While business owners are used to being paranoid about their staff potentially stealing money, data or even pens from their premises, the theft of time may not have come to their mind so often.
The term ‘time theft’ refers to employees being paid for work that they haven’t actually carried out. One example of this is the employee rounding up the number of hours they’ve worked when completing their timesheet, which might mean they are paid for 10-15 minutes more than they worked.
That might not sound like very much, but just imagine how much money this could cost your company if all of your employees did it for an entire year. Your firm could end up paying many thousands of pounds more a year than it needs to do.
At this point, you might think to yourself that your recruitment agency isn’t using a timesheet-based system to pay its consultants – so why worry? However, there are various ways in which time theft can occur in a recruitment agency environment, as detailed below.
The Internet and social media
There are so many personal things that employees can end up doing on the Internet on their employer’s time, ranging from checking social media or their personal emails to online shopping. Sure enough, one survey found that 61% of polled employees spent about 15 minutes a day using Facebook when they were supposed to be working.
Again, 15 minutes may not sound like a significant amount of time, but it is time that could have otherwise been spent onboarding a candidate or closing a deal with a client.
Such time theft can be identified and prevented in various ways, such as by periodically monitoring or checking your workers’ Internet use, or even getting your IT team to impose restrictions on access to certain websites that are not business critical.
Extended lunches and break abuse
It can be very easy for what is supposed to be a one-hour lunch break for a given employee to creep into hour-and-a-half territory, or even beyond. Again, you can tackle this problem by monitoring how long your team members spend on their lunch breaks, although it’s also vital for any managers laying down a stringent policy to be sin-free in this regard.
Employees can also sometimes abuse breaks by spending just a little bit too much time having a ‘quick cigarette’. Such time theft can also create resentment among your non-smoking staff.
One solution for regulating the latter type of break abuse is asking the smokers among your workers to subtract a certain amount of time – for example, 15 minutes – from their lunch hour, to be divided into three separate cigarette breaks over the course of the day.
Dealing with personal problems
It’s understandable that many workers of yours may have to address personal situations over the course of the day, spending a certain amount of time on the phone or checking personal emails.
However, as necessary as this may be in specific adverse situations, any affected employers should tell you of this in advance, so that you don’t automatically think they are slacking. This doesn’t necessarily mean they should share every detail of their personal life with you, but a simple ‘heads up’ can be invaluable for ensuring continued good communications and respect between employer and employee.
Trust is a common theme as far as time theft is concerned. Ideally, you should be able to trust your employees not to take liberties with time that cost your company money – but this is often unrealistic. It’s therefore up to you as an employer to set reasonable boundaries, policies and guidelines in relation to your employees’ use of their time during working hours.
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