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Have you ever been on the “fence?”
No, we don’t mean the “tough decision” fence—we mean a “geofence” to be more precise. Since geofencing is all about precision, it’s actually the perfect segue to better people management.
Geofencing is a virtual boundary that is created using either GPS or radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
If you’ve been near a quick-service restaurant or frankly just about any business area in the past few years, you probably have experienced geofencing firsthand whether you realize it or not.
Companies like McDonald’s are increasingly using geofencing technology to alert their stores when a person with a mobile order is approaching. According to the company, doing so can cut customer wait time by just over a minute (62 seconds). It might not seem like much, but in the world of fast food, every second counts when it comes to keeping clients happy. Not to be outdone, Burger King once held a promotion based on geofencing. If you ordered a Whopper sandwich within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, you only paid a penny. It reportedly led to 1.5 million new app downloads in the process.
Oh, and if you’ve ever seen an ad on social media related to a certain business or perhaps about a product when you’re at a conference, that type of marketing strategy is based on geofencing, too. You can even set up your own geofence through a Ring doorbell to create a virtual boundary around your property.
Without question, geofencing technology has evolved quite a bit since inventor Michael Dimino first received the patent for a “telephone operable global tracking system for vehicles” in the mid-’90s. And HR is no exception.
Time & Labor Geofencing
You know where else geofencing works really well? For tracking employees’ clocking-in and clocking-out locations at work. By including geofencing capabilities, companies can ensure an employee is where they say they are at work. In other words, employees can’t clock in when they’re still in the drive-thru lane for coffee and a pastry or head out for an early dinner and say they were still on the job.
For instance, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency’s Office of the Inspector General reported earlier this year that three employees regularly spent time at home after checking in at work, which led to a $9,004 loss for the San Francisco-based agency. For a small business in particular, this type of bottom-line hit could have a huge impact. That’s why geofencing technology is so important to have in an advanced Time & Labor solution.
Using geofencing in Time & Labor also helps reduce “buddy punching.”
It’s a tactic that has been going on for generations with one employee saying to another: “Can you do me a solid and punch in for me? I’ll be there shortly.”
The business loses in that scenario in terms of payroll but also productivity loss. It could hurt the company’s reputation, too, if the absence affects customers or even other employees.
Recent stats are hard to come by, but the American Payroll Association once reported that 2.2% of payroll losses and almost 75% of companies are affected by buddy-punching issues. A few years ago, resorts in Ocean City, Maryland, hired a private investigator to see how their seasonal workers were clocking in and out. The investigator said he found a prevalent abuse of the system with people punching in and out for their colleagues and costing companies money.
Even if buddy punching occurred just one hour a day for a worker making $15 per hour, over the course of 100 days (roughly the length of the summer season) that could cost a company $1,500. If 10 employees did that every day, that’s $15,000 for the same timeframe. And that’s just lost wages. What about the 1,500 hours of lost productivity and likely poor customer service caused by absent workers? The risk could be too much for some SMBs to survive long term.
Enter Workforce Management
So what can companies do about it? PrismHR’s new Workforce Management offers geofencing as well as industrial-grade biometric fingerprint capability built for “hard use” and facial recognition. It also is a completely integrated solution so your clients and their managers and employees can benefit from the same look and feel of their current PrismHR solution.
Ready to help your clients sniff out buddy punching and offer them the advanced scheduling options they need to run their business? Learn more about PrismHR’s Workforce Management solution in our white paper.
No reason to be on the fence about it!
