Time and Attendance is one of the most important aspects of keeping your business productive. Employees can sometimes take advantage of the fact that you may or may not notice when they come to work. Many businesses do have “clocking in” procedures in place but even these can be thwarted by asking a friend to do it for them or other ways.
There are other problems, too, regarding incentives to get people motivated to attend more regularly. Working mothers often call in with sick children. Some workers have health problems or other issues that get in the way of their regular attendance. Those things do happen and people do have problems, lives, and responsibilities outside of the work place.
But how do you differentiate between those legitimate reasons and those which are just excuses not to come to work, and what do you put in place to motivate workers to attend work more regularly and on time? And more importantly, how do you get the attendance and punctuality issues to improve? After all, time and attendance is at the heart of productivity for your business so this should be a priority.
One way is to offer incentives for good attendance and punctuality. This would create some sense of reward for a job well done, and for being on time and at work when they are needed. This is basic applied human psychology that works for some. Another idea is to create a “pay-per-performance” model which pays bonuses for those who have near perfect attendance and punctuality. Some businesses also create teams and the team with the most productivity or time and attendance record would win a prize or get additional holidays after so many days of perfect attendance.
One of the best things you can do is to invest in time and attendance software that keeps records for you. This allows you to keep a running check of how your employees are doing in this regard, allows you to sit down and discuss it with those who seem to be missing a large number of days, or have problems with punctuality, and allows for you to have a valid record of the missed days, should you ever be challenged on it. The best way to handle time and attendance issues is to hit it head on, by employing an assertive strategy that focuses on the problem and allows you to share it with your employees and other staff.
A popular reason to turn your time and attendance over to the software, is to take the worry away from you, the manager, payroll team or CEO, so you can focus on other things. Line Managers can take over the management of their team’s records with little time and effort. No more having to worry about time clocks that people may or may not fill out correctly. You just let the software do its thing and then analyse the results.
If you need a solid software solution to address your time and attendance issues, contact ELF now! Our software handles all aspects of time and attendance record keeping and analysis – it’s the perfect solution for an age old problem.