With workforce accounting for 70% of overall costs for most businesses, an increasing number of companies are implementing time and attendance software to ensure productivity, accuracy, transparency and quickly reviewable data that validates their daily investment in employees. Time and attendance software not only assists with automating reporting and pay for individual employees, but also makes sophisticated rota planning, project planning, shift pattern planning, departmental evaluations, and resource assessments easily achievable.
Switching from a tedious manual process to time and attendance software is cost-effective and convenient, but it also protects your business from recurring issues with payroll error or time theft. A quality system keeps employees, managers, and the rest of your staff aware of discrepancies or issues in reporting and helps you resolve issues quickly to optimize staffing and operational planning.
In this article, we’ll explore the 5 major benefits of implementing an automated time and attendance system to reduce business costs, improve productivity, ensure legal compliance, and increase employee satisfaction.
Increased Productivity
By using automated time and attendance software for your business, you eliminate the need for HR staff to use spreadsheets, collect timecards, or enter data manually. This reduces the amount of time spent processing time and attendance data during each pay period – hours that can be reallocated towards more pressing and high-value tasks.
Outside of HR productivity benefits, time and attendance software facilitates the quick creation of reports that help you and your managers evaluate scheduling and productivity for individual employees, as well as projects and initiatives. On the level of the individual employee, time and attendance software establishes a transparent accountability system that is accessible to employees and managers alike, encouraging accuracy in reporting.
Improved Accuracy and Compliance
A manual time and attendance process is vulnerable to unintended human error and, in more extreme cases, deliberate time fraud that directly harms your business. With the use of digital time and attendance software, employees can track their time through a mobile device, online, or through the use of an electronic time clock. This method of automated time and attendance reporting has been shown to reduce productivity leaks by up to 80%, while likewise ensuring accuracy, transparency, and accountability across a company’s entire workforce.
Additionally, in the interests of accuracy for the sake of ongoing legal compliance, all data gathered by your time and attendance system can be exported to comply with The Department of Labor or other authorities in the event of an audit or legal dispute, safeguarding your company against interpretive disputes that could occur with a manual system (misreading of handwritten time entries, missing or disputed signatures, etc.).
Improved Employee Satisfaction, Accountability & Trust
From the perspective of individual employees, time and attendance software grants each employee secure, 24-7 access to their personal data, allowing them to submit and review their time entries, evaluate performance, remain informed about available vacation days, and streamline a host of inquiries or requests that typically require communication with HR staff in a manual time and attendance system.
Time and attendance software also holds employers accountable by ensuring transparency across the entire organization. Time and attendance software provides a consolidated and accurate source for any disputes regarding hours, productivity, or other concerns, empowering employees with the awareness that their work will be judged objectively.
Adaptive to Remote, Hybrid, and Flexible Work Configurations
As more and more businesses shift to remote, hybrid, or flexible work configurations, many employees (and overall workforces) are completing their work from a variety of locations. This makes a manual time and attendance approach practically obsolete. That’s why many companies now use time and attendance software to ensure that their employees, regardless of when and where they’re working, are able to track their time and attendance in real-time, using whichever clocking option is best suited to them on a particular day or under particular circumstances.
Holistic Monitoring to Reduce Absenteeism
Although time and attendance software provides valuable data about hourly and day-to-day concerns, its historical data can also provide broader insights into trends in absenteeism, especially related to individual employees. Periodically, absenteeism is a consequence of burnout due to excessive working hours, unoptimized scheduling, unutilized PTO, or other reconcilable causes. Time and attendance software makes it possible for employers to meet with an employee with verifiable data in hand to resolve issues with absenteeism caused by burnout, allowing both parties to discuss what can be done to modify scheduling. This is an important feature for reducing absenteeism but also impacts long-term employee retention, employee satisfaction, and work-life balance for employees.
Upgrade Your Time and Attendance System with Payday
Switching to an automated time and attendance system can save your company time and money while improving efficiency and boosting employee morale. Payday is here to help you make the transition seamlessly. We provide the expertise, support, and software-based solutions to help you implement a secure, mobile-friendly, and employee-friendly time and attendance system that supports your entire workforce. Contact us today to start our collaboration.