As a manager, how hard is it to get your personnel to complete their daily or weekly employee timesheets? Be honest now!

Despite the frequent reminders, the software upgrades, and the initial training, your employees aren’t filling in their timesheets. What could you possibly do?

For whatever reason, a handful of your staff members refuse to submit their timesheets on time or accurately. Of course, without the timesheets, it will be difficult for them to get paid. It can seem like they don’t want to get paid and prefer to work for free. So, that’s good for you! But you’re not in business to take advantage of staffers who don’t know any better.

Your office can employ some simple but effective measures to see an increase in submissions.

Here are five tips to make your employee timesheet easy to complete:

1. Keep it Simple for Staff

When something is difficult to do, it is less likely to be done. That is just human nature.

That said, the necessary remedy would be to make your employee times simple for staff to comprehend and complete. You don’t want to be written in Latin, or to be calculated using advanced calculus. All the employee timesheet should entail are the hours worked, the tasks completed, and what breaks they took.

Done!

2. Make it All Digital

Many offices still rely on paper timesheets to calculate hours and pay employees. This is inefficient, and will inevitably serve as a headache for administration – not to mention the added costs of having to file paperwork!

It is essential, particularly with today’s younger generation of tech-savvy workers, to have your employee timesheets in a digital format. Therefore, the company should institute a digital spreadsheet, an employee timesheet software (see below), and an online submission program.

This eliminates the clutter of paperwork, the headache of filing timesheets, and enhances use of the cloud (if employees forget to submit their timesheet on Friday night, then they can hand it in on a Saturday morning).

3. Flexibility is Key to Completion

Should you be stringent on hours? Should you dock every break and trips to the bathroom? If you do, then this will not only produce resentment for the employees, it will also cause difficulties in crunching the numbers.

It is important to be flexible.

If a worker is hired to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and they work those hours, except they come in from lunch a couple of minutes late, it is OK to be flexible. Perhaps you should remind the individual on a few occasions, but don’t force staffers to add every minute gained or lost.

4. Is a Reward System Necessary?

A growing number of businesses are implementing a reward system to accomplish certain workplace objectives. Is it time for your company to incorporate a reward system to increase employee timesheet submissions?

Perhaps!

For instance, if you had a submission rate of 90 percent, and you wanted to get it there to 100 percent, then you could reward your workers who have a 100 percent success rate for the month. The reward could be a $2 Tim Hortons gift card, or the benefit of leaving one hour early on the final Friday of the month.

5. Employee Timesheet Software

There are plenty of paid, open source, and free employee timesheet software. You can utilize these types of software in your business – large or small – to boost the compliance rate for your employee timesheets. This is something that your company should certainly think about.

If your business is on a tight budget, then you can take advantage of limited employee timesheet software. However, if you have a little bit of leeway, then you should mull over the pros and cons of paid software. Before you know it, you will notice a substantial jump in the success rate.

Why is it so hard to get workers to send over their timesheets? That is certainly a great question, especially considering that it is critical for hourly workers to get their wages for the week or last two weeks. But to avoid frustrations, arguments, and headaches, you can employ several measures to encourage staff to give you their timesheets.

Whether it’s a reward system or timesheet software, there are many worthy methods to use.