Running a business means having to juggle a lot of different balls in the air. Unfortunately, one of the most important is also often the easiest to neglect, and that is ensuring that you have a system in place that accurately manages your temp workers when they are on the clock, and distributes tasks quickly and easily so that everyone knows who is expected to do what, where and when.
One way to help with this process is to use new developments in software such as a workflow and time card app. It’s a 21st-century update to reliable—but slow—20th-century solution.
What Is It?
A workflow and time card app is a piece of software that combines two essential procedures of a good, organized workplace, and puts them into a centralized, easily accessible, online digital format. One aspect of this is the time card app.
This is the payment portion side of the software, and it is perfect for staff agencies that charge clients and pay workers on an hourly basis. The old notion of a punch card, clock in/clock out mechanism works perfectly well if the staff is always going to one fixed location permanently, such as a factory. However, if your workers are temp staff that comes in on request at a variety of different locations, it’s wasteful to have them come to a central office, clock in, and then drive out to the required location to start work. At best, this means you have to calculate when to start paying them by their arrival at the actual work site. At worst, you’re paying them while they’re still headed to the actual worksite, to say nothing of what happens if a request for overtime comes in from the client.
The workflow management side of the software is, as the name implies, something that helps manage the availability, allocation, briefing, and even monitoring and confirmation of work and work completion.
How Do They Work?
With the workflow management aspect, all the factors that used to require an in-person briefing at the home office, or extensive documents that needed to be sent and read by the workers can now be handled on the workflow time card app a worker carries right on the phone. For example, job assignments can be sent out to all workers with the app installed so that they can see it on their phone, and, if they want to take the job, once they do, the job is removed from the board while admin gets a notification that a job has been accepted.
Details for a job can be as minimal or as detailed as required. Everything from the worksite location, to the specific supplier to visit for materials can be included as part of the in-app briefing. Even specific details, such as requiring a photo to be submitted once a repair has been conducted, can be included as part of the job summary. Managers can even track workers on the GPS of the app and phone to keep track of their location while on the job.
The time card app means that no matter where workers are, they always have the option to clock in and clock out, and have that action registered online, at a centralized database that admin can see. This is not only more convenient; it ensures cheating on clocking in is reduced to a minimum.
For staffing companies, this is a big boost in efficiency and convenience, while deterring fraud.
