Make Office Security a Priority in Your Workplace

Keeping your company’s information and client information guarded, as well as your employees safe, are all part of office security. Office theft can lead to the loss of client information, personal employee information, and valuable office possessions.

It’s absolutely vital that a workplace has a high level of office security. There are several steps a workplace can take to increase its level of office security, safeguard its employees, protect its possessions, and keep company and client information safe. Most office crimes take place in workplaces that have little or no security measures in place.

As a first step in increasing office security, consider hiring a security professional to do a full security assessment. A complete, professional assessment includes your office’s current security measures and potential weak points. Once the assessment is completed, a workplace should follow up on its recommendations and consult with local law enforcement accordingly.

General measures that a workplace can take to increase office security range from the physical make-up of the office to communicating policies with employees. It’s essential that employees are not only aware of the office security policies and procedures, but that they strictly follow these policies and procedures. Measures to help increase office security include:

·      Installing key card access and security cameras around exterior areas.

·      Creating a security system for accessing computer systems and online data.

·      Securing and locking important paperwork and data.

·      Keeping employees informed on what to do in the event of an emergency.

·      Install a fingerprint time clock.

·      Arranging office spaces so that unwelcome visitors are easily spotted.

·      Instituting a company badge policy so employees are easily identified.

How Fingerprint Time Clocks Help The Bottom Line

When an employer looks at their bottom line, they almost always sees that payroll eats the biggest chunk of the money. It is the biggest expense business owners face. Add to that, the idea that whether white or blue collar, employees have long been involved in payroll fraud. To steer away from this, the implementation of fingerprint time clocks can help.  

Fingerprint time clocks capture the unique fingerprint of each employee for use when he or she comes to work every day. A fingerprint time clock can be used with employees that work either on site or off site. Removing theft of time from the equation may help employers get a handle on payroll costs. 

With this new technology, employees will no longer be able to punch the time card of a co worker and it also eliminates the time consuming task for the human resources department of having to manually calculate payroll. Additionally, there is no storage space needed like there is if you have to store time cards for tax record purposes.

To set an employee up in the fingerprint time clock system, an employer need only have the employee put his or her finger on the scanner and their unique fingerprint is scanned. The fingerprint scanners are easy to use and are portable and easily tied into a company’s computer system.

Streamlining the preparation of payroll as well as taking the idea of employee theft of hours out of the equation of running a business, employers and their employees can focus on the job at hand – running the business. Electronic payroll systems integrate well with fingerprint scanners.

Interview Etiquette

After hours of work submitting resumes and covers letters, you finally are invited in for the interview! Yet for many the interview is one of the most nerve wrecking parts of any job search. You want to make a good impression and may arrive early in your best suit to make a good impression.

Remember, however, that etiquette in interviews goes a long way to impressing an employer. There are some things you should remember to do the next time you head into an interview for your dream job. Here are a few tips that may be helpful in the interview process.

Listen carefully to what the interviewer is saying and ask plenty of questions.

The interviewer first presents the problem. Take time to organize your thoughts, ask clarifying questions and then explain to the interviewer your thoughts. The interviewer will give you important information and help so be sure you listen!

Structure the problem and then work out a plan to solve it.

Often interviewers will give a scenario and ask how you’d handle it. Think for a moment about the case. Place for a structure and a concept firmly in order to clarify each step and determine which analysis you want to do in order to arrive at a solution.

Think before you speak…

Take time to organize your thoughts and avoid jumping to conclusions.

Concentrate on the essentials.

Focus on the issues that really matter and give reasons for your decisions. Be able to clarify your reasoning clearly.

Generate hypothesis and then examine possible options.

Make suggestions and then do the calculations of these major problems when solving them. The interviewer looks to the same things as any client: innovative approaches that can be changed by the company’s rules and thus creating a sustainable and competitive advantage.

Summarize your thoughts together and draw conclusions from your analysis.

Sum up your key points at the end of the interview and the hypotheses developed by your options and make the final push to show that you are the best option for the company. Show why you want to, and should be, punching into the company time clock every day. You want to ensure that the business does not think about any other prospective employee except for you after you leave and following these simple steps is a great way to start.

Making A Smooth Transition to A Biometric Time Clock System

Human resource professionals are faced with many decisions on a daily basis, not the least of which are the items that relate to payroll. In some companies, especially those with telecommuting or other off-site employees, the switch to a biometric time clock is becoming more of the norm than in the past. It’s difficult and time consuming to track hours with the use of an old style time clock and also these card-based time clocks can lead to employee hour fraud. 

While your employees may be resigned to the fact that they have to punch a time clock, they may balk at the idea of a biometric time tracking system and might consider it an act of Big Brother checking up on them.

The introduction of any kind of new technology, especially a time tracking one, needs to be done with grace and tact and most importantly you need to show the employee how this new system will benefit them on a daily basis. The chief employee benefits are that they can rest assured they won’t have to worry about mistakes in the calculation of their hours. They will also be better able to track not only hours worked but also time off, comp time earned and they may even be offered the option of going online to schedule vacations. This will make it easier for them and easier for the human resource professional that used to juggle vacation schedules manually. 

With a biometric time keeping system you can have it programmed to recognize fingerprints or you can give your employees unique pass codes so they can log in to their own system and begin tracking their workday as soon as they start work. The system can also be set up to log in when they start, log off for breaks and log off at the end of the day. A biometric time clock eliminates the chance for employee fraud of having a fellow co-worker log them in and out for hours they might not have even worked. Open lines of communication between the human resources department and the employees will make the switch more palatable but the bottom line is the implementation of a new time and attendance system is the company’s decision. 

