Alternative To Recording Hours?

[Jasmine Zhou]

We don't use attendance to measure the quantity of people's work so much as their willingness and ability to commit. If, for your team, hours put in is correlated with quantity of work (in some units), then perhaps you can trust the work to someone who doesn't have all the other responsibilities of team leadership, and perhaps you don't need to keep track of things on an hourly basis. I'd imagine that there's probably not a justifiable difference between someone who put in 125 hours during build season and someone who put in 127 hours during build season anyways, since that could easily be the result of rounding over several weeks.
For each of the past two years we have designated someone (who is given the unofficial title of secretary and a couple of other responsibilities) to take attendance, making note of latecomers. Both years it started out as calling out names and by about a month in turned into the secretary checking people in by sight. We have a spreadsheet with names, dates, and people being present, absent, or tardy (1, 0, T to easily add sums when we're making decisions). Because meetings have an expected duration, and school day meetings are about half those of weekend ones for us, we can weight the meetings accordingly. A similar spreadsheet is (or should be) maintained for our regular fundraising efforts.
This doesn't preclude people leaving early or five minutes into the meeting, but we haven't had problems with that so far since people have usually been too lazy to game the system, and there are the occasional end-of-meeting check-ins to catch that.

(P.S. sanddrag, that's an awesome system. Once I'm on a computer that actually has Excel, I'm going to play with it some more and see if our next year's secretaries would like to use a similar system.)

[MamaSpoldi]

Our team website includes a clock-in mechanism for the students. They clock-in when they arrive and clock-out before they leave. When clocking out they also select a mentor that they have worked with during their time that day and enter a short note which details the work they performed that day. This serves as a reminder to the mentor (who may have worked with several students) to make sure the student gets "credit" for all they did. The mentor then qualifies the hours for all the students who selected them by scoring their performance in several categories including leadership, productivity, and cleanup . These scores are then multiplied by the number of hours they were there to arrive at their qualified hours score. This number is then used to define a cut-off line when determining attendance at travel events.

In addition the mentor provides feedback to the student in the form of a message with suggestions for improvement, praise of effort, or whatever the situation warrants.

[DonRotolo]

In addition to hours of attendance, we measure quality: Every student gets two "performance reviews", either of which could prevent them from traveling.

The first review is in week 2, and here we focus on opportunities for improvement (if any), or just reaffirm they are on the right path. The second review in week 5 checks if they fixed any challenges they were having or not.

Reviews are carried out by the student team leader with a mentor present. We have a rubric (a kind of checklist) with specific examples of poor, acceptable and excellent behaviors. It's not very subjective, but that can't be eliminated entirely.

Virtually every student with a 'need improvement' review in week 2 cleans up their act by week 5. Some do drop off the team though.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by MamaSpoldi

Our team website includes a clock-in mechanism for the students.

Can you explain more on the technical side of how this is set up on your website?

[MamaSpoldi]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Can you explain more on the technical side of how this is set up on your website?

Unfortunately, I am not very knowledgeable about the internal workings of the website. Here is what I do know. It is written in PHP. It includes a database of those with team logins and their designation as a student, mentor, parent, alumni. The student must login and then clock-in which records the time that they began working that day. At the end of the day they login again and clock out which records the time that they finished work that day and calculates the number of hours worked. [Note that students can only clock in or out from the computers at the high school where we meet. I believe this is controlled using the IP address.] On the clock out screen the student is also required to select a mentor from a drop down list (which is formed from the database of those designated as mentors). The student is also presented with a box where they can type whatever info they want to provide to that mentor.

When the mentor logs in they are provided with a list of the students that have selected them as their mentor. Each entry shows the mentor the clock-in and -out time as well as the calculated number of hours. Note that the number of hours can be adjusted by the mentor if the student failed to clock-in when arriving or forgets to clock out before leaving. It also shows them the comment from the student. The mentor is also presented with radio buttons where they can select the ratings for the different categories being rated. They can only select one rating per category. The mentor is also given a comment box where they can leave a message to the student. This message is generally an assessment of their performance and can include praise or suggestions for improvement where needed. Mentors are requested to login at least once a week to qualify hours.

Hope this info help you. Sorry I cannot be more technical on the implementation on the website.