September 2014 – Time and Attendance

Increase your Employee Overall Productivity!

Providing your employees with more control will increase their productivity according to a recent article done by Forbes. Statistics show that employees who feel ignored within the work place are actually less productive than ones who have been given more control.

In this day and age where everything is increasingly becoming digitalised, it is no wonder that more and more businesses are shifting toward digital alternatives for their organisational management practices.

A recent Forbes article reveals statistics that show that giving employees more control, or the impression of control will increase their productivity. Conversely, employees who feel disregarded, ignored, and unrecognised are statistically less productive.

Even more surprising, a recent study by Stanford University shows that productivity can also be increased by allowing your employees to work outside of the workplace. The study involved a company having its employees work from home for an experimental period of time, the result was a 25% increase in productivity and an annual saving of $2,000, per employee, for that company.

ELF Productivity, Ltd. offers you a new way to digitalise your employee management: through our Employee Self Service system. Our self-service system allows your employees to access their own records via the Internet. Each employee has their very own secured user ID and password, ensuring that no one else can access their records except you.

Employees can view their precise clock-in times for the week, vacation days (remaining, and unused), any absences, and much more. Employees can clock-in from virtually anywhere, using this self-service system. They can also request vacation days, and add reasons for their requests as well as add reasons for their other absences as well! They can even message other users using this system – allowing for an in-house closed messaging system.

Incorporating our Employee Self Service system into your Human Resources department will allow your employees to clock-in from anywhere, making it possible for them to work outside of the workplace. The in-house messaging system will cultivate increased efficiency by allowing your employees to collaborate with ease and speed. These new versatilities will surely increase your employees’ productivity, as now they will feel they have more control over their employment and are free to work from anywhere! Contact us today to learn more!

Avoid Productivity “Speed Bumps” with Employee Self Service Software

When it comes to increasing employee productivity there are a number of things to consider. Do you increase your employees working hours or perhaps even provide them with more tasks, or do you simply motivate them to use their working hours in a better way. Removing distractions from human resources is one of the simplest ways in which you can improve your employees productivity levels.

What factors are involved in increasing productivity? The number of hours an employee works is a factor, but the way those hours are used is a bigger one. Distractions from getting the job done cause productivity speed bumps, and sometimes those distractions come in the form of completely ordinary, completely necessary, administrative tasks.

Common Speed Bumps

Many ordinary employee requests or needs require a brief conversation with a manager or HR person. If the employee can connect with the right person quickly, there is minimal impact to the workday. But sometimes a busy manager is hard to connect with. Many workers have had the experience of checking in at someone’s office several times during the day before they finally make that connection; constantly trying and failing to find someone creates a productivity speed bump.

Email is a more efficient way to handle some issues, but it doesn’t solve all problems. A misunderstanding in email can take several back-and-forth messages to sort out, worse, the volume of email some workers receive makes it too easy for an email to slip through the cracks.

Speed Bumps Send Productivity Off Track

Small speed bumps can turn into big problems. Imagine an employee needs to update their employment record because they have a new mobile phone number, they give the number to their supervisor or an HR person, but the note or email goes astray. The employee doesn’t think to check back with their supervisor to make sure their record is updated. A few weeks later, there’s an urgent need for someone to fill in a shift. The supervisor tries to contact the employee, but is unable to reach them because of their outdated employment record, all of a sudden, a minor oversight in record-keeping has become a big problem: not only is the company short-staffed for that shift, but the supervisor must spend more time trying to find someone to fill in. Future shifts may also be affected because of a backlog of work. The supervisor may need to postpone important tasks in order to handle the staffing issue.

Smooth the Way With Employee Self Service Software

HR software with an Employee Self Service component can eliminate many speed bumps. Requests for holidays or time off can be submitted via the system without needing to personally contact a manager. There is no chance of email or other messages being lost or misfiled. When an employee needs to update a piece of personal information, they are able to do it directly and immediately, which means employee data is always kept up to date.

Preventing speed bumps makes a big difference to productivity in the long term. Contact us today for more information about how our software can remove speed bumps for your business.

The Absolute best Features to Look for in a Time and Attendance System

Tracking and managing time and attendance data used to be a time consuming process and much of the information collected would never be fully utilised as there were no good ways to analyse it. Time and attendance systems in this day and age go way beyond the once required processes, as they are now able to record, track and manage accurate data in real time.

Tracking and managing time and attendance used to be a labour-intensive, time-consuming process, and much of the data wasn’t adequately utilised because there was no good way to analyse it. However, advancements in the software industry makes it possible to track, manage, and generate reports on an impressive amount of data, lowering losses in payroll, improving regulatory compliance, and making the work faster and easier.

