Attendance tracking is essential to the success of any business. This process helps you keep track of employees’ hours and monitor their attendance and productivity. Aside from that, you also ensure that they’re eligible for benefits that might motivate them to stay within your organization.
The traditional way to track employee attendance is through a time clock or paper time sheets. This is inefficient, as manual data entry is prone to human error. Fortunately, the right technology can make the process easier and more efficient. This way, you can manage your workforce better.
This article provides the benefits of adopting digital transformation for employee attendance monitoring, including the best practices.
Advantages
Digital transformation offers many benefits that can make employee attendance tracking more accessible and practical. Here are six ways digital transformation can help:
- Eliminating Paper: In most cases, organizations use paper-based systems for attendance tracking purposes. These systems involve scanning documents such as ID cards into an application or storing them in physical folders and filing cabinets. However, these systems are prone to errors such as misfiling or losing data. This is because they do not have an electronic system that keeps track of everything automatically.
With digital text solutions like TeamSense, you can eliminate all of the paper-based processes from your attendance monitoring. Such solutions store information electronically instead of printing and scanning documents into your system. This technology also saves time since there’s no need for manual time sheet input and output. Lastly, this innovation reduces the risk of lost documents because everything is stored online, where you can access them from anywhere at any time.
- Monitoring Absences: Timekeeping ensures that you’re paying your employees for hours worked and not for hours not performed. This process also provides a historical record of employee productivity, which you can use to make recruitment, training, and promotion decisions.
An enterprise absence management system allows you to track attendance remotely from anywhere in the world. This technology makes it easy to monitor absences accurately and quickly, which helps keep your business running smoothly. Aside from that, this technology reminds your employees to continue working if they become idle. If they fail to respond, you may take action by contacting your human resources (HR) team to send them a warning.
- Reducing Employee Turnover Rates: Without a more efficient employee time-tracking solution, workers take on multiple roles and aren’t sure how to allocate their time effectively. This issue can cause employees to clock in for coworkers or stay late without permission, leading to tardy or untimely work that you may not compensate for.
With technology, you can also save your organization time and money by reducing the costs of new software programs, hardware updates, training, and upkeep. Its automated reporting capabilities would boost your confidence in your data regarding accountability and tracking.
- Lowering Costs: Using a paper-based system involves a lot of paperwork and requires regular manual printing and filing. Aside from that, this traditional method doesn’t always provide the information leaders need to make decisions about their workforce. For example, if your company has many employees who work remotely and are not required to punch in or out at a computer terminal, tracking their time using traditional methods can be challenging.
With the help of digital attendance tracking, you can reduce your employees’ time wastage by keeping track of their activity. This tool will also help you understand how much time they’re wasting, which could be used more productively.
- Offering Convenient Time-Off Policy: If your employees are spending time on the clock that they may be spending with their families, you’re losing money. The challenge is that many companies don’t have an easy way to track employees’ time off or verify whether they are actually at work.
With a digital employee time clock system, you can solve this problem by offering your team the convenience of punching in and out with their smartphones. This way, they can clock in and out from anywhere, even if they don’t have access to their desktop computers or office printers.
- Enhancing Employee Productivity: The traditional methods of tracking employee attendance are inconvenient for employees. This is because they fail to provide accurate information about the time employees spend at work. For instance, employees have to write their arrival and departure times on paper and submit the information to their supervisors.
Automated employee attendance monitoring allows you to check your team’s activity without inspecting or visiting their desktops or cubicles. This technology helps you manage your teams better and gives them access to real-time reports on attendance and productivity through smart devices.
Best Practices
With these benefits, you must be able to implement strategies to ensure their effectiveness. Thus, here are seven practices for implementing digital transformation in employee attendance monitoring:
- Understanding The Business Need: The first step in executing effective employee attendance tracking is understanding your business needs. So, knowing which aspect of your business drives this decision on digital transformation is vital. This is to determine which exact tools are suitable for the job.
Start by auditing current processes and procedures and identifying areas where you can make improvements. From there, you can determine what type of solution would work best for your organization.
- Keeping Time Tracking Simple: The key to digital transformation is to keep things simple. If you can make it easier for your employees to track their time, you’re on the right track. This is especially important if you’re trying to move away from paper time sheets.
With a digital solution, employees can use their smartphones or computers to track their time. You’ll also be able to send them alerts when they’ve been logged in for too long, which will help reduce the chance of overtime abuse or absenteeism.
- Automating Overtime Policies: Overtime is a common issue in the workplace, and it can create headaches for employers who want to keep track of it. It’s essential to set a policy in place so that you know how much time employees are allowed to work each day or week. These rules will help prevent violations of labor laws and keep your employees safe on the job.
An employee time-tracking tool can help you manage overtime. For example, the software can automatically notify you of employees’ extended work hours. Another way to use the same technology is to switch from regular time to overtime pay once they exceed their allotted hours for the day or week. This device saves time by eliminating the need to manually change timesheets before paying employees for their extra hours.
- Give Employees Access To Data: When you give employees access to their attendance data, they’ll be able to see how much time they spend on each task. This gives them valuable insight into improving their performance while allowing them to take responsibility for their time-tracking efforts.
Employees should be able to log into a system that shows them their schedule and whether they’ve clocked in or out. This technological feature allows them to check if you pay them correctly and ensure they don’t overwork. However, you must train your HR team on the questions they should ask if an employee has concerns about their paychecks or schedule.
- Using Employee Recognition: Employee recognition is one of the most important aspects of successful digital transformation. The idea is to reward employees with appreciation incentives, such as gift cards, travel vouchers, or cash. The best part of this strategy is that it allows you to improve employee satisfaction by providing them with something they want.
Include achievement-based rewards to use employee recognition for your modern attendance tracking system. These incentives are given to employees who have met specific goals or milestones over a particular time. These rewards can include bonuses, promotions, or even salary increases, depending on how well an employee has performed during their tenure at your company.
- Optimizing Scheduling Processes: One way to boost productivity is by optimizing scheduling processes. You can optimize your scheduling process through digital transformation by automatically assigning shifts based on employee availability and preferences. This ensures that employees are scheduled for the changes they want and minimizes employee scheduling errors.
The first step in optimizing the scheduling process is automating timecard approvals. Your HR team needs to set up a workflow so that when an employee submits a timecard, it goes through an approval process. Any supervisor can approve or reject it for the accuracy and appropriateness of hours worked for that day.
- Setting Up Regular Meetings: The best way to implement digital transformation in employee attendance tracking is through regular meetings. By gathering your team together and discussing the progress of your project, you can set up a schedule for how often you will meet. This will also allow you to discuss any issues that arise or workflows that need enhancement to prevent jump shipping.
Using a mobile conferencing platform, you can set up regular conferences about staff attendance monitoring. This technology has screen-sharing and real-time chatting service to encourage workforce engagement during the meeting. Also, you can send email invitations and add attachments you’ll use for discussions.
Key Takeaway
As you run your business, you must ensure to use technologies that will help you accurately monitor the attendance of your employees. When you adopt digital transformation in this process, you can reap these six benefits. That said, make sure to also follow the seven tips on implementing digitalization to ensure effectiveness.