When did companies need to start holding their employees accountable for their paid time? Did the cavemen carve tally marks in stone, only to trade tools-of-the-trade later? Did Egyptians time the building of the pyramids with sundials? When did the timeclock first start ticking?
Believe it or not (but believe it), it was not always a necessity to track employee time and attendance. It was all work and no play—and almost no pay. People worked like the Egyptians—beginning their workday when the sun came up and going home when the sun went down. If they were lucky, they had more than a hundred pennies in their pocket at the end of their "shift."
The need for timeclocks developed during the Industrial Revolution when both factory owners and workers needed to be responsible for payroll and hours worked, respectively. Employees punched in and punched out as early as 1888.
Over the years, time and attendance has been tracked in many different ways. While the days of scratching hours into stone are over (and maybe they never existed), methods of tracking hours worked continues to vary by employer.
Despite the push towards going paperless, there are still some companies whose employees ink their hours on paper. These companies have to employ entire departments to flip through each timesheet and meticulously add up EVERY hour that was worked by EVERY employee. In other words, they pay people to pay people. And since the days of paying only pennies are also gone, this method can be expensive, especially since the company likely also pays printing costs for paychecks, paystubs or both. It is likely that most punch in and punch out timeclocks have been replaced by swiping employee ID cards to log in and log out, at the very least.
Some employers prefer using cost-effective and environmental friendly time and attendance tracking systems such as webtimeentries. Some companies use this to log hours worked by freelancers or employees who work from their home offices. The utilization of webtime also allows the company to track employee productivity and efficiency, as well as enabling them to monitor what the employee’s actions and which Website he or she visits. Some employees who do not use webtimeare also held accountable for their work only by their measureable productivity. This includes employees who are paid commission for sales.
How does your employer or your company track time and attendance? Today’s technological advances suggest modernizing from pen, paper, or punch to more economical systems. These same advances recommend your employer or your company gets with the times and jumps on the solution bandwagon. That is, of course, unless you, your company, or your employer wants to revert back to time and attendance tracking using the honor system—or the sun.
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