Advanced Automation

Things like payroll, that are incredibly labour-intensive, can now be automated and integrated with other systems to make data available from one system accessible in another. Payroll no longer has to depend on clock cards or other manual methods, which cost the average worker about 18 minutes per week to fill out. Automation can lower this time spent to just 2 minutes per week.

Compliance With EU Working Time Directive Rules

The data necessary to remain compliant with the Working Time Directive is already available within your payroll systems. Innovative software, however, can extract and analyse this data so that you can identify employees who are close to the limit of weekly service or have already exceeded it. The software should also allow you to identify workers who have opted out of the directives so that they can be taken care of separately.

Auditing Trail

Frequent editing of an employee’s time sheet is always a concern, but it’s necessary to have a method for tracking these exceptions and disallowing certain edits. Choose a Time and Attendance solution that tracks edits and notates any changes made, when changes were made, and by whom, so that patterns of problematic behaviour can be identified and addressed.

Identifying Short-Term Absences

The most costly time and attendance problems for most companies involves frequent, short-term absences. It is estimated that this problem costs the majority of businesses £666 per employee every year, and a total of 3.5 percent of all productive work time. Look for a system that includes Bradford Factor reporting, which identifies and tracks such short-term absences so the issue can be addressed.

Are you searching for time and attendance solutions for your workplace? Contact us for an innovative solution that will save your company time, money, and extra effort.

The Importance of Human Resource Management

Having information of each of your employees most important tasks as well as their overall job role is key for when your company has to recruit a new starter because a previous employee has left. Keeping track of all of this information however can be a difficult task. Ceequel human resource software allows you to organise your employees into groups and input information about their titles roles and skills.

Why is excellent Human Resource management vital to your company?

In large, or small, companies, often the concentration is on the products or main services which generate the majority of the revenue; human resource management is commonly overlooked as a crucial key for overall success.

Tracking your employees’ titles and roles is necessary so that you can determine which exact functions are diminished from your company when an employee leaves.

With Ceequel Human Resource software, you can organize your employees into groups and then input titles, roles, skills, and much more for each specific employee. By using Ceequel’s software, you can keenly keep track of who your employees are and the exact functions they perform for your company. This way if an employee leaves, you will be able to act fast in minimising any delay this might cause your company by using the software to quickly determine which employee(s) are capable of filling in for the missing function(s).

You can also minimise costs by using Ceequel’s Human Resource software to record all employee salaries in intricate detail (raise, bonus, etc.). In doing so, you can look for trends in your employees’ performance, resulting in you being able to fine-tailor wages and bonuses such that you can improve the overall competitive attitude and performance of your employees. Ceequel’s Human Resource software allows for such detailed record keeping and advanced management parameters that you can record and view the trends of benefits utilisation, using this, you can see if your employees are being productive as a whole, and which benefits are going unused or overused. You can then implement measures to counteract any negatives that you see trending.

The Ceequel Human Resource software also has future trend analysis features which allow you to make predictions about future overall employee performance and costs.

Time and Motion Studies for the 21st Century

Originally, time and motion studies were carried out by an observer who would watch someone complete their work whilst timing the process and making notes. However, as you can imagine not many people like being watched as it often leads to serious stress and tension between management and staff. Unions are also often likely to pressure monitors into changing their data, meaning the accuracy of the study is poor.

Traditional time and motion studies were greatly beneficial to streamline manufacturing across many industries. The methods by which such time and motion studies are conducted have inherent problems, however, which modern technology can help to alleviate.

Costly Procedures

The original method of conducting a time and motion study was dictated by the technology available at the time. An observer watches someone do their work, timing their actions with a stopwatch, and making notes.

With a careful observer and a well-designed study, accurate data capture is possible with this system. Even so, the potential problems are not difficult to identify. Few people enjoy being watched closely on the job, and this can have a real impact on performance. Having monitors on the shop floor with stopwatches and clipboards can lead to serious tensions between workers and management. Influence from unions can pressure monitors to change their data, reducing the overall accuracy of the study.

Even in instances where a traditional time and motion study doesn’t result in extra tensions on the shop floor, it still requires personnel to observe and measure actions, personnel who need to be paid for their efforts. The study must also be designed in advance so the monitors know what to watch. The high cost of such a study can push companies away from engaging in them, which means inefficiencies in the manufacturing process go undiscovered. Also, a badly-designed study can waste large amounts of time, effort, and resources.

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