Smart Ways to Monitor Work Attendance
Published: 13/12/2021
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Work attendance is a tricky subject that can lead to significant issues. The corporate world loses enormous amounts of money each year due to attendance-related malpractices such as buddy-punching and others. In this article, we’ll discuss how you, as a manager or a founder, can implement better work attendance monitoring practices.
You pay your staff to do the job - naturally, you expect them to fulfil that expectation. However, not everyone is genuine, and sometimes you encounter individuals who don’t uphold their end of the deal. If identified and addressed quickly, your damages will probably be limited to short-term trust issues. In the long run, however, you risk losing money, business, and clients.
Due to the dangers posed by poor work attendance, businesses have always maintained some form of attendance tracking. This, in turn, has led offenders to seek ways around these systems. Good news: there are some smart practices that are very difficult to deceive, and we are here to share them with you.
Tracking work attendance is vital for many organisations. Whether it’s to determine the wages of hourly employees, invoice clients correctly, or evaluate overall business performance, visibility of staff attendance is a crucial metric. However, traditional solutions, such as paper timesheets or card swiping, are easy to tamper with, providing inaccurate data. The best solution is to adopt work attendance tracking software.
Traditional timesheets can be very time-consuming and are particularly prone to human error when they are complex. According to statistics presented by Workpuls, 80% of the surveyed employers admitted that 80% of the timesheets they receive need correction. This, in turn, leads to delayed and sometimes incorrect payments.
The process itself is long—from filling out timesheets to handing them to the employer and calculating the total hours. Online timesheets only require employees to enter their hours. The employer or manager then gets to either approve or reject them, depending on whether the timesheet has been filled out correctly. If rejected, it becomes the employee's responsibility to amend any inconsistencies.
Another advantage of digital timesheets is that wages and holiday entitlements are calculated automatically, leaving no room for error. Timesheet Portal even allows you to create custom timesheets, addressing specific needs and complex rules that may be unique to your business.
Absenteeism, or missing work without a valid reason, is a tricky yet costly issue. It is particularly difficult to detect as it only becomes evident through patterns of absence. Moreover, if you manage to identify it, the damage has already been done.
Digital work attendance solutions come equipped with absence level calculators. This module is designed to help you identify such patterns as soon as they emerge, enabling you to address them immediately. Our software uses the Bradford Factor to manage short-term absences and alert you when they become excessive.
Adopting software that is only suitable for one purpose is a wasteful and inadequate investment, especially when the market is filled with multi-modular solutions that can serve various areas of the business. That said, attendance software can also support other processes within your organisation. Below, we will provide some examples.
The main component of attendance solutions is timesheets. Traditionally, once they are approved, payroll must calculate employee earnings according to the displayed information. This creates breeding grounds for human error.
Timesheet software that integrates with a payroll platform ensures a fluid transfer of timesheets from one solution to another, enabling the automation of wage and salary calculations. The better your solution is, the more detailed calculations can be made. Instead of only considering employee hours, more sophisticated solutions can also handle data like differentiating rates, sick pay, maternity/paternity pay, expenses, and more.
A good quality work attendance monitoring software will always include a holiday management platform. This module alone is particularly handy for the entire business. It saves employees the time of going back and forth via emails to book time off, grants them better visibility of their holiday entitlement, and keeps the team in the loop if someone is going to be absent.
For the managers, it provides better visibility into the near future regarding the staff available. Having these insights ahead of time allows them to plan the workload accordingly, minimises the risk of understaffing, and drives overall improvement in team performance.
To summarise, the best software isn’t solely focused on attendance tracking; it merely includes it as one of the modules. This can create a challenge when selecting a solution. You may not require the majority of the other features offered, and paying the full price for software that you won’t fully utilise will negatively impact your finances.
At Timesheet Portal, we have acknowledged the aforementioned issue and the significant challenge it poses for smaller businesses and startups. This is why we have developed a way to make our software accessible to organisations of any size by offering fair pricing. Since our solution is rich in features and caters to various needs and business maturity levels, we enable our customers to create their own functionality package.
This approach allows them to acquire software that includes only the necessary modules, ensuring they pay solely for the features they utilise. As they grow or require a broader range of functions, upgrading becomes a straightforward process. In this way, Timesheet Portal supports the growth of small companies without imposing unreasonable prices or undervaluing services for larger corporations.
The best way to monitor work attendance is by utilising a digital solution. If chosen wisely, the software you select will also assist with various processes across the company - so take your time to study the features, modules, and integration options offered by different solutions.
What you invest in a digital work attendance tracking platform will pay off tenfold by saving the money you would otherwise lose to absenteeism and other attendance-related malpractices.
Are work attendance issues draining your budget? Timesheet Portal will be your band-aid.