Employees are the backbone of a company and its biggest asset. Making sure that your employees are completing their tasks at the right time would be instrumental to your business success. Hence, keeping track of the working hours of the employees becomes extremely important to facilitate optimal business productivity. Employee attendance tracking and management are also important for making comprehensive records of sick leave and holidays, to see to it that each of the workers are paid appropriately.
Right from typical punch cards to contemporary access cards and biometric systems, a variety of tools are used to track employee working hours. Slowly but steadily, the process of tracking employee attendance manually is being done away with, at least in major companies and flourishing startups. After all, monitoring staff attendance has been among the most time-consuming and complex duties of the HR department.
Today a large number of businesses leverage tech-enabled attendance management system to maintain accurate data on employee attendance, working shifts, leaves, and more.
Employee attendance management: A brief introduction
In the simplest terms, attendance management can be referred to tracking employee login time, working hours, breaks, departures, and time-offs, to make sure that they are compensated properly and are delivering the desired level of productivity.
Traditional, manual timekeeping practices were quite time-consuming, complex and took a toll on employee productivity. It also leads to the issues of inaccuracies and timesheet tampering, for which companies might have to deal with payroll errors, compliance concerns, and more. Replacing paper-based timesheets with new-age tech-enabled attendance management system allows companies to cut down administrative work, save time, eliminate process bottlenecks, and maintain accurate attendance records. There is always a chance for human errors when the attendance of the employees is recorded manually. Electronic attendance management systems, on the other hand, provide assurance of absolutely accurate records and data.
Reasons why companies need an attendance management system
- Tracking employee performance: Daily employee attendance is an immensely important metric for measuring their performance and productivity. The time and effort put in by them on a regular basis are reflected in their results. If you observe that employee productivity or performance has reduced, it can often be attributed to their absence in the workplace. With the proper record of their attendance, your team can be held accountable for their performance. An attendance management tool or system would document the clock-in and clock-out time of employees every day, and hence can provide perfect records of their presence at the workplace. Therefore, HR managers do not have to spend hours going through excel sheets or paperwork to find such details.
- Payroll processing: Attendance and payroll go hand-in-hand. In order to calculate the exact sum of money you need to pay the employees; accurate attendance records would be necessary. The details you would need include the paid time-offs, half-days, overtime worked by the employee, leaves, vacations, and more. A good tech based system for attendance management would provide you with all such details within minutes. Many of such systems can also be integrated with a payroll module. Hence, whenever you calculate the monthly payroll, the system would automatically take the factors mentioned above into consideration prior to coming up with the right amount of salary for each employee. When you follow such a systematic and well-defined approach, no employee will get the chance to complain about miscalculations or errors in the final salary.
- Calculating absenteeism: While employee absenteeism is not uncommon for any business, high rates can actually cause a huge amount of loss for a business. There usually are both indirect and direct costs incurred by businesses in case their employees show absenteeism patterns. Therefore, it is immensely important to monitor the presence and absence of the employees in a proper manner. Handling this task manually can be a huge burden for HR managers as they have a number of other responsibilities to deal with. To make things easier, the task of calculating absenteeism can be left to automated attendance systems that display the days absent by employees quite easily. Having all the data in front would allow you to analyze the patterns properly and hold the relevant employees accountable. In case they breach your company policy, you may even opt to relieve them of their duties to prevent further losses to your company.
Each and every company has to properly keep track of how their employees spend their time, particularly when they work with clients, and provide services at an hourly rate. A proper attendance management system becomes important in billing clients and calculating employee salaries, while also reducing the time and effort the HR department has to spend on attendance management activities. Problems like delays in overtime payment, buddy punching, and absenteeism, can also be eliminated by removing the manual strategy, thereby allowing your business to be more productive.
