"Smart" Time Clocks Manage Employee Time More Efficiently

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Time. We fight against it everyday. Yet it is something we all seem to want and need more of. Time. And in business, it is effective time management of employees that can often mean the difference between success and failure.

Retail managers say "Time management and labor management as a cost is our biggest beast, there really is no single more important thing to our business then managing our labor costs". In the hospitality industry, these issues are especially critical because, food service managers are dealing with a labor force made up predominantly of hourly employees. Here lost time in minutes can literally translate into thousands of dollars annually. Budgeting, scheduling and manual payroll operations can also put a drain on a manager's time, keeping them from more productive pursuits in a busy retail environment. A chain of stores called Eatzi's Market recognized these difficulties, and these challenges prompted Eatzi's to install a computerized program, that automates all functions related to employee time. This represents a major leap forward form the traditional "punch-in/punch-out" time clocks. The designer of the system explains, "The system is a smart time-clock, it enables a manager to actually create a schedule in the software, then send the schedule down to the clock, and then optionally restrict the in and out punches to control early ins and early outs to eliminate employees from clocking in when not scheduled, and also to enable a manager to very quickly and easily print a series of reports at the clock to see who's currently here, who's absent, and who is supposed to be here."

According to Neil Neufeld, Assistant Manager of the Eatzi's in Dallas Texas, the advantages of this system are many. "We used to do manual tracking of time on manual time cards, so one day a week it would take a manager an entire day to go through every time card, it was a nightmare, time consuming day. Now the time saving is huge, anytime you're doing something on a computer rather then writing it'll eliminate a lot of time, everything is calculated for you so instead of having to divide or multiply, you're able to just plug in your numbers in the schedule, go back into a costing area, and it will tell you all your daily, weekly, venue or department costs. On a given day in the morning your spending 15- 20 minutes on it, so the majority of your time can be spent elsewhere rather then handwriting stuff, costing stuff out, it's all done for you very simply." And when a manager has to spend less time on these tasks, he can spend more time on the most important aspect of his job, serving the needs of his employees and his customers.

And if the freshness of the food and the service I received from a friendly and attentive staff at a recent visit to an Eatzi's is any indication, the idea is certainly working. While even our most advanced technology hasn't managed to put more hours on the clock, it certainly seems to help us make better use of the ones we have.