Attendance at work is by far the most important aspect which makes the employees determined in a workplace. It is one of the most crucial components in the calculation of the payroll, maintaining the payroll in the register or entering it in the spreadsheet may include errors in the data. According to a recent study, An estimated 8.7% of all payroll costs are tied to the absenteeism of an employee. When employees are generally not interested they seem to make excuses to work. Proxy punching has given people more opportunities to cheat the system. Many employees do proxy punching when not working and the organization has to pay the price for it.
When an organization has the same manual process to work every day the employee doesn’t feel like working and gets bored. But it’s even tough to know if an employee is interested in working in the first place. There’s no real solution for this, other than implementing software that has all the features, including knowing about an employee’s interest to be working and making your work environment healthy and with necessary boundaries. So, the well-treated employees work productively.
What is a robust attendance process?
Robust attendance management means a strong and healthy attendance policy that is fair by all means. An unbiased attendance process that is in favor of all the employees and doesn’t have an ill practice included in it. When the employees are treated equally and appreciated equally they are more consistent in their work processes. Following are tips to build up robust attendance management:
1. Attendance flexibility
Attendance doesn’t mean the count of hours a person has worked in a workplace. It varies from person to person, if someone comes late to the office every day but is present for the whole day isn’t enough as it causes issues with other employees. Punctuality is also an important aspect to keep in mind while talking about attendance.
If you want to keep your employees happy and satisfied with their day-to-day work timings, then a flexible attendance policy does more good than you think. When you have a strict attendance policy that costs you money, you need to inspect the employee’s needs too. If you go on implementing the same strict policy that is problematic to follow and pressurize the employees to follow it, your organization will face a lot of loss.
For instance, if an employee is suffering from a terrible headache they might call in sick. But instead, if you design a policy that compensates the few hours an employee needs for rest with extra working hours then it may be easy to follow.
Pros:
- Instead of calling in the whole day as sick, employees can compensate a few hours of working
- Employees do not feel pressurized
Cons:
- Some employees may misuse flexible work hours for personal work.
- Employees who come late may compensate for this flexibility often to make up for their tardiness.
2. Tracking Software
Attendance tracking software is more than just marking up the employee’s entry and exit time from the workplace each day. The software provides you with a regulated record of an employee which might help you while calculating the payroll. It also prevents buddy punching which is practiced in almost all offices till day. According to an American payroll association, Buddy punching affects 75% of all businesses.
For businesses looking for a green initiative, this is an opportunity to go paperless. Instead of pilling up mountains of paperwork, punchcards save up a lot of space. You might hear a lot of times, employees grumbling about switching to a new system. Even many employees have been satisfied with the implementation of the software. Both the employees and the employers will be delighted to have up-to-date storage of their records.
Pros:
- Unbiased records of employees
- Prevents proxy punching
Cons:
- The system is ineffective without a power supply
- Cost-effective
3. Train Your Management Executives
Image(source)
Management executives have the responsibility to encourage employee attendance and punctuality. Poor attendance can be a cause of a larger problem other than the reasons like sickness and injuries. There can be many problems affecting the employees such as an internal conflict with the employee, or personal family concern. Before taking any kind of disciplinary action the root problems should be inspected. Here is where you’ll need your management executive to inspect the root problem.
Usually, the supervisors do not ask too many questions and accept the leave reason given by the employee. Training your supervisor with effective workforce management techniques while being reasonable is also necessary. If any employee has an issue or a need for leave then they should be allowed to shift their workload to the next day. In case a pattern has been developed by an employee then the case needs to be inspected. The organization has to be sure that the supervisor and the employees, do not abuse or misuse the policy. Respective executives should be well aware of the policies and the disciplinary actions to be taken in case of such complications.
Pros:
- Problems can be easily inspected and solved
- Employees will be able to express their concerns regarding their work issues
Cons:
- Sometimes supervisors can be biased towards employees
- Unawareness of supervisors can also cause a lot of chaos
4. Set A Clear Path Of Expectations
While forming an attendance policy it is important to make sure that your message is conveyed neatly and clearly. This will prevent the misleading concepts of leave and attendance which tend to happen often. Make sure to let your employees know about the leave-taking process and also the calling-off procedures so that every employee has a unified number of steps to follow for a particular need. Generally, These pieces of information are shared while the onboarding process is ongoing.
When physical and electronic handbooks are provided for the employees they won’t have a reason to state their misconceptions about the policies. There are numerous options that employees will expect from the office. Consistency is always the key to implementing anything, regularly updating your policies, and letting all of your employees know about it is the crucial aspect of the management. When the policies are well defined there’s no such chance for a possible error.
Pros:
- All employees will be treated in an unbiased way
- Organizations can work under the same code
Cons:
- Misconceptions may occur when not conveyed properly
- Sometimes the employees can misuse the policies
What To Avoid While Building Up An Attendance Process
An attendance policy should consist of a lot of things but some things are so obvious to be mentioned a policy that is left unmentioned. This makes your policy unclear sometimes, which leads to a loophole through which mistakes can be made. Here are some things that shouldn’t be done while building a policy:
- Unclear consequences for not following the policy
- Limitations of implementing a particular policy
- Dictating the rules without proper approval of policies
- Not conversing regularly with the employees
- And most importantly, Not getting feedback for your updated policies
To Conclude
Organizational management can be tricky sometimes but the policies and clear path of expectations come in handy. While tracking your employee’s attendance and leaves many aspects need to be considered. Remember, Whenever a policy is to be implemented it should be unbiased and free from partiality. If you want to build up a happy workplace, the above-mentioned factors will be the most helpful way for an error-free and flexible workplace.
