Organizations prosper when their employees work to the best of their abilities. At the same time, an organization that implements a way to track its employees’ attendance can surely benefit from enhanced profitability and reputation.

Attendance management is an excellent way to track your employees’ attendance and punctuality. What is it, you ask?

Attendance Management, by definition, is the process of tracking your employees’ attendance to minimize the loss in productivity, while also monitoring employee absenteeism. Employers can keep track of employee report timings, especially in cases of non-exempt employees, who are required to be present at all times to serve customers.

When attendance management first started gaining momentum amongst organizations, employees’ attendance was tracked using physical registers or excel sheets. As times have advanced, digitization of this process has become the norm. Finding efficient ways to track your employees’ attendance will help you understand the data with a lot more clarity.

What Are the Common Problems Faced by Employers with Their Current Attendance Management Systems?

Those employers who have not yet shifted to incorporating an attendance management software may currently be facing the following problems:

• Physical attendance registers – An outdated way of keeping track of your employees is by using attendance registers or punch cards. Even if employees follow up diligently, it becomes very time-consuming for the employer to track each and every person’s time spent at work – including overtime.

• Excel sheets – Although excel sheets go a step ahead and help you maintain a digitized version of your attendance register, these sheets are still maintained by human effort. Small errors on the part of the team responsible for looking after attendance will make your efforts go in vain.

• Biometrics – Biometrics requires the employees to be physically present at the office to register their attendance for the day. Moreover, these machines require offices to buy and maintain various other equipment and technical assistance tools to ensure that it works efficiently.

• On-site attendance issues – Not all employees may be working from the same office location, and for those who don’t, it becomes burdensome to log in their attendance manually for on-site days.

For all these reasons and more, companies need to shift their focus to attendance management software and witness its benefits first-hand.

Key Features of Attendance Management Systems

Technology has evolved at lightning-fast speeds in the past decade, and as of 2020, we are looking at software that can make our lives much easier. The same applies to tools that are used to record attendance. The range of attendance management software available today includes on-premise software, as well as cloud-based tools that incorporate advanced analytics along with automated schedule configuration.

The main benefit of these cloud-based attendance management systems is the enhanced flexibility it provides, along with the optimization of costs. 

Here are some of the key features that your employee attendance system needs to have:

Clocking in/out

Employees can use magnetic card readers or their mobile phone numbers to clock in and out of a workday. These tools allow employees to even use their cards for registering break periods so that employers can remain aware of their productivity throughout the day. Card readers are a highly-preferred tool because they reduce the risk of proxy attendance.

Leave management

When an employee doesn’t show up for work, their attendance simply cannot be marked as ‘absent.’ Employees should be allowed to apply for leave to the management if they are looking to get a day or half a day off work. Making this a regular practice will instill a sense of discipline within your workforce.

Payroll features

When the attendance management system is linked with the employee payroll, this synchronization makes it much easier for you to deduct or compensate employees’ salaries based on their attendance. It can also take into consideration approved leaves and paid time off. This feature can also prove to be very handy in organizations that offer hourly compensations.

Report generation

Using advanced employee attendance management systems will help your HR team make use of the given data in a much better way. These reports will come in explorable formats and will provide each and every detail necessary for the HR team to analyze and maintain proper employee attendance.

Missed clock-in

Oftentimes, employees may clock in for the workday and rush to leave without clocking out for the day. They may not even clock in after taking a break. Such discrepancies can cause a loss in productivity. An efficient attendance management system can alert the managers or authorities of such instances and pave the way for appropriate action.

Employee self-service

The self-service feature is slowly being adopted by a lot of companies around the globe. Employees no longer need to stand at the office doorway to clock in for work. They can do the same at the comfort of their desks (even during remote work) with the help of an app or a browser. Employees can see their work schedules and make corrections without the need for a manager to overlook the situation.

Advanced analytics

With the help of advanced analytics, employers no longer need to single-handedly go over every employee’s attendance records to observe any patterns. If some employees are working over-time or are not putting in enough hours, advanced analytics will highlight those patterns for you so that immediate action can be taken.

Reasons Why Companies Invest in an Attendance Management System

Companies today are opting for advanced attendance management systems for a variety of reasons –

• It helps to enhance transparency in your entire attendance management process. You can make informed business decisions and enhance your overall productivity.

• Avoids the need for employees to opt for manual tracking, which often creates a lot of discrepancies in the process.

• When attendance management data is not secured and allows employees or any other party to modify or make changes to the confidential data easily, an advanced attendance management system can keep important data protected and give access to only those who need it.

• With the help of an efficient attendance management system, you can incorporate important functionalities that are essential to the workforce of today. These include – multi-level approaches, biometrics, as well as mobile submission.

• Employees often choose to help one another by ‘buddy punching’, which means that a co-worker can punch in for you if you’re running late on any given day. These compliance risks can be mitigated with the help of advanced attendance management software.

• If you are working in the service sector, you can avoid problems associated with scheduling and headcount shortages. 

• In the long run, you can avoid any complications associated with labour laws. When a company displays inaccuracy with regards to maintaining proper employee records, it can be a violation of certain labour laws. Keep your business safeguarded by using accurate attendance management tools.

• With several companies exploring more remote working options, opting for a cloud-based attendance management system can come very much in handy to record clock-in timings.

Benefits of an Efficient Attendance Management System

When you invest in an ideal attendance management system, you can be assured of maintaining compliance within your workforce. Here are some of the biggest advantages of having an ideal attendance management system –

Accuracy

Automated attendance management systems eliminate the need to check and cross-check all attendance records multiple times. Everyone is prone to make errors, but a fully automated system helps you avoid even the smallest lapses.

Optimization of costs

Your business may be losing out on money simply because of a workforce that is left unmonitored. Habits like buddy punching, inaccurate time reporting, time abuse, overpayment, and absenteeism can be carefully monitored and rectified with the help of the right systems.

Offers better insights

With just a few clicks, an advanced attendance management software can help you attain monthly reports, summarized data, and graphical views of all the employee attendance patterns. Utilizing this data, you can make plenty of changes to your attendance management program and incorporate more transparency within the organization. You can make all the necessary changes to improve workplace policies, office culture, leave management, and so on.

Improvement in organizational performance

Overall, your company will stand to do better because attendance control helps you enforce a workplace culture that thrives on productivity. It helps you achieve your organizational goals with fewer hassles along the way.

Conclusion

Today, organizations are focused on maintaining a balance between employee welfare and organizational productivity. An ideal attendance management system can go a long way in helping you get tailor-made reports that can make you understand your organization with much more clarity. In the long run, you will be benefitted from better outputs, improved cost control, lowered data redundancy, and better value for all of your employees’ time.

With the help of talenx.io’s data-driven approach, you can create an optimal workforce that suits all of your organizational needs.