Kronos Eats Little Kids!

The Greek titan of time, “Kronos” (or Cronus) in addition to spawning the name of the company we all know and love, also had many children. Most of these he ate. Or at least swallowed until, Zeus, one of the survivors grew up and forced Kronos to disgorge his siblings. Such abuse was apparently common during the so called Golden Age of Greek mythology.  Another famous Greek, Plato, is known for his own perspective on the abuse of things… namely poets and or poetry. Apparently much nerdier folks than I have spilled a lot of ink debating whether Plato disliked poetry or the poets themselves. As far as I have read he never ate any of them. Plato did, however, coin a very interesting (dare I say poetic) admonition: “Banish the abuse, not the thing”. 

If you are having a hard time connecting all this with Kronos Workforce TimeKeeper I know just how you feel. I was in a Guitar Forum of all places when I started reading a thread asking about people’s experience with ‘Kronos timekeeping system at work’.  Quite frankly ‘Kronos’ got a fair amount of abuse from many of the responders. One complained about having a tiny window of time to clock in, another the amount of keystrokes needed to login or make a change, and another about how paranoid management must be to install fingerprint readers. Of course, none of these evils are inherent to Kronos but rather a particular implementation. I wanted to shout “εξορίσει την κακοποίηση δεν το πράγμα!” (Banish the abuse not the thing) but I might as well be speaking Greek to them. Oh wait, that is Greek. This got me wondering who hates Kronos and why? (Reference the Timekeeping system not the voracious namesake titan ) 

Go ahead… search the web for “Hate Kronos”,  “Kronos Sucks” and any other malevolent term you think your company’s web-filter will let you search on. See what things people are complaining about, as I did, and see if you find much that can actually be blamed on the software or clocks and not the implementation.

Go Ahead… I’ll wait.

Okay. Did you find the phlebotomist who said “I hate Kronos, and I hate myself for not being able to remember to use it. And I hate Kronos for making me feel this way even more.”[1]  Did you wiki the word Phlebotomy and find out that it comes from the Greek “to cut a vein”?

Now my colleagues, clients and I have all had our frustrations with various aspects of Kronos Workforce TimeKeeper, Attendance, Activities, HR, clock hardware, documentation, personnel, management and those straps on my Kronos Works 2011 iPad holder that cover the slider switch. These are all far from perfect. But most of the complaints I have seen on the web and with customers are due to poor implementation choices or, just as often, bad business policies and procedures that shouldn’t be modeled in anyone’s timekeeping system.  

Got a different view? If you do, comment below or drop me an email. Right now I have to go pick up my kids and grab a bite. (You see how myths get started!)

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