Employee absenteeism in the workplace is a growing concern for employers which, when compounded, threatens productivity and could jeopardize not just a company’s overall operations, but also its financial health and longevity. With more and more employees now opting for non-traditional working environments such as telecommuting, it has become even more difficult and important for businesses to identify and keep track of their employee’s absences. According to the survey taken by the Society for Human Resource Management employers spend approximately 22 percent of their total payroll on vacationing, sick and otherwise absent workers. With this many absences happening in the work place today, it is imperative that the subject of absence management is addressed, and a solution proposed.
Accurately tracking employee time to curb absences has never been more critical in today’s workplace. It is time for businesses of all sizes to revisit time management in the simplest sense of the term. Time as a measure of work has been around almost as long as work itself. While modern work practices seem to point to other, more advanced measurements of work, the emergence of several trends, including enhanced regulatory requirements, make the tracking of employee time in today’s workplace more important than ever before. Companies are struggling to reduce the time it takes to capture and record man hours and decrease data entry errors all while trying to utilize captured time for increasingly complex calculations and applications.
Most companies who find themselves dealing with these issues do not know how to handle this complex problem, so what are businesses to do? The key lies in: Software automation. Companies can streamline the grouping of absences and handle the numerous policies and government regulations pertaining to employee absence, as well as handle and differentiate unique payment and attendance cases. But not all automated software is created equal. When evaluating various software packages as part of your selection process, here are the benefits you need to make sure your automated software program provides:
- Effective overtime monitoring and management
- Complex federal and state labor regulations administration
- Automated time capture
- Elimination of errors, rounding, and any employee errors
- Integration with the payroll process
- Custom time approval workflow creation
- Work schedule creation and management
- Time-off and leave request management
- Labor analytics
Employee absence management doesn’t have to be an unconquerable burden. By providing information, access, and reports through automation, you will allow your managers to focus on your business’s core competencies instead of being occupied with the nitty-gritty details of employee absence management. With an automated software system, you can use this important measure of work to your advantage in a competitive environment and leverage effective employee time tracking to get a leg up on competitors. By smartly automating your employees’ time and attendance your business will become a better steward of its most important resource, time.