Biometric time clocks offer your employees the chance to log in and track hours worked, whether they’re close to overtime, whether they have time available for a day off and how many sick days are left. These time clocks offer employees peace of mind and eliminate their need to go to the HR office to see if they have time available. Instead, they can look it up themselves and that offers them autonomy.

Biometric time clocks pay for themselves in the long term by offering employers the benefit of freeing up human resource employee time from not having to manually calculate hours worked. It also virtually eliminates the possibility of inaccurate time keeping and mistakes in paychecks.

Pitfalls in the Hiring Process

Hiring is the most important function for any business, and if it is not done correctly your firm could end up wasting thousands of dollars and valuable time. People who punch a time clock make the company work, so it is worth your time as a manager to avoid the most common errors that plague the personnel process.

Time clocks are great for measuring hours worked, but when it comes to hiring, it is quite difficult to measure human qualities that match a specific job opening. Quality is not as clear-cut as quantity. These days, nearly every company uses its website to screen job seekers. Be careful not to overdo the use of the internet, as you might just end up with too many candidates. If you are not set up to interview dozens of people for a given position, then go easy on the recruitment efforts, especially online. Too many personnel managers overestimate the ability of the internet to bring in job seekers. So be careful what you wish for, as the old saying goes.

Many studies have pointed to the fact that well over 70 percent of all managerial hires are found through personal contacts. That’s why it is wise to spend a few days each month keeping up your face-to-face contacts, attending trade shows, and speaking with others in your field of endeavor. Never rely solely on impersonal job forum listings unless you are trying to gather together a large number of candidates for a mass screening.

Never, the experts tell us, rely on your gut to make a final decision about a candidate. This can lead to a really disastrous situation, where a hire drains significant resources during a training period, which ultimately goes to waste. Hiring based upon charisma, personality, or looks is an accident waiting to happen. Better to use quantifiable parameters to measure skills, interests, and background experience.

In addition, before you bring in that new person, who will eventually be punching the company time clock, have a specialist do some of the interviewing. That way, a person who truly knows what the job requires will get a chance to sit down with the applicant and get a feel for his or her abilities. Time clocks are a great way to measure hours, but sometimes it takes a professional, even a specialist, to ferret out the best job candidates for a particularly demanding position. Avoid the pitfalls of the hiring process, and you will have a healthy company.

The Power of Praise

When it comes to motivating employees, praise is a great way to do just that. Positive reinforcement works much better than negatively pointing out mistakes and it’s been shown that employees respond better to earning perks rather than having items taken away – much as children and your pets do. To have a team that truly performs, rather than one that simply comes in and punches the time clock, you need to foster a positive working environment.

Research has shown that organizations will see an increase in employee productivity and even in sales if employees are offered praise and a sense of personal fulfillment. Employee recognition programs are also great motivators when it comes to increasing productivity and job satisfaction. When you’re putting an employee recognition program in place, look for buy in from them and make the program have a specific start and end time. Consider posting results on a board in a central location so that employees can track their progress.

Praise and recognition should be offered for truly achievable and measurable results in order to be meaningful. Simply handing out “gold stars” to employees can be de-motivating if the results they are expected to achieve are easy to achieve. Make the results earned worth the recognition received. Your employee recognition programs could be as simple as naming names in the employee company wide newsletter to small gift certificates or a good parking space or even a floating day off.

Having a specific goal for employees to reach – whether through an interoffice competition or by reaching specific sales numbers or goals or even having a team with the least amount of employee sick days punched in on the time clock - are items to consider. Choose the goals that make the most sense with your department or organization that will be worthwhile to the employee that receives it.

Walking through the office handing out “atta boys” may be the way you handle employee recognition but if you’re not seeing the results you’re hoping for, you might need to change your employee recognition methods. Why not ask your employees for suggestions on what they see as valuable ways of being recognized. Their idea of praise and rewards might be different from yours and would help make the recognition program be something they would strive to achieve. If your organization doesn’t work to single out employees, consider hosting a recognition lunch for a department that achieves results over and above a department in another part of the company.

How a Time Clock Can Improve Payroll Accuracy

If your company uses a time clock system to record hours worked, you probably already know how prone the system is to error. Because the time clock does just one thing, the data collected from the system is liable to be entered incorrectly, mislabeled, entered twice, listed for the wrong employee, or any number of other mistakes. You get the idea. For their own purposes, time clocks do a great job, but they are very limited in their function. As a result, the mentioned mistakes, along with countless others, are waiting to befall to the manager who does not use time clock software.

Time clock software immediately eliminates the typical errors that crop up with all measurement systems. For one thing, software will automatically include paid time off, which a time clock will not do. By using an automated system that includes time clock software, you can easily apply the paid time off hours to any worker’s paycheck. Not only will your employees be happy to get accurate checks, you will be free to perform other managerial tasks that often are postponed due to “payroll time.”

Rounding errors are the bugaboo of payroll, and have been for over a hundred years. In the old days, this category of mistake was the most common paycheck error, and accounted for many managerial hours spent trying to correct the problem. Whether you are skilled or not with mathematics, rounding takes time, and time clocks cannot do it. Software does the chore automatically and accurately.

One of the other common errors in the world of time clock payroll accounting has to do with duplicate entries. If you manually enter data of any kind, you know all too well how this occurs. The reason is human fatigue and inattention. The numerical version of a typographical error, duplicate entry causes a cascade of errors in payroll reports. Because payroll software instantly eliminates this error, you can say goodbye to the nightmares of finding and correcting mysterious duplicate entry errors.

The time clock is a wonderful invention, and has allowed small and large businesses to measure something that used to be utterly time consuming and frustrating. By centralizing the chore of recording and stamping total hours on an individual card for every employee, the time clock truly revolutionized the industrial revolution. Today’s time clock software is just as important as that long-ago invention, providing yet another leap ahead in the world of business technology.