It’s probably not realistic to expect every employee in your business to show up on time, every single shift. They’re also going to miss work, whether it’s planned or not occasionally. Still, the more compliance you get with policies about punctuality and attendance, the more productivity you will get out of your team.
Efficiency goes up, and morale among staff members can increase because they know everyone is showing up and trying to pull their weight. Having the right attendance and time hacks for your human resources management plan sets the right tone for your whole company if you know what they are.
Improving Attendance In Your Company
Wondering how to improve attendance among your personnel? Forbes has some suggestions you can use.
- Consistency and Fairness: Consistent application and communication of labor and attendance policies make things fair for everyone.
- Embrace Remote Work: It’s here to stay. Some employees will want it full-time, and others at least want the option of doing it some of the time.
- Facilitate Trust: Don’t just rely on brutal crackdowns enforcing corporate policy. Take time to get insights into why people miss work, show up late, or leave early.
- Flexible PTO Fills Gaps: Flexibility in personal time off lets employees handle personal needs in ways that minimize disruptions.
- Get to the Bottom of Things: Dive into the data to see what might be causing people to be absent as a group or individually.
- Offer Wellness Options: Healthy workers are more likely to show up regularly, and they’re going to be more productive.
- Purpose, Priority, Persistence: Clarify why a change is necessary, make it an ongoing priority, and then be persistent and consistent in its application.
- Safe Spaces Engender Communication: Absences are unavoidable in their entirety, but open communication lines can minimize their instances and impacts.
- Spread the Word: Having a good time and labor policy is good, but having employees know all the details is even better.
Time And Labor Tracking Solutions
Your human resource department is usually the team responsible for managing time and attendance within your overall business. However, there’s much more to this than just ensuring people show up for work. It actually starts with an assessment of the company culture and what actual expectations should be of the various professionals within your organization.
Once that assessment happens, specific standards have to be formulated and put into place. These can cover things ranging from how people track their time to vacation requests to creating schedules. A delicate balance is always necessary between making sure the company’s labor needs are adequately staffed while trying to keep professionals happy with their hours and getting time off when they need it.
Industry standards also have to be taken into account, so your workplace is competitive in terms of hiring and allure for talent within the sector. Decisions have to be made in regard to where boundaries are set that might trigger warnings and disciplinary actions, leading up to and including potential termination.
Time and labor software and technology can simplify or even automate a lot of the process. Employees can input time-off requests, schedules can be done digitally, and reminders and warnings can be issued via communication channels that leave the right paper trail and make sure everyone is properly informed. The more your business can rely on technology, the less you have to rely on human intervention. Mistakes, miscommunications, and inefficiency all go down.
Why Employee Attendance And Timeliness Matters
In the grand scheme of things, employee attendance might not seem like a huge deal. However, it actually has a direct impact on your company’s overhead. A business with a high rate of absenteeism might spend more money onboarding employees and recruiting dependable talent.
Big issues with staffing and turnover can motivate many business leaders to start micromanaging every aspect of their labor force. That can sour a company’s culture. Employee morale can get poisonous fast.
In a tight labor market where it’s already hard to recruit and retain talent, being known as a bad place to work isn’t something that your company can afford. The modern economy means that you need to view multiple groups as potential customers of your business. It’s not just consumers buying your products and services but also potentially shareholders owning some of your company and professionals who might want to work for you.
Companies exist to provide consumers with products and services. Employees are necessary for the production, management, and delivery of those products and services. Time and labor attendance are crucial to the very functionality of an organization.
In many industries, payroll or labor is the single-biggest expense or category for companies. This is especially true of small businesses. In some cases, payroll and labor eat up to half of all operating costs. Managing payroll and attendance matters is crucial to determining the level of success of your company.
You have to avoid both overpaying and underpaying. Either might be something your company can get away with for a little while, but both will eventually come back to haunt you. Overpaying wastes money that could be better spent growing a company, while underpaying might result in a talent exodus later in the future. Human resources need to apply time and labor hacks to manage both angles.
Set The Tone
Tracking employee attendance and time matters might be one of many responsibilities for your human resources department, but your HR professionals need to understand one of the unspoken rules about that. They lead by example.
That means that they need to adhere to your company’s policies regarding attendance and being on time as much as anyone. In fact, they should probably be better about it than any other department in your business so they can set the standards that are responsible for enforcing on everyone else.
