Time and Attendance – Page 12 – Time and Attendance

Access Control Trends

Over the years access control trends have changed dramatically because peoples attitudes and initiatives are often different year on year. However looking back at these changes there are a number of trends that we feel you need to be made aware of, the top three are listed below.

Looking back at the past year, we’ve noticed a number of changes within attitudes and initiatives related to access control. Taking a look at these changes, we see a number of trends coming to light that we wanted to share with you.

Access Control Trends

Ease of use – It’s easier than ever before to moderate an access control system. Now, HR staff can quickly add, delete, or edit staff permissions in one central system. This helps to keep the workplace safer and more productive.
Fluid and adaptable – In the past, access control was sort of a “one size fits all” model where you used one proprietary solution for access control, another for security clearance, and so on. These days, access control systems are fluid and adaptable: they can integrate with employee ID, cashless vending, staff parking, and even time and attendance. These trends are also moving toward integrating IT security with access control. Staff will love the convenience of using one card for many tasks.
Realtime data analytics – Today, access control systems are engineered to provide realtime data analytics so that anyone with administrative access can quickly see at a glance what is happening. No longer will staff have to run reports after the fact to see how the system is working. All of the information will be time sensitive and easy to access.

To talk more about this, or anything else related to workplace security, productivity, and access, please contact us.

Performance-Based Incentives need Hard Data to Work

Paying employees bonuses for hard work is a system that has come under scrutiny for many years now. People believe that if employees are aware that they will be getting paid more money if they work harder, then they are more likely to do so. However the truth behind this is much more complex as there are many potential issues with performance based pay.

Performance-based pay has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent years. There appears to be a basic logic in tying pay or incentives to performance – if you promise rewards for hard work, people will work harder – the truth is much more complex.

The Real Story Behind Performance-Based Pay

There are many potential issues with performance-based pay. True high-achievers are often driven by motivations other than money, and offering money for achievement can actually decrease a person’s internal motivation to work hard and well. But on the other hand, good employees expect to be paid fairly for their work, and rewarding employees with raises or bonuses is a common way to acknowledge and show appreciation for them.

Given these contradictory facts, is there a right way to use performance-based pay?

Performance-Based Pay That Matters

A key to creating a performance-based pay system that actually works is to make sure that the system for giving rewards is fair and transparent. Many employees have become disgruntled by a perception (true or otherwise) that one employee is rewarded because he or she is liked better by management, not because of actual performance. Other employees become unmotivated because management sets production goals that are out of touch with reality.

In order to work, performance-based pay systems need to be absolutely fair and administered according to clear guidelines: here’s where using hard data on performance can help.

Shop Floor Data Reveals True Performance

Our Shop Floor Data Capture system can provide the data needed to make a performance-based pay system work. Data captured by the system doesn’t depend on a manager’s perceptions of employee performance. It provides a true picture of productivity. This makes assigning performance-based raises or bonuses more fair and transparent.

Also, capturing shop floor data gives management a clear picture of what is actually being produced in a given time period. Setting a realistic goal with a clear reward for meeting it is a proven way to increase motivation for both individuals and teams. Using real shop floor data can help management set realistic goals based on past performance.

If your organisation uses performance-based pay and incentives, you need to have hard data backing up your rewards, or your incentive system could do more harm than good. For more information about the benefits of shop floor data capture, please contact us.

Razor-Thin Margins demand Shop Floor Data Capture

A business’s biggest expense is the paying of employee wages and tracking these hours should not become the second biggest. That is why it is crucial for businesses with multiple shops to implement an efficient shop floor data capture system, specifically designed to effortlessly record hours worked meaning less time is spent processing information about individual employee wages, saving you both time and money.

Do you know what the biggest expense is for most businesses? Wages and compensation. Don’t let the costs of tracking employee hours become the second highest! When you have a shop that requires employees to clock in and out, the only way to keep costs down is through an efficient method of Shop Floor Data Capture.

A good program designed to effortlessly log and store hours an employee has worked translates to less time processing payroll, and an immense cost-saving to you. These programs provide comprehensive coverage of the following:

Shifts and Roster Scheduling
Holiday & Absence Management
Payroll and Exceptions Reporting
Calculations

Profit margins in retail and manufacturing can be slim enough. The technologies you need to keep the production line moving shouldn’t have to compete with payroll. Endless data entry, editing, and payroll complications can keep you from seeing the revenues you deserve.

Don’t you want to know the performance of your employees in real-time? A great Shop Floor Data Capture program delivers near-instantaneous reports on:

No Clockings
Missed Clockings
Hours More than Expected
Hours Less than Normal
Late Clockings
Unplanned Attendance

With Ceequel® Time and Attendance software, you’re able to sift through to the pertinent details you need to keep your production moving smoothly. Employees are an essential part of your business plan and you can now manage them effortlessly and spot any gaps in coverage due to vacation, holiday, or any other event that brings one of your employees off the line.

There are many advanced features that Shop Floor Data Capture adds onto this versatile software suite to enable you to capture your shop floor data in real-time. Don’t hesitate – contact us today so we can identify your business’ needs and keep you on your track to success.

Internal Skill Matching can save Hiring Costs (and Risks)

In the unfortunate event of having to let an employee go from within your business where do you look when it comes to hiring a new one. Do you choose to contact a recruitment company or do you prefer to promote from within your existing employee base. According to a study done by Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania, hiring from within can provide added benefits to your organisation.

When you next need to fill an open position in your company, will you focus on outside candidates, or look for an existing employee to promote? A study from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania uncovers some unexpected benefits of “hiring” from within.

Comparing External and Internal Job Candidates

The study found that people promoted from inside the company show a significantly higher level of short-term productivity and success than external candidates. It can take up to two years for an external hire to come up to the level of an internal promotion, measured by comparing employee reviews. But external hires are given starting salaries averaging 18% more than internal promotions, and are far more likely to leave within two years, meaning they never reach a true level of proficiency in their job before they’re gone. Given the cost in both time and money of identifying and interviewing external candidates, this picture makes hiring from outside look like a very risky undertaking.

Getting Behind the Data

There are good reasons for this picture of internal vs. external candidate success. Part of learning a new job is learning about the people and culture of an organisation, and this can be a much bigger task than simply getting to grips with basic job responsibilities. Someone who is promoted from inside has a huge head start in this area over someone who is brand new to the company.

On the other hand, there are good reasons for hiring external candidates in some cases. Bringing in someone new may be necessary to bridge a gap in experience or education, and it can also bring fresh new ideas which will help the company thrive. The data also shows that when external candidates remain on the job for longer than two years, they tend to be promoted faster and show high levels of success.

So there are strong arguments to be made on either side. Choosing the right option when there’s an open position can help a company save time and costs while getting the best people to move the organisation forward.

The Benefits of Skill Matching

This is where great HR software can help. Ceequel®’s Human Resource management module includes a skill matching function which can assist you in both analysing upcoming staffing needs and identifying existing employees who have the right skills and experience to move up into an open position.

Providing opportunities for employees to develop their skills and take on new challenges is key to employee satisfaction and retention. It can also help HR departments remove some of the burden of the hiring process, enabling HR staff to focus on filling positions which truly do need a new face and voice from outside the company.

For more information about Ceequel®’s Human Resource benefits, including skill matching, please contact us!

Access Control is not just for Employees

Access control within a business goes way beyond your employees. Everyone who enters your company’s office needs to be accounted for and some may even need access to different parts of your facility. Our Ceequel Access Control system can handle all of this with ease maintaining complete security, whilst making sure all personnel within your building are safe.

If you are considering Access Control for your facilities, you’ll need to think about more than your own employees. Everyone who enters your building for any reason will need to be accounted for in your access system, especially contractors, such as: cleaning and maintenance staff, outside IT support professionals, people who provide food services, and so on. Authorised visitors and guests will also need access to the parts of your facility they are permitted to enter.

Ceequel® Access Control will handle all of these cases with ease, maintaining complete security for your facility. It will also help to protect all personnel who work in your building, whether or not they are your direct employees.

Right Access, Right Time

Some people, for example cleaning and maintenance staff, will enter your building for regular and predictable shifts. Ceequel’s® access tables can permit these individuals to enter at certain times on specific days, giving them the ability to do their jobs, but limiting their access outside of their regular work hours.

There may be cases where outside contractors need to have a special period of access, for example if HVAC or plumbing repairs are needed, or if outside IT specialists are installing new servers or other equipment. These work periods can be entered in Ceequel® ahead of time to give those contractors access to all required areas while excluding access to the rest of your facility. Their access can also be pre-limited to the period of time in which they are working.

Finally, any authorised visitors can be handled with the same ease and flexibility, giving them the ability to move freely about in areas they are authorised to access, but only within those areas.

Protection For Everyone

Disasters never happen on schedule. Fires, accidents, and natural disasters happen on any day, round the clock. If something happens outside of normal working hours, but during the time when cleaning or maintenance contractors are present, including them in your access controls means you can pull a fire register and make sure that everyone is safe and accounted for, the same as for your regular employees.

With Ceequel’s® Access Control program, everyone who enters your building can be granted the access needed for the time period needed, and accounted for in the case of an emergency. For more information about how Ceequel® can help you keep your facilities secure, contact us.

Accurate Shop Floor Data enables Targeted Training

Having accurate information about your employees productivity levels through every task can be massively beneficial when it comes to implementing training days or development programs. Knowing who needs what, help saves your business time and money. Without an accurate system in place, management will often only have a rough idea of where the slowest parts of the manufacturing processes are and often have no idea how to improve it.

Shop Floor Data Capture gives companies the most accurate data possible for measuring productivity across all workers, as well as productivity of individual workers. As well as knowing what’s getting done, and by whom, smart companies can use real-time data from their shop floors to create targeted training and development programs for increased worker productivity and flexibility.

Identifying Key Points for Improvement

Without an accurate data capture system, management may only have a fuzzy sense of where the slowest parts of manufacturing happen. With a good data capture system on the shop floor, any issues with productivity quickly become clear, which enables management to take direct action; for example, if the data captured by the system shows that all new employees tend to take the longest period of time to come up to speed on one particular task, or in using one work station, that’s a clear bottleneck to focus on for overall performance improvement. Maybe more training, or a new training program, would help employees gain proficiency faster. Perhaps a mentoring system which pairs a new employee with an experienced one to learn that task would be beneficial, enabling experienced workers to demonstrate any “tips and tricks” which speed up the process.

Individual Evaluation and Improvement

As well as making improvements in overall productivity, a good data capture system is beneficial for evaluating and training individual employees. Individual worker data can be used by managers during performance reviews, to acknowledge where workers excel and find the places where they most need improvement. Using this kind of data can help managers train and mentor workers to reach their best personal levels of achievement.

Good training is necessary for good productivity. Using real time shop floor data to enable targeted training can help managers design and refine the most effective training systems to get workers up to speed fast and working at their best.

For more information about how shop floor data could work for your business, contact us!

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!

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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