The experience of many businesses has proven the fact that employee attendance tracking is important for maintaining a healthy work environment and high team performance. Even if a company’s workflow allows remote work, tardiness and last-minute schedule changes, this needs to be tracked. Otherwise, leaders may face problems related to dedication and morale, additional time expenses, and even excessive costs.
Negative effects of overlooking absences
Among the problems associated with employees’ unscheduled absences, the following ones are the source of major concern for managers and business owners:
- Low motivation and poor morale: employees filling in for their absent colleagues resent the increased workload, which adds to their fatigue and stress.
- Decreased performance: absenteeism causes a higher percentage of idle time, which lowers the productivity of the whole team.
- High turnover: replacement employees or contractors are hired to maintain team performance in companies with higher absenteeism rates.
- Excessive management time expenses: disciplinary action takes time, and so does figuring out ways to finish work within the estimated timeline.
This results in decreased performance, and as a consequence, failure to meet deadlines, poor quality of provided services, dissatisfied customers, and loss of revenue. In order to avoid it, many companies choose to adopt software tools for attendance management.
Benefits of attendance tracking
The data on employee absence is not just essential for controlling the work process in the company. It also helps avoid many indirect costs associated with absenteeism:
- Improved productivity allows teams to do more. Fair distribution of workload prevents employee burnout and dissatisfaction, which directly affects their dedication and performance.
- Lower overtime costs. With reliable attendance data, managers are able to give more exact time estimates for specific tasks and better divide workload. This way, the amount of unforeseen urgent work that causes overtime is reduced.
- Decreased extra costs related to delay penalties. With accurate and predictable schedules, there is less risk of failing to meet contract deadlines.
On top of that, keeping track of employee absence helps prevent any inaccuracies caused by errors in PTO or sick leave balance accruals.
How to Track Employee Attendance
Before you start tracking employee attendance, you need to adjust all the necessary settings. These usually include leave and sick time accrual rules, leave request approval settings and leave types settings.
When you are all set, employees get access to the actiPLANS corporate calendar. Depending on the privacy settings, they can request leaves, view their paid time off and sick-leave balances, review leaves of other team members.
Employees can record their attendance in the following ways.
- Request leaves. Users need to select leave days, specify leave time and submit their requests. Depending on the request approval settings, these requests will be further directed to the approval manager or automatically approved.
- Set statuses. You can create leave types that don’t require accruals and approvals and use them as statuses. For example, you can create a leave type called Remote Work so that your remote and semi-remote employees can use it to notify their team about their working from home status.
- Notify about changes in their schedules using the mobile app. actiPLANS mobile app allows employees to log unplanned absences such as getting late or leaving early. This information will be displayed in the corporate schedule as a note and not counted as leave time, unless you choose to.
So, managers can review leaves in a corporate calendar using a web interface or mobile app where they can sort the data by name, leave type or status. Managers responsible for leave request approvals will be notified about new requests by email.
Summary
Careful collection and analysis of employee attendance data is necessary for detecting and preventing possible productivity problems in your team. Special attendance management tools automate this process and provide a clear picture of absences for past and future dates, helping managers avoid negative effects of unscheduled absences and increase the performance of their teams.
