Discover what a good attendance management software looks like and how your team can reap the benefits.
Key points:
- Absenteeism is a major problem for companies.
- An attendance management system is a critical component of any company’s plan to reduce absenteeism.
- Good attendance management tools are automated, easy to use, and web-based.
On any given day, 3.6% of all full-time American workers do not show up to work. Some of these reasons are completely legitimate, like illness or disability. Others, like skipping shifts, are not. An attendance management system tracks your employees’ hours. By keeping a close eye on a workforce’s comings and goings — whether that be work hours, remote login time, breaks, or time off — HR leaders can ensure employees are working when they are supposed to be and being paid appropriately.
With a few extra tools, attendance tracking systems can also deduce patterns in an organization’s absenteeism rate and figure out how to reduce it. In the old days, employees used a timesheet or punch clock to track attendance. Today, digital software is an integral component of attendance management systems for top-performing organizations everywhere.
If you’re looking to implement an attendance management system, or simply to improve your organization’s current practices, here is everything you need to know:
Which Features Should You Expect from This Software?
Know which features you need before you make a final decision on how to manage employee attendance
There are many different attendance management system options on the market for organizations of all sizes. Regardless of whether you run a small office or a growing facility, there are some basic features any attendance management software offering should contain:
- Clocking in and out: Using a mix of physical touch screen readers, badge readers, or even geofencing, HR can quickly see when and where any team member is on-shift at any given time.
- Leave management: Track paid time off, sick leave, and other authorized absences for all of your employees.
- Payroll integration: Whenever an employee punches in, attendance management software automatically logs that data for their payroll records. That allows HR to easily see which employees didn’t finish their shifts, and which ones earned overtime pay.
- Reporting: Quickly generate reports based on absence data to help your leadership team make critical business decisions.
- Biometric attendance: Using facial recognition technology, attendance management software can confirm an employee’s identity without the need for anyone to tap a screen or push a button.
- Missed clock-in alerts: Your team will instantly know the moment anyone on a shift fails to properly clock in.
- Calendar integration: By linking to your organization’s calendar, attendance management software can ensure coverage for every shift, stay compliant with labor laws, and control overtime spending.
- Mobile and cloud storage: All data is stored through mobile or the cloud, allowing HR or leadership to check attendance from anywhere.
- Employee self-service: Employees can record their time, view their schedules, request time off, and more without HR assistance.
- Advanced analytics: HR can easily track absence plan enrollments to see when and how employees are spending their time off.
4 Steps to Effective Attendance Management
Use these steps to streamline your employee attendance tracking
Attendance management isn’t about picking out the flashiest, most feature-laden time tracking software on the market—it is more of a philosophy. Organizations need to think about four key principles when looking for a tool to track attendance:
1. Choose an Automated Time Tracking System
Timesheets and punch-clocks worked for decades, but automated attendance management software is far more accurate and efficient. It takes away the burden of daily reporting by ensuring all attendance data is automatically filed away into an organization’s records. Not only that, but it also eliminates the possibility of an employee incorrectly filling out a timesheet and creating an HR headache on payday.
In any effective attendance management system, an HR professional must be able to easily pull up all attendance records for specific departments, shifts, or even employees at a moment’s notice. Even more importantly, the HR professional needs to know that they’re accurate. The best way to ensure accuracy is through automated attendance management software.
2. Integrate Your Time Tracking with Other Applications
Most employees’ pay is tied to the number of hours they work in a given week, so good attendance management requires a system capable of translating absence rates into up-to-date pay stubs. Conversely, employees who work overtime need to be fairly compensated.
Attendance management goes beyond calculating pay. For example, fair scheduling laws require organizations to ensure they aren’t giving too many shifts to the same employee. Achieving compliance requires an organization’s attendance management system to integrate with shift calendars. HR managers must be able to compare scheduled hours versus the schedule an employee actually worked.
3. Prioritize Employee Convenience
If your employees cannot easily log their hours or request time off, your attendance management system is bound to fail. There is no way you can reduce absenteeism if the punch-ins and punch-outs collected by your system are unreliable. Using intuitive software your employees quickly grasp is one of the best ways to ensure your system gives you the most accurate picture of your workforce’s attendance.
4. Move from Traditional Information Storage to Cloud-Based Storage
Storing all attendance information on a digital system, rather than banks of servers on-premises, is very important for any modern enterprise. Not only does it save employees and HR managers valuable time, but it also centralizes all relevant data on one system that is accessible anywhere with an internet connection.
How SentricHR Can Help
If you’re looking to improve your organization’s attendance management practices, cut down on absenteeism, and free up your HR team to do more than just fill out paperwork, SentricHR is the way to go. With a human resources information system capable of integrating absence management with all other critical HR functions, from payroll to ACA compliance, you’ll always be on top of absenteeism.
Contact a SentricHR representative today to learn more.
