Stephanie Friedman, vice president of marketing, said the old space was a maze with differently-sized offices, and the new space has all new furniture and modern, open spaces.

 

"Our new office allows for a breakroom, which we never had in the 100 years we were on First Avenue North," she said. "We have a showroom, which allows for a creative display of our work for our clients."

 

The move has come with ambition: the company has hired two new employees and there are plans to add more over the next 6 – 12 months. 

 

"We are currently on-boarding some new customers, as well as a few new employees," she said. "Now that we are all moved in, it’s time for us to close out 2018 with a bang and anticipate a very exciting 2019 year ahead. Our team is more rejuvenated and inspired than ever and our new office space has been instrumental in creating that energy. It’s amazing to witness how people are collaborating who may not have done so in the past. Even something as small as coffee shared in the break room has sparked the most intriguing conversations." 

 

It was difficult for the company to give up their previous premises, which were ten times older than many companies operating today, but the company decided that the potential morale boost and improved customer service would be worthwhile. It was vital to them that they stayed in Birmingham. 

"We love this city. To be honest, it was a difficult decision for us to move out of downtown Birmingham," she said. "Our warehouse is still on First Avenue North next to our old building. That being said, we are 121 years old. After a century in the same building, we knew it was time to invest in our future and to do this, we needed a little face-lift to match the company we are becoming. We knew we needed to be within an easy driving distance to our warehouse but wanted more of an office building environment. We could not be happier."

 

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City Paper Co. had a great reason for moving and defying tradition, and the benefits of doing so outweigh their sadness at leaving their century-old premises. They will even get some staffing increase from it!

 

However, an area which is often overlooked as companies expand and grow is how they measure their time and attendance. This is particularly important if they are also recruiting new staff, since this puts more strain on existing processes.

 

The least effective form of time and attendance management is still practiced by hundreds of companies all over the country – the self-reporting paper timesheet.

 

The process typically goes like this: every week or month an employee hand-writes on a printed sheet how many hours they worked on which days during that period. 

 

As you can imagine, this is very likely to lead to people forgetting exact details of their shifts (not to mention being a massive waste of paper). Inexact time and attendance management can lead to potential infringements of the Working Time Directive, amongst other issues like tax discrepancies due to incorrect payslips. 

 

Once the first hurdle of employee submission is cleared, this method still has problems up ahead. The next stage is that somebody needs to collect all of those individual timesheets and enter all that data number by number into a spreadsheet in order to send it to the payroll software for processing. 

There are a number of workarounds to these problems. Letting employees submit timesheets via email gets rid of the handwriting and environment issues, and making your employees fill in their entrance and exit times on a sign-in/sign-out sheet on the desk makes it less likely they will forget what they have worked. 

 

However, the best solution is to centralise and automate both those parts of the process. With our clocking stations and top-quality time and attendance software, we can do exactly this. 

 

Employees no longer have to spend time and energy filling in the forms, because all they need to do is just clock in or out using their smartcards or fingerprints. The process is over in less than a second, and the data is then automatically sent to the central Tensor.NET database. 

 

Payroll staff no longer need to squint at bad handwriting and hope that this number is a 7, not a 1, because the collected data can be exported later in the month, or whenever required, in a format suitable for all the leading payroll programs.

 

This automated time and attendance system also drastically reduces the opportunity for unscrupulous employees to commit wage fraud. They can’t pretend to have someone else’s fingerprints!