Five Ways to Improve Your Company’s Time and Attendance

It’s become easier than ever to manage workers’ time and attendance in an efficient, fast and smart way, which has the potential to significantly improve productivity and profit.

Time and attendance technology for facilities management has come a long way over the last decade. That’s largely thanks to the increased availability of affordable Wi-Fi, SIM cards, data and connected systems, all accessible via the Cloud, making it possible for you to run your operation from almost anywhere.

In this article, we look at five ways technology can help you improve the time and attendance of your workforce — and therefore productivity and profit.

1. No more chasing your employees for timesheet

At the end of the week, two weeks or a month, all employees need to submit their completed timesheets to you. It sounds simple, yet every week when it comes to do payroll, you know at least one person will have left for the weekend without turning in a completed timesheet or didn’t even do one to begin with. Correcting timesheet problems costs you time. The easier you make it for employees to track their time, either through a mobile app or self-service portal, the less time you spend taking care of missing and incomplete timesheets.

2. Reduce admin costs

We all know how inefficient manual payroll processing is. After collecting all your employees’ timesheets, you then need to check the submissions, then is the inevitable round of amends from where employees have forgotten to accurately record their time. Finally, after all of that, the data needs to be entered into the payroll system. Even with physical timecards, they may by cheap to implement and maintain, there’s a widely accepted benchmark in data entry of one mistake per 100 keystrokes.

Implementing a computerised clocking system immediately cuts down on admin and reduces risks associated with errors by automatically transferring every clock-in and clock-out directly to your payroll system for processing.

3. Track, measure and report time and attendance

One of the benefits of good time and attendance technology is the ability to analyse your records and identify trends in employee absences. After all, everybody knows someone who regularly phones in sick when they likely aren’t. In fact, a quarter of organisations report that non-genuine time-off is one of their top five causes of short-term absence.

Now you can increase the efficiency of your workforce by taking note of frequent offenders and taking action. For example, if somebody regularly gets stuck in traffic in the mornings, schedule them for duties outside of rush-hour, or if a worker is regularly taking time off for non-genuine absences you can discipline them.

4. Time and attendance tools in your hands

Time and attendance applications give your employees access to their schedules anywhere at anytime, and on nearly any mobile device. Tools like this allow you to publish schedules, and along with many other HR functions, direct your workforce via mobile phones that use branded apps to deliver a connected experience. And there’s also the ability to put the clocking-in and clocking-out function in your employees’ hands too, eliminating the excuse of forgetting to record their timesheets.

5. Reduce “Buddy Punching”

Time theft is a common problem for employers, resulting in losses.

Although “buddy punching”, or employees clocking-in and clocking-out for each other, may only result in a few hours extra pay, over weeks and months, that certainly adds up. The American Payroll Association reports that time theft can cost companies up to 7% of their gross annual payroll.

Using biometrics as part of your time and attendance solution means that staff can’t cheat the system by clocking-in and out on behalf of someone else. Biometrics means you have the technology to identify and verify exactly who submitted the time and attendance data.