Employees who arrive late, take longer than permitted for their lunch breaks or slip out of work early, can cost your business dearly, with up to 20 hours of productivity being lost in some cases. So, what can you and your business do to help prevent this and get back all those lost hours? The solution is to make your employees more accountable by implementing an effective time and attendance management system.
What is a time and attendance management system?
These systems are used by businesses large and small to enable their employees to clock in and out of work electronically, and this is usually via time clocks, computers connected to the internet, a variety of mobile devices and telephones. The data that is collected from the time management system is then fed into software that can be swiftly, and effortlessly transferred into the company’s payroll solution without even having to touch a button.
But these time and attendance management systems have the capacity to do much more than simply track when employees arrive at work, and when they leave, they can also:
- Use geolocation and geofencing to closely monitor mobile employees
- Provide business owners with accurate, real time data related to the comings and goings of staff; whether they arrived at all, showed up late or who may be nearing over time
- Effectively manage paid time off
- Give detailed data related to labour
- Help to create schedules for employees
How can a time management system make payroll easier?
Most systems that effectively monitor time management can be tailored to fit the specific requirements of each business, and when that business is ready to run payroll, the employee’s hours are already in the payroll system. In this way, accuracy and productivity, not to mention the reliability of payroll, is made much simpler, and enables managers and their teams to spend time on other important aspects of the business while freeing up finances that can be put to better use elsewhere.
Old systems of time and attendance meant gathering time sheets at the end of every week or month, calculating the hours and then adding all that data into the payroll system. This was a time-consuming process that wasn’t always accurate, either, whereas modern time management solutions make the entire process far swifter and far more accurate.
How do time management solutions impact upon employees?
The most obvious impact that an effective time management solution can have on an employee is that their payday experience becomes much improved. Their pay-check will accurately reflect the hours that they have worked, and their pay will appear in their account in a timely manner, enabling them to rely on this to pay their own bills on time and to more effectively manage their own finances.
Without an effective time-management solution, there is the potential for employees to be less productive while at work, since they are unable to rely on an accurate pay check, there is perhaps less motivation for them to work hard. This negativity can quickly spread too, and before you know it, you could have a wholly disgruntled and unproductive workforce on your hands.
You can clearly see that having an accurate and effective time and attendance management system is the only way of guaranteeing that your employees receive their pay on time and that it truly reflects the hours that they have worked. Not only that, but it’s the simplest solution to a complicated and time-wasting payroll system, and since payroll is such a vital element of any business, it’s crucial that you get it right.