Time is what we want most, but what we use worst – William Penn.
The same goes for an organization’s ability to record, update and manage their employees’ time & attendance (T&A) records. Employee work hours is a critical metric to measure an employee’s performance and forms as a key input to payroll. Yet, global enterprises find managing time and attendance as one of the biggest challenges even today!
According to Kessler International’s survey of retail and service industry employees, a whopping 80% of workers admitted to ‘time theft’. Imagine how laborious it would be for a global organization without a robust time solution to manage employees’ T&A records across geographies!
In today’s modern age of technology, it doesn’t take much for an organization to find an effective T&A system. But what one should look for is a tool that not just records employee time & attendance, but also empowers HR leaders to make strategic decisions pertaining to employee productivity, performance, workforce expenditure, and cost. T&A solutions like NeeyamoWorks TimeTM help organizations stay compliant with labor regulations pertaining to employee attendance and can avoid over-payments incurred when employees falsely claim overtime workhours.
To answer the age-old question – ‘what should I look for in a T&A system?’, here are five critical pointers that you can focus while scouting for a technology-based T&A solution that fits perfectly to your overall HR landscape:
1. Time capturing, Scheduling & Regularization – Organizations have transcended from legacy technology like a manual punch in/out and access cards. Of late, there is an increase in uptake of revolutionizing T&A technology that supports facial recognition, fingerprint attendance systems, and biometric attendance systems. Several progressive organizations are found to use GPS technology to capture the attendance of their mobile workforce. Thus, it is imperative to find a solution that outperforms legacy methods of capturing employee time and seamlessly supports new-age time capturing techniques.
Furthermore, with the rise of the gig economy, flexible working schedules and the popularity to allow employees to work from home have now become the new black. A study conducted by the American Sociological Review found that workers with flexible workhours slept better, felt healthier, and were less stressed than their nine-to-five counterparts. Thus, it becomes essential to find yourself a time management system that can create customized schedules and help track/manage shift changes.
Take a scenario of an employee, who is expected to work outside of his office premises for a set number of hours at a client workspace. Having a time solution that has in-built workflows that support employees regularize work hours spent outside of office premises is a definite boon to any organization as opposed to manual tracking of such instances. The reporting manager’s approval could be made mandatory (optional) for such requests raised, as this is bound to have an impact on employee pay.
2. Integration-friendly – Have you ever been in a situation where you are required to work on employee data that exists in different disparate systems (a separate solution for HRIS, Time or Absence devoid of integration)? Has collating employees’ performance ratings from a performance management system and productivity data from the T&A system for annual performance evaluation given you nightmares?
Imagine logging into a system where you find employee information pertaining to employee history, personnel records, T&A, and even their performance ratings right in front of you through a single unified interface, no matter which region the employee is based in. Does it sound like a distant reality? Not anymore! You can now find global HR platform providers who can offer time and attendance tracking systems as not just a stand-alone solution, but also as part of a holistic solution suite supporting ancillary processes such as Absence, Payroll, Workforce Management, Benefits, Helpdesk, etc.
3. Metrics & Reporting – Measuring key metrics to generate reports related to employees’ T&A is often spoken about and conceptualized. But the struggle begins when organizations fail to derive actionable insights from these reports. Depending upon the size, industry, and geographies that organizations operate in, the levels of transparency and visibility required will certainly rise.
Global enterprises should look for a solution that not only provides basic information regarding employee timesheets but also generates centralized employee productivity data.
4. Employee Experience – We often come across the phrase – Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, an ideology which I believe has contributed to Apple’s market success. Apple has been known to place User Experience at the forefront of all its inventions. Well, it is a no-brainer that the success of any system is directly proportionate to the number of users effectively using the system. A Time & Attendance solution is no exception!
User-based personalization is key. The solution should be intuitive to throw up alerts and notifications to denote actionable as and when required. User adoption will have a significant bearing on the success of the solution’s implementation. More often than always, a user-friendly solution has a direct impact on increasing user adoption.
A flexible and scalable T&A solution is an important asset to any organization, irrespective of its nature, size or geographical spread. A global T&A solution that is a confluence of cutting-edge technology and rich functionality to meet unique T&A needs of multinational organizations is the need of the hour.
Is your organization in need of a time management solution that leverages technology and addresses all your T&A needs? Click here to get into a quick (we know how valuable TIME is) discussion with our experts.
