional or a social occasion. I have also worked with those who didn’t have my admiration and didn’t show up on time, but they always had a wonderful excuse. And I have worked with people who always show up on time – most of the time earlier than the agreed upon time – these are the people I can count on.

Last night at the movies, one of the main characters was a working mother and she was always late to her job. It was a trait I suppose her co-workers accepted, because she was good at what she did.

How do you handle an employee who is always late? Does it make a difference whether they are a great employee or just “doing their job?.” Do you treat them differently in evaluations? Is there a pay differential? Do you make exceptions? Business decisions like these, no doubt addressed in ye olde employee manual are supposed to be cut and dry… but they rarely are.

The larger the company, the dicier this gets with consequences not even considered previously. Make sure you document the tardiness.  Make sure the employee knows why their behavior matters to you and your company. If you don’t have a good time keeping system, get one. They’re  not that expensive and they’ll you time and money in all sorts of areas. And finally address the consequences of tardy behavior – even for your good employees.

Promptness is a kind of code – it doesn’t just happen – it requires some planning, it shows respect and it allows for the task to be accomplished when everyone is engaged at the same time. It also sends a strong message – you can count on me.

It’s a rainy Monday – no excuse for being late:-)

Bryan Dear

www.payrolldept.biz

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued. Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825 – 1895

Rounding is almost always permissable in any activity as long as the outcome is fair. For example, when adding a set of numbers, always rounding up will result in an unfair outcome while rounding up on five or higher and rounding down when under 5 will result in a much closer result as compared to adding the actual numbers.

Time and Attendance is where we see rounding violations. The employer doesn’t trust the employee. The belief is that the employee clocks in early, before actually working, and clocks in late, after their work is long done resulting in an overstatement of time by the employee. To repair this breach, the employer may program the clock to deduct five to fifteen minutes from the employee’s clock in and clock out time.

Don’t do it. This could result in the payment of late wages complete with fines and penalties while dragging you through an ugly audit process. It also can degrade the trust between the employer and employee. You can program your clock to round to the nearest tenth of an hour, the nearest five minute increment, etc. as long as you round without favor to the employer.

Rounding good, rounding in favor of the employer, bad.

Cheers,

Bryan Dear

www.payrolldept.biz

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.     - Arnold H. Glasow, 1905 – 1998

T & A stands fors time and attendance tracking. It allows employers to easily compile actual worked time, record holidays, vacation, and other types of time by the employees and provides a much easier processing of the payroll. We are believers in the online clock.

Employees may become a bit skittish when an online clock is first set up. It may seem to them that their every moment is being followed; flexibility is no longer tolerated; trust is flushed and the special bond that may have existed between employer and employee is weakened.

Not true. One of the first recognitions by the employees of using a clock is fairness. In almost every organization, there are employees who arrive five to ten minutes early and maybe depart five to ten minutes late. And then there are employees who arrive five to ten minutes late and depart five to ten minutes early. In a system of time cards, both of these employees may have shown the same time. With a time clock their actual times are shown and recorded. Pretty soon, the online clock becomes just a part of the framework of doing one’s job – in the background and making the process of work just a little bit easier.

Online time keeping can make department and labor allocation much easier. It can help identify overtime situations that can then be stopped. It can provide supervisors a method to check who missed a punch from the previous day (it’s a lot easier to figure out what I was doing yesterday than what I was doing last week). It provides a long-term and easily retrievable history of hours worked. It’s one of the best things we ever did in house to ease the process of compilation of hours.

If you would like more information on time and attendance, feel free to contact us.

Cheers,

Bryan Dear

www.payrolldept.biz