Quiet Quitting And Time Theft Issues With Employees

I really love all my employees. However, sometimes employees will try to take a mile if you give them an inch. Running a business is hard, and with the rise of quiet quitting, I figured it might be important to talk about ways that employees may try to take advantage of you or your business.

Some of these issues might seem harmless. Other issues are solely my fault. However, for a business all the below issues matter. Quiet quitting and time theft issues really are things that you need to keep a close eye on from a practice management standpoint.

Time Tracking

We currently use QuickBooks for our payroll. A time tracking company, OnTheClock, integrates with QuickBooks.

The first 2 employees on OnTheClock are free. After that, each employee is $3 a month. This service can be set up for employees to clock in on a central device (a tablet), their computer at work, or even their phones. Most of my employees in our business like to log their hours on their phone.

Geofencing Your Office

Within OnTheClock options, there is the ability to set up your office location or GPS coordinates. You can set the radius that is GPS locked to your business so that employees can only clock in or out if they are physically present. This only applies if you allow employees to clock hours outside of a single tablet on site.

Before using OnTheClock, our employees would often forget to clock in or clock out once a week. It was becoming such a hassle for me to correct time sheet errors. Out of frustration, I started searching for a better solution online. This is how I stumbled upon OnTheClock.

Before I set up a geofence, I found out that sometimes my employees were clocking into work while they were stuck in traffic about a mile away right when it turned 8:00am. Thay way they would not get in trouble for always being slightly late to work. Since each clock in and clock out is tracked by GPS coordinates, I was able to see that employees were checking in on the interstate before even physically being in the office.

Time theft is the biggest issue you will have with your employees. Even though quiet quitting has become a popular story, time theft will be your employees biggest issue with the business. Stay on top of this since employees will try to get out every little bit of extra time they can for overtime pay or extra pay.

Error In Time Off Calculation With Quickbooks

We use QuickBooks for payroll, and it is starting to show its issues for business that scale. One of the issues with our business is the time off calculation.

In our business, we give employees 3 weeks paid time off per year. Time off is accrued per week worked. However, when I put in the maximum allowed time as 120 hours (3 weeks paid time off), I understood that to be per maximum paid hours off per year.

Wrong.

This is the maximum amount that an employee could have at any time in their “bank” of paid time off. Not a hard amount of accumulated hours off per year.

The devil is in the details and it screwed us.

Overtime Counts Time And A Half For Paid Time Off

A few months ago we realized that two employees had way more time off than others. The constant time off every other week or every third week caused us to do an audit. It turns out that one employee was using our errors to their full advantage taking over 5+ weeks of paid time off, not the 3.

This employee figured out that any hour worked added a certain number of paid time off hours to their total. Not that every work week they added paid time off to their bank of hours saved up as we intended. They also figured out that any overtime gave them paid time off at time and a half credits.

This employee never let her paid time off max out to the 120 hours we set it up. Every time she would get close, she would draw it down to less than 120 hours so that she could keep taking more time off to exploit the system.

This is how she eventually obtained over 5 weeks of paid time off in less than a year even though our agreement calls for only 3 weeks paid time off. Paying out unintended time off may be arguably much worse than quiet quitting.

Be careful calculating paid time off. We assumed that QuickBooks would calculate it like we intended to, and were very wrong.

Hour Banking

Much like doctors will “sleep bank” before a 24-hour call, another one of my previous employees found a loophole, I called it hour banking.

This employee would work a bit of overtime everyday Monday through Thursday. Any employee who works more than 30 minutes of overtime a day needs to talk to the manager. She would often clock 25-29 minutes of overtime per day Monday-Thursday.

Friday would then come around and she would request to take time off every other week with 4-6 hours of overtime saved up. This employee would then take the Friday off but only have to use 2-4 hours of paid time off rather than the full 8 hours since they had hours banked up prior to the day off.

This ex-employee exploited this system to get 6+ weeks of paid time off per year in a roundabout way.

Office Manager

One of the things that I have been extremely disappointed with is our office manager. We have given her a lot of tasks while growing our business. However, I was very upset that she did not catch all of this paid time off until my partner and I started to Audit these hours.

To my managers credit, set was set up to fail. My manager does not have access to the payroll system. She has no access to QuickBooks, where all of paid time hours off is stored. So, my manager was flying blind not knowing how many hours each employee was saving up.

I made the mistake of having my manager be in charge of something but made a huge mistake myself in not granting her any access to any of this data. I set her up to fail. After initially being upset with her, I really have no one to be upset with buy myself. I apologized, learned from it, and set clear goals going forward.

Taking Home Supplies

In our office we use voice over IP for our phones. This means our phones ring on our employees computers. Some employees requested earphones rather than the Bluetooth headsets that we have so they can on the phone without hearing other people in the room.

We obliged and bought in-ear earphones.

I was doing an audit of our purchases back in June and found that we purchased 4 times the number of headphones than we have employees. It turns out that some of the previous employees were buying headphones, taking them home, and using them for their own personal use.

While not an expensive issue, you have to keep an eye on all inventory to make sure it does not walk away to the employees home.

Quiet Quitting

While this has become a popular term lately, our office is small enough that if one person is slacking, it is immediately noticed. Luckly quiet quitting has not been a big issue for us so far. However, quiet quitting may be inevitable as we grow with some employees.

Some employees will always take advantage of your system in any way they can get away with. Always keep a vigilant eye on things to avoid the errors like I listed above. Try to occasionally do audits to keep a pulse on every aspect of your business.

If you give someone an opportunity to take advantage of you or your system, eventually someone will.

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This week may be the last week I continue this recording style type of video. Next week I plan to switch up the way I record videos since personally I find the talking head videos to be too boring. If these talking head videos such as this one is boring for me to edit, they must be boring to watch. So, I’m going to be experimenting with some changes to production styles in future videos.