Wondering how to stop employee turnover? It could be as simple as improving your timekeeping.
When you have a team of cleaning professionals who work well together, everything is easy. Your customers are happy, your schedule is full, and your inspections are flawless. But to achieve that, you need to figure out how to stop employee turnover.
Employee turnover in the janitorial industry is notoriously high. And every time someone leaves your commercial cleaning company, you have to start from scratch with hiring, training, and onboarding new people.
You’ll always have people who will leave your company for any number of reasons, but you can still focus on employee retention. A stable crew is good for business. But… you have to take steps to make that happen, and there’s a lot more to it than just hiring the “right” people.
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Find out how to stop employee turnover with one simple change in your system
When we think about how to stop employee turnover, there are far too many business owners and managers that feel as though that’s entirely out of their control. They assume people will do what they’re going to do. Or there’s an attitude that comes from a place of defensiveness.
This may come out in statements like, “They knew what the job was and what it paid, so if they’re not happy, that’s their problem.” If you haven’t said this, you’ve probably heard it from someone. Unfortunately, that gets you nowhere except back in your office typing up “help wanted” ads.
Let’s look beyond that, though. You don’t have to search very hard to find stories of workers who have left jobs because they weren’t getting paid correctly. Yes, some of these instances were purposeful – employers purposely paid below minimum wage, withheld pay for various “reasons,” or had some “creative” accounting where they charged employees for job-related supplies and equipment. However, these aren’t the ones we’re addressing here. That’s another topic altogether.
But payroll and timekeeping can be challenging. Even with the best of intentions and best practices, pay discrepancies happen. One of the most frequent causes of this is timekeeping issues.
People forget to clock in or out. They work overtime, but it doesn’t get into the payroll system that way. They came in to pick up a shift for a sick coworker but went straight to the job site, thinking the time would get recorded later. Or the timeclock is malfunctioning. These are all situations that lead to payroll mistakes.
If you’re lucky, your accounting person, whether that’s you or someone you’ve hired, can catch these errors and correct them. Still, mistakes slip through. Your employees may be understanding to a point, but eventually, the frustration builds up, and they start looking for other job opportunities.
So in thinking about how to stop employee turnover because of these issues, one of the best things you can do is get rid of any manual timekeeping. There are simply too many ways to make mistakes.
You have any number of options for timekeeping software. However, you also want tools that work efficiently and integrate into your system. We are biased, but janitorial management software with built-in time tracking is the way to go here.
In the case of software like Janitorial Manager, your employees have several ways to clock in and out. The easiest and most worry-free way is to use the geolocation option. Your employees are automatically clocked in when they enter a facility. Plus, you can use the information to determine whether or not your team needs help in any given location.
Your team doesn’t need to worry about logging overtime hours or remembering to clock in. It’s all done automatically. That’s one big worry taken care of for them and for you. And while this is an effective tool in figuring out how to stop employee turnover, it does a lot for you, too.
What automatic timekeeping can do for you
When you submit bids and proposals, you’re basing your rate on an estimate of hours your team needs to complete a job. Certainly, these estimates may be pretty accurate, especially if you’ve been in the industry for some time.
But we all know there are those jobs that are never quite what they seem. With automatic time tracking, you can quickly look at reports to see where there are inefficiencies or workloading issues. In addition, you can review schedules to see if you need to move employees to different locations or submit an updated bid when the contract is up.
What’s more, time tracking is only one part of the equation. You can also track inventory and equipment, so you know exactly how much you need to dedicate to any one location. Over time, your bids will become more accurate, and your profit margin will increase.
And with more accurate timekeeping, you won’t have to worry as much about how to stop employee turnover. Instead, you can focus on keeping your current employees happy and doing great work.
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