How to Track Employee Attendance: The Complete Guide

About 4.2 million employees in the U.S. missed work due to illnesses, injury, or other medical-related appointments in 2018. The general rule of thumb for any human resource manager is that the rate of absenteeism should never rise beyond 4%. However, managing your staff team’s habitual non-presence is never that easy. 

For most human resource managers, chronic absenteeism is a constant headache. Tracking your employees’ attendance tops the list of common management concerns. Timely and regular employee attendance is at the core of your business’s productivity. 

Have you been wondering how to keep up with employee attendance at the workplace? This complete guide is all you need to track your employee’s daily register. 

Tracking Employee Attendance Through Pen and Paper 

Tracking employee attendance is a common headache, especially in big organizations. Pen and paper is one of the traditional approaches organizations utilize in their tracking of time and attendance. This option requires that employees sign in and out on a spreadsheet every time they report for work.

Advantages

Human resource teams may consider this option due to its simplicity. You only need to have a pen and paper where employees sign in and out each time they’re on duty. The best thing about this technique is that there are no costs involved.

In theory, things should work out well when using the pen and paper technique. As such, small businesses might gamble with this technique at the initial stages of recruitment. 

Drawbacks

First, the pen and paper method is not tamper-proof. Employees might conspire to defeat the system by signing in on behalf of their absentee colleagues. Second, time-stealing remains one of the most common concerns when using the pen and paper technique.

If you don’t have proper systems to keep track of what your employees fill in, you might end up incurring massive losses. As your business grows, you might find the pen and paper model hard to sustain. 

Manual reporting introduces errors that might cost your business a lot in the long-term. You might end up wasting productive time trying to reconcile such errors. The pen and paper technique might also expose your business to conflicts and disputes with employees in case of disparities in the payroll.  

Using Time Clocks to Track Employee Hours  

The manual approach to tracking employee attendance can be pretty limiting. If you have been struggling to keep up with the errors related to the pen and paper technique, you could always consider using the time clocks approach to track employee hours.

Advantages

Compared to the time and paper technique, the time clocks can help you eliminate the drawbacks related to manual entry. A time clock is a timer-like device that records your employees’ daily start and end times. Time clocks allow paper card insertions that help you keep track of your staff’s attendance.

With the innovations in technology, modern workplaces embrace biometric time clocks to help keep up with employee attendance. These clocks can identify an employee through specific bodily measurements as they enter the work premise. This eliminates the possibility of employees conspiring to tamper with the attendance register. 

Biometric time clocks use features such as face recognition or fingerprints to track employee attendance. This makes it easy to calculate employee wage hours per month. You’ll also be able to electronically track time and attendance even when dealing with an expanded workforce. 

Time clocks vary depending on the cost and the level of sophistication. However, you can still acquire relatively inexpensive punch machines if your business is still budding. You have the option of upgrading to more sophisticated tools as the organization expands over time.

Drawbacks

Like any other electronic employee monitoring tool, time clocks are prone to technical hitches from time to time. There’s also a general perception among employees that employers don’t trust them whenever time clocks come in the picture. This may lead to employee demotivation. 

You might also need to consider the cost of upgrading as the organization grows given the challenges of scalability notable with