Consequences of time theft in the workplace: The mischievous time theft schemes of employees have a profound impact on organizational productivity and finances. Moreover, the employees receive monthly payments for nonperforming hours through malpractices like buddy punching, favored check-in and checkout, and other means of time tampering.
Time theft has impacted more than 75% of businesses in the United States of America alone. The global implications of this problem are much more significant and result in more than financial or productivity loss. For example, time scraping via buddy punching could result in excessive work overload on coworkers, meeting deadlines without secondary help, and achieving misinterpreted results.
Therefore, it has become critical to sight and take action against employees involved in time theft. Today, we will uncover some of the practices undertaken by global enterprises under such a circumstance.
3 Major Implications Against Employees Involved in Time Theft
1. Firing from the Job
Some employees might consider this to be a harsh implication that may never be implemented within the organization; however, they are living in a delusion. As disciplinary actions still need to be determined under state and federal law against time scraping, it is up to the organization’s discretion to decide the fate of the employees.
Moreover, time-tracking systems have enabled organizations to judge the productivity of employees during working hours. At times, the manager may decide to review the work and leisure activities of the employees to find the most and least productive workers.
As a result, it might highlight the lowest-performing employees and might relieve the employee after informing them.
2. Demotion Or Pay Decrease
Another significant implication of stealing time at work is demotion or a pay decrease. In either case, the employee suffers drastically. However, it is still a better option than getting fired from the job.
While this may hit hard, an employee may become compelled to switch jobs due to such a harsh punishment. At the same time, the organization could also evaluate other coworkers’ performance and may decide to promote a highly efficient one if the time and productivity are higher than those of the one who has just been demoted.
Moreover, the organization could even ask the employee to work on extra days to compensate for the lost time, as it drastically hampered the organization’s productivity. In addition to this, an employee could be put under PIP and decide the change in performance compared to the previous period.
3. Issue a Warning
An employee could receive a written and verbal warning from the HR and admin staff for stealing time at work. The notice may be subtle, but it is generally a medium of informing the employee to manage time effectively and avoid excessive breaks, browsing, or other modes of time theft.
Organizations may go to the extent of re-evaluating the time and attendance activities of the employees to ensure that the malpractices linked to them have stopped or diminished significantly.
If not, the next meeting would involve a deeper discussion with the management and could extend to a full-scale review of activities involved in a day. If the employee productivity doesn’t match the organization’s requirements, it could lead to the issuing of disciplinary action, final warning, firing, or PIP.
Conclusion
Time theft is problematic for global enterprises. Enterprises have been taking action against employees who get caught in activities involving it. At first, they may show leniency, assuming that it’s the first time or that it happened by mistake and wasn’t done deliberately.
However, suppose the HR and admin staff become satisfied with the fact that it is a deliberate action. In that case, they may subject the employee to additional working hours, demotion, lower pay, or termination. Moreover, many government and state bodies don’t have any specified laws stating the implications of time scraping.
As a result, the discretion of the action remains with the employer under such a circumstance. A time tracking system can help to account for the time and attendance of the workforce accurately.
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