The best tips & tricks to get employees to submit their time-sheets early
Written by Le-roy Staines, CEO of TimeDock on
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No timesheets, no pay!
It's an oldie but a goodie: Set a cut-off time and put your foot down.
Explain to your staff the massive overhead of manually keying in fifty timesheets at 6pm the night before pay-day, and how it's a bottleneck constricting growth of the business.
Enforce your time-sheet policy with clear rules of engagement:
Time-sheets must be logged daily, before heading home.
Finalised time-sheets must be submitted by 10pm Friday.
Start/stop times should be accurate to the minute.
No rounding is done by the employee.
Lateness or early finishes must include a reason.
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Automatic SMS reminders
Send out SMS messages to your employees as a reminder to submit their timesheets. There are many online services such as ohdontforget.com that you can use to schedule recurring SMS messages.
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Focus on managers
Reinforce accountability within your organization. Period.
Encourage supervisors' and managers' to take responsibility their staff, ensuring that they understand why it's important for time-sheets to be submitted on time.
Get time-sheets manager-screened and reported daily. This will allow you to spread the time following up on errors and keying the hours into payroll, instead of becoming bottle-necked at the last minute.
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Incentivize good outcomes
Some organizations offer fun incentives for staff who submit timesheets on time. One good example is to offer a weekly raffle on a Friday afternoon with your time-sheet as an entry ticket. No ticket: no entry.
One Brazillian-based company went so far as to install a beer machine that only opened once everyone had submitted their timesheets correctly and on time.
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Make it super easy!
The easier something is, or is perceived to be, then the more likely it is that people will be willing to do it. Particularly if the 'thing' in question is something they feel like they are being forced to do.
Digital automation is one aspect, but there are other ways to make the process easy. For example if employees are not often near headquarters and dislike the long drive in to drop their timesheets off, then your could offer a training day showing non-technical employees how to take a photo of their timesheet and email it into head office with their phone.
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Upgrade your TimeSheets, with TimeDock.com
TimeDock is the easiest, most robust, and scalable time-sheet plaform with QR-code time tracking and wall mounted time clock machines
Here's a 30 second demo video for the gist...
This article was written by , CEO of TimeDock - web-based time and attendance platform