Trust but Verify

Author: Gurmit Dhaliwal, CEO

For most businesses, managing the attendance of your workforce can be challenging. Everything from knowing when an employee has come in to start their shift, to when they start and finish their breaks can be a major problem without complete trust or constant supervision.

Problems like this are made even more complicated when your workforce is located across multiple sites and potentially remote sites without a manager on site. Tracking to verify where employees are, where they are meant to be, or even if they show up can be a nightmare without automation of attendance tracking.

In an ideal world, we would rely on trust to verify hours scheduled vs. hours worked to ensure all shifts are attended on time, or within specific pre-set tolerances. However, the level of trust can vary. Accordingly to the American Payroll Association (APA), almost 75% of US businesses are affected by workers exaggerating hours worked on their time sheets or what is referred to as “time theft.”

Fortunately, with today’s technology, there are ways to reduce and even eliminate direct supervision effort, all while ensuring you have a highly accountable workforce

For workforce attendance tracking, it becomes critical to implement a “Trust but Verify” approach. Trust but Verify is based on two principles. First, that you trust your employees; and second, as a failsafe, you have a reliable attendance verification method in place to ensure this trust is not violated by anyone. Here are a few ways you can adapt Trust by Verify for your Business

a) Minimize supervision effort – have real-time alerts of any missed check-ins, late check-ins, early check-outs, etc. to get real time updates on all shift statuses. This will dramatically reduce the need for supervisors to manually ensure all shifts are properly attended and will free up their time to focus on more important business needs.

b) Minimize labor fraud –ensure employees get paid only for the hours worked through an automated system that will automatically match the check-ins and check-outs times against schedules. This verification will eliminate situations of time theft and make sure your bottom line is protected.

c) Reduce compliance and contracts risk. –Implementing a real-time alerts system of attendance violations will ensure your customers’ are covered with certainty and avoiding any situations of no shows that impact the health of your contracts.

A good Trust but Verify approach in regards to attendance monitoring would be technology that allows you to track workforce attendance using GPS location verification to ensure you know in real time the status of all your shifts. With this type of technology, you and your staff will be automatically notified of situations such as late check-ins, early check outs, no shows and many other conditions. As well, the GPS location verification ensures employees are only able to clock in from designated work locations. The Trust but Verify approach will dramatically reduce workforce planning and management effort, making it so supervisors only deal with exception situations instead of having to worry about the attendance of all employees. This will increase reliability, eliminate fear of no-shows, and drastically improve payroll and billing data, making sure your staff are paid for the time worked, and your clients are billed based on verifiable information.