5 Tips to Get Your Staff to Fill Their Employee Timesheets

Digital or paper, it doesn’t matter. Despite the reminders, the memos, the encourage, your staff simply refuses to fill in their employee timesheets. Whether it is out of frustration or just sloth-like behaviour, your personnel are not getting in their timesheets, which then prompts them to complain about their paycheque not being correct. Go figure! Well, perhaps there is a solution to this nonsense: improve the template of timesheets.

This may seem superfluous and time-consuming, but it could help you and your team get on the same page in completing employee timesheets. Will it work? It’s worth trying!

So, what exactly can you do? What changes, inputs or additions can you make? Here are five tips for getting your staff to fill their employee timesheets:

1. Make Them Easier & Simpler

When something is complicated, then it makes it that much harder to complete. You don’t that to be the case with your employee timesheets.

Ultimately, your employee timesheets need to be easy to fill out and simpler to submit. This could consist of creating a timesheet that simply includes what time the employee started and when they finished, while simply handing or emailing it in to the supervisor on duty.

Voila. You didn’t need algebra or coding to get the job done.

2. Remain Flexible About Time

A common issue that impacts employee timesheets is the paucity of flexibility about time. Oftentimes, it can be hard to keep track. Other times, it can create headaches office-wide.

The rudimentary solution is this: start becoming flexible about time.

For instance, your office policy could be this: two 15-minute breaks (10:15 to 1:30; 2:45 to 3:00 p.m.) and one 30-minute lunch break 12:30 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.). The hours will depend on your office, but this makes the entire process of monitoring time that much easier.

3. Establish Automated Reminders

Perhaps staff members just need a little reminder to get the timesheet done.

Do you think it would be prudent to establish automated reminders? Sure!

Here is what you could do: send two or three emails throughout the day, reminding everyone to fill in those timesheets (you can eliminate this if you reach a compliant rate of 95 percent).

At 9:30 a.m., you can send a reminder, which is then followed by one after lunch and another one an hour before everyone leaves work. This should certainly be a success.

4. Forego the Reward & Penalty System

Think dangling the carrot in front of the donkey will result in getting timesheets filled in? Nope.

A lot of companies implement the reward/penalty system to achieve the desired result. Experts note that this should be avoided as much as possible because it will only produce even more problems – we also can’t forget the administration costs of keeping track of such things.

Simply put: don’t reward employees who submit timesheets on time (an extra 15 minutes on their paycheque) and don’t penalize staffers if they don’t submit timesheets on time (withholding paycheques)

Plus, an unintended consequence of this could breed resentment among personnel.

5. Is it Time to go Automation?

Automation has saved offices a lot of money over time. Isn’t time you follow suit?

In the end, maybe it is time to implement automation for your timesheets and time tracking. By doing this, you reduce administrative costs, you eliminate the manual processes, you slash the odds of human errors and you can allocate the time saved to more important work.

You can install a Software as a Service (SaaS) for your automated timesheets. Doesn’t this sound amazing? It certainly does!

Employee timesheets may seem as antiquated as the old employee time cards that you would clock in and out when you would arrive and leave work. That said, should you decide to keep the current system intact, you need to adapt the situation, persevere with new and modified methods. In the end, if you automate, become flexible and remind employees, then you should have no reason to adopt any other system since it is a perfect success.