How to Track and Maintain Employee Attendance Effectively?

Employees are among the most valuable resources in your company. Managing your employees correctly can be the key to your origination’s success. If you can manage employee attendance effectively with attendance management software, the rest of the process becomes much easier.

Often, small businesses don’t focus on managing attendance, which can lead to a lot of losses in productivity, which in turn, leads to profit losses as well. Additionally, if you cannot track employee attendance correctly, you won’t be able to calculate accurate payroll as well.

Effectively managing employee attendance can lead to improving the bottom line and productivity of your organization. Here are some methods you can utilize to track and maintain your employee attendance effectively.

Rules & Expectation

The first step to effective attendance management is drafting a clear attendance policy. This policy should clearly list all the rules and expectations related to attendance.

Having a policy like this can help you reduce unscheduled absenteeism. Employees should also be able to understand how to request time offs. But before you make any drastic changes to your new attendance policy, be sure to take your company culture into consideration.

Both of them should be consistent, and discussing with your employees and their expectation will also help your build an effective policy.

Integrate Payroll with Attendance Management

Manually managing attendance can not only be tedious, but it can also often lead to multiple human errors as well. And if you fail to identify these errors, you will make mistakes while processing payroll as well.

When you have an attendance management software, you can automate the whole process which will eliminate the possibility of human error. Integrating attendance management with payroll will make things much easier. The software will calculate the total number of hours worked including overtime and process payroll based on the result.

Self Service

Modern HR software offers self-service portals to each employee, which allows employees to access and submit attendance on their own. This will help reduce the burden on the HR department as well. This feature can also let employees feel they have control over their information and can help improve employee motivation and experience.

Flexibility

While having an attendance policy is a good strategy, that doesn’t mean you should always stay rigid towards them. This often leads to employees disliking their jobs. If employees are not getting enough time offs, you will see a spike in unscheduled absenteeism.

Always try to be flexible when it comes to attendance and try to understand employee concerns. For example, offering work from home if an employee is unable to physically come to the office, can boost their productivity and morale.

Analytics

Check detailed insights that HR analytics offers you. This tool can help you get detailed information about employee attendance which can help you identify patterns.

You can also analyze the daily routine of employees such as total time spent on a task and activities. This information can easily be generated in the form of reports for better understanding.

Rewards

Rewarding employee effort has been known to benefit the organization in multiple ways. If an employee is dedicated and maintains good attendance, they should be rewarded for their efforts. Offering rewards for exceptional attendance routines can motivate employees and reduce absenteeism significantly.

However, most businesses avoid this due to the mindset that they would be rewarding employees for doing something that is expected from them. But balancing attendance penalties with rewards for good attendance is the best way to recognize the hard work of employees.

You do not have to spend heavily for the program, the reward can be as little as recognition during a meeting or offering attendance certificates, etc.

Closing

You might not feel like you need extra tips to manage the mere attendance of employees, but small mistakes and slips add up over time. Eventually, by the end of the year, you might be losing more money than you expected due to simple mistakes related to employee attendance that you didn’t recognize early on.

Invest in time and attendance management software if you want to streamline the whole process. It might feel a little complex at the beginning, but it will simplify most of attendance related tasks. And you can integrate payroll with this tool as well, which will further reduce the burden on the HR department.