Employees are a valuable part of any business. They play a vital role on how your business performs and their poor attendance can drain your business efficiency to the bottom. Managing employee time and attendance can be a tiresome job. Employee's continuous absenteeism affects your business’s productivity and may even affect it’s profile and turnover. The U.S Department of labor in its 2017 report had estimated that approximately 3% of an employer’s workforce would be absent on any given day. With stricter labor laws all over the world, it has become important for business owners to track and maintain employee working hours and overtime hours as well.

Poor or non-existent time and attendance management can result in inefficient workflow and quality, missed deadlines, strained workplace relationships and a decrease in overall profitability. Having a well managed time and attendance management system can solve all these problems and can also bring effective changes in your workplace atmosphere.

Here are the top 8 tips on how you can efficiently manage your employee's time and attendance.

1. Set clear expectations in front of your employees

Drafting a clear working hours (shift) timings and attendance policy should be the first step of yours if you want to bring in discipline and efficiency in your employee work hours. You need to clearly define the late timings for your employees. Having set daily working hours will limit your employees working for too long even after office hours and they will be expected to finish the work on time. This will also ensure in saving employee overtime cost and will keep your business compliant towards labor laws. Along with this, you also need to set policy for allowed leaves in any given month including both paid and unpaid outlining the process on how to request for a leave and any consequences if the process is not followed. Before setting a policy keep in mind your business culture and your employee expectations as both will go hand-in-hand for a long way.

2. Make use of Time & Attendance management system

While there are many ways to track employee attendance, using an automated time and attendance management system can increase employee accountability and reduce level of absenteeism. It will not only help in eliminating manual errors but will also help you in monitoring employee hours and absences, manage scheduling and track business holidays. If you or one of your employees manages employee time and attendance on paper, there are very high chances of errors resulting in total chaos at the end of month while calculating total work hours for payroll purposes. This process is tiresome and more time consuming. Use of an automated time and attendance system can solve all your problems and present your employee’s attendance data at a single click from anywhere anytime.

Zizbey offers efficient Time and Attendance management system to track automatically employee’s hours right from clock in to clock out. It is best suited to track all types of employees, be it full-time, part-time or freelancers. It even comes with geo-fencing option to track employee locations if your employees have to do continuous roaming jobs.

3. Measure Employee Performance

Any successful business should measure employee performance which should be directly co-related with their attendance. By making attendance a performance duty, your employees will get serious about their work creating a result-oriented environment and will boost total work culture. With the help of an accurate time and attendance tracking system, you will also be able to get to know actual time taken by an employee to finish the tasks. This will help you in understanding their capabilities and expertise. You can thus manage your resources properly and can get work done more efficiently. You can even consider rewarding employees for excellent performance. Acknowledging your employees for their good track of attendance encourages them to perform more efficiently.

4. Control Planned and Unplanned Leaves

As said earlier, in order to effectively manage time and attendance better, it is important for you to maintain employee planned and unplanned leaves to a certain number. In most of the business that we have worked with, we found that employees take one or two extra days off more that allocated number of vacation days. You should plan your leaves policy and convey it to your employees in such a way that they adhere to the allocated leaves and avoid any extra days off. You also need to limit the unplanned leaves in proportion to total working hours as it is important for managers and other employees to make up for the lost time and work. Having employees calling for sick leave or emergency leave counts as unplanned leave. Your work culture must encourage employees to consult either their superiors or team members in case of such unplanned leaves so that they can take control of any urgent work ensuring timely completion.

5. Create a Positive Work Environment

Employees morale increases when their attendance and working hours are appreciated publicly. Employees work their best when they seek work as desirable and not just a way to pay off their monthly expenses. With the help of an automated time and attendance management system you can have a proper look at employee logged hours and analyzing them will help you in better understanding their potentials and drawbacks. You can thus team meetings discussing issues and work that help employees not feel burdened by the job and also be able to get closer with other employees. Efficient time and attendance is essential for maintaining business operations and keeping a good atmosphere in the work place.

6. Encourage employees to manage their own attendance

Your employees should be able to access their attendance and leave data at their convenience. This will reduce any chaos or the questions they have for you or your HR department when their payroll comes into consideration. Having a glance at own logged hours and leaves will help an employee to plan work and vacations accordingly. You can also make your time and attendance policy accessible to your employees through an Employee Self Service Portal. Having an access to own attendance, it gives your employees a feel of control of their own work. This automatically helps in boosting their motivation and ultimately increase efficiency.

7. Have Flexible Scheduling

A very strict and rigid attendance policy may have the possibility of employees disliking their job. When employees are offered very little time off, there are chances of increasing absenteeism and thus your business’s efficiency may suffer. Continuous hammering may decrease employee’s morale. With today’s generation being of millennials and gen z, they prefer flexibility over any other benefits. Best example of providing flexibility is giving a remote work option for your employees when they are not able to be physically present at your workplace. However, you need to make sure to not allow any unconscious bias to creep in while being flexible. It’s also important to have a time and attendance management system which can monitor employee hours and activity that are working remotely along with employees from workplace.