How Should You Manage Employee Time and Attendance

As an HR officer, dealing with employee time and attendance, you are having mismanagement with these affairs. Perhaps your manually-managed clock-in, clock-out, and attendance data repeatedly produce severe errors.

This creates complete chaos at month’s end, leading to wrong time tracking & salary disbursement, and owing hours miscalculation. Sometimes, these events may cause misunderstandings with employees too.

Luckily, concrete solutions exist to resolve these major drawbacks in the form of HR software. HR tools with automation power and deep data analysis ability can track your employees’ time & attendance flawlessly.

Understanding Time and Attendance Tracker

It’s often a challenge for companies to create employee schedules, track work hours, and manage time-off requests. Manually handling these tasks in spreadsheets often causes multiple errors in the records.

With a time and attendance tracker, you can optimize processes for tracking employee work hours, schedules, overtime, time-offs, and more in one central system. 

Time and attendance software offers the following perks —

• Employee overtime hours tracking
• Creating and managing employee schedules
• Tracking punch-in and punch-out
• Tracking vacation and time off requests
• Allows for remote access
• Managing documents
• Generating reports & analytics

Common Drawbacks in Time & Attendance Management

Lacking Analytics

Time & attendance analytics is the base for tracking employee hours. This encompasses analytics for attendance, entry time, exit time, break time, project timeline, and more.

Analytics allows both HR managers to create reports to monitor employee attendance. Based on that, they can process monthly salary accurately.

But many companies leverage manual time & attendance management, thereby not getting analytics to handle employee attendance & work hours.

Unapproved Overtime

Most companies pay overtime hours at a rate more than the regular hourly rate. The tantalizing offer makes many employees work overtime which sometimes leads to unauthorized overtime.

This not only costs businesses a hefty amount but also makes it difficult for managers to track overtime hours.

Remote Working Adjustment

Typically, it’s easier to track employee hours while working onsite as compared to working virtually. However, many companies are shifting to a fully or partially remote set-up, where the time & attendance management system requires a different strategy.

But all these companies can’t formulate proper strategies for precise tracking of employee time and attendance.

Lack of Automation

An automated time tracking tool monitors employees’ time and attendance and informs employers of any discrepancy in data like an extended break. However, zero to slight automation in attendance tracking causes employers to waste time in manual tracking of hours.

How should you Manage Employee Time and Attendance

Gone are the days of manual recording of employees’ attendance, work hours, entry time, and exit time. Automated HR tools have stepped in to make your job of recording employees’ daily time and attendance data a breeze.

Let me share some insights about how HR software can help you make entry of employees’ daily time and attendance info —

Track Daily Attendance

Conventional tracking involves punch cards and clocks. But manual tracking causes erroneous recording, misuse, and sometimes tampering. Many HR tools have a time-tracking feature that can display employee attendance data by tracking entry time and exit time.

The best aspect of a time-tracker in an HR tool is it automates and tracks attendance data flawlessly. Also, you can generate a monthly attendance report through your time-tracker, getting month-wise data in one place.

As your employees enter and exit the office daily, they have to punch in and out digitally from their phones or PCs through the time tracker of your HR software. The software will record the attendance data straightaway without creating any hassle.

Track Daily Work Activities

Not just attendance, a number of HR software exist that can track employees’ daily work hours. This includes tracking employee schedules, in-progress projects, break hours, overtime hours, time-off requests, etc.

This type of HR software tracks all employee activities, from start time to end time precisely facilitating your calculation of their work hours and other project-related timing data.

For example, when it comes to recording task hours, team leads can create different tasks and team members can easily log their time as they work on those projects. All of this data is laid out and stored in the system automatically.

Employ Biometric Time Clocks

Biometric devices tap into facial characteristics like fingerprint capture, retina scan, and iris recognition to verify employee ID and register attendance.

Companies often install these devices at the building’s entrance to ensure employees don’t forget to clock in and also restrict unauthorized entry or buddy punching.

Once they wind up their daily work and head out of the office, they have to scan their biometrics to make their total working hours calculated accurately and stored in the system.

And the good thing is that these devices are now being integrated with HR software systems to make sure the attendance data necessary for payroll processing is readily available and centralized.

Perks of Time and Attendance Software

Executing the best time and attendance software solution can induce multiple core business benefits when it comes to managing your workforce.

• Enhanced precision in tracking employees’ work hours
• Able to liken assigned schedules to hours actually worked
• Operational cost cutting due to manual time card elimination and curbing errors
• Amped up productivity and efficiency through a more optimized and automated approach to time and attendance tracking
• Boosted morale and employee satisfaction thanks to convenience and ease of use.
• Ensures compliance with labor regulations with time and attendance software.

Simplify Time & Attendance Management with HR Software

Every company wants to streamline its time and attendance management system. Whether you are a company owner or HR manager, make sure you use an HR tool featuring a time & attendance tracker.

This will not only bring accuracy to the employees’ time and attendance data but also speed up your daily and monthly time & attendance management. But remember that HR software for startups, SMEs, and large enterprises must be chosen circumspectly.