Creating the Right Company Culture Minimizes Theft of Time

Charles Antis talks about company culture this month’s topic in the 3-minute video "Do you have a handle on how much time employees are paid but not productive (or all out stealing time)?

"Employee theft of time was always a concern.  National average is 20% of time is not being worked.  We switched the focus from trying to catch employees not working to putting our people first and now our business is thriving."

Charles Antis is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing. See his full bio here.

Read Video Transcribed Below:

Hi Roofers Coffee Shop, thank you for your question. "Do you have a handle on how much time employees are paid but not productive, or all out stealing time?"

I have a lot to say on that and you can use any of this, or all of this. This has always been a concern of mine because as a roofing company we have offsite labor. Statistically offsite labor, the number that comes to my brain is 20% of offsite labor is the national average of theft of hours. That means if you pay for every 10 hours of pay we employees, if we're a typical offsite labor company, 20% of it is being stolen, it's not being worked. That's a huge expense. That means 20% of our pay that we're paying out, and our burden on that labor, is being wasted. This history of Antis Roofing we've had this concern, and this struggle, my nature is to put time and emphasis on my employees, so they won't want to steal.

I have been caught, at times, penny pinching, worried so much about the bottom line that I'm chasing it. When you start doing that, you start looking to catch your people. It creates a different economy of emotion amongst your employees. In which case, you're making examples out of them, you're catching them, it's this cat and mouse game. It doesn't help your culture. My experience has been, when I put the people first, no matter what, and I'm not focused on shrinkage, or theft of hours, my experience is that this is where we thrive. Today, if I had to guess what our ... because it's hard to guess.

If I had to guess how much our theft of hours was, I would say it was under 10% I believe this because our culture is so strong, because we put our peoples first no matter what. Our emphasis on them is less about how much time they're stealing, or how much materials they're stealing, but it's all about congratulating them for doing the right thing. Our emphasis is on safety. By focusing on other compliance, like safety, I think we also emphasize a more pristine environment that allows employees to want to be honest, and want to do the right thing.

The last thing I'll say is purpose. If you can effectively bring purpose into your culture, which we have at Antis, and we believe all of our employees, we believe that they self monitor unlike they ever had at any times in their lives. Because they believe in what we're building, they believe that they're influencing the LA labor market, and the world of roofing, to a higher standard. Hopefully that's stuff that you can use for this. If you have any additional questions, please get back to me.

Goodbye, thanks.