Imagine that you’ve neatly scheduled your work tasks in a particular order, and has arranged for each to be completed by a certain date. Suddenly, ad-hoc work comes from the big honcho upstairs and you start feeling puzzled. No, you’re not puzzled because of the task’s complexity. You’re simply unsure if the big guy didn’t just dump his work on you, and management wouldn't actually count that work as yours.
“Will this work really contribute to my salary?”
“Couldn’t they arrange for a system that properly gives credit when it’s due?”
“Why can’t they accurately count the hours that I work?”
Well, guess what? They can keep track of the work you do.
This is possible through job costing, an effective tool for businesses to manage their operations as it helps show how much time and labor goes into a particular ‘job’. This managerial accounting concept involves calculating specific costs that goes in an individual task, and can address two extremely important HR issues: maximizing efficiency and properly crediting work. Tackling these two issues will then help to keep operational costs low while keeping employee motivation (and productivity) high. As far as any HRM concepts go, this is pretty much the standard you and your business should shoot for.
The first HR issue, maximizing the business’ efficiencies, is achieved via two ways. Firstly, the practice of recording the hours logged into a particular task will make employees feel more accountable with their work. This, in turn, will ensure that your staff will not ‘dilly-dally’ with a task and instead complete it in a timely fashion, giving your business a level of productivity that may not have been accessible before. Another way the efficiency is improved is when management can actually account for all that are used on a single task, and lay out a feasible plan that does not waste any resources (and increase costs). Overall, both higher productivity and lower costs will mean higher efficiency for the company!
Part of a successful human resource management practice is keeping employees adequately satisfied and motivated. This is hard to do when workers are not sure if proper credit is given when due, or in other words, when workers think that the company is NOT paying them appropriately. With job costing, employees will be more assured that the company will compensate the time they put into specific tasks and this peace of mind will indirectly help avoid motivation problems. At the risk of sounding like a total HR nerd; this is exactly in line with Vroom’s expectancy theory, which states that individuals may be more motivated when they believe that there is a correlation between favorable performance and desired rewards.
Implementing this concept is easy with a comprehensive and powerful data management software such as TCMS V2 from FingerTec. All in all, job costing can very much help companies improve their daily operations in a few different aspects, benefiting both the workers and management, and ultimately better the business as a whole. When companies can deploy an automated system that keeps track of employees, the only question that they need to ask is this:
“How many hours did I put in for work today?”
A Central Solution for Time Attendance and Access Control
