How can you prevent time theft and buddy punching?

To prevent time theft and buddy reporting, the first and foremost thing is to cleary communicate your organization's policies and consequences upon breach of those policies. Clear cut policies help to mend behaviours among emoloyees. Also, make regular auditing of employee's time as a part of your policy. So, checks happen frequently and it will create an psychological impact on potential policy violators.

We have plenty of products available for bio metric punching. It will help to prevent buddy punching. Also, thru' geo tagging and geo restrictions on logins of mobile apps, we can prevent wrong punching by field employees who are supposed to report at a specific location. It will also help to capture accurate timing and locations.

As mentioned earlier, auditing should be part of policy. Regular audit thru' various reporting tools which are widely available on timekeeping and WFM products are very helpful. We can automate notifications and alerts for missed punches, unscheduler punches or excessive overtimes. This will make manager pro active to check time of their empoloyees and also make employees cautious if they are doing mis reporting.

Now a days, flexible work culture is important and almost become integral HR policy part. Not all industries can give this benefits and they can try to flexible at policy level while implementing. One aspect is schedule. Like if emloyees want to change shifts or swap with others, they should be allowed. For this, they can take help of available scheduling prodcuts like UKG Advance scheduling which provides all possible feature for modern workplace. It helps in automatic scheduling based on forecast of past sales/customer footfalls and labor requirements. It uses machine learning alogrithms to calculate future trends and adjust schedules.It also provides features like shift swap, On-Call List, open shift, to set availability of employees.

To curb time theft and buddy punching, maybe we should start by creating a workplace where trust isn't just a buzzword. If employees genuinely feel valued and trusted, perhaps they wouldn't resort to such antics. Recognizing those who adhere to the rules can inspire others as well - never underestimate the power of a pat on the back! Let's face it - if the work environment was truly engaging and employees were happy, we probably wouldn't even be having this conversation. It's high time the company took a hard look at the work culture we're cultivating, aiming for one where employees don't feel the need to beat the system in the first place ??

One might want to consider leading by context and not control. Organisations pay for work and not for time. Paying for time, leads to more employees bucking the system, leading to tighter controls, and so on.

To me, 'Buddy Punching' often demostrates a strong team work spirit and solid trusting relationship at the workplace. To me, theft case can be prevented if the company able to compensate their employee with their own manufactured products as gratis of gratitude or token of appreciation for free to thanks for their dedication at work to uplift their motivation. Employee Appreciation is very important to drives long term succeed for any working environment and should be practiced. In general, a warmed workplace avoid negativities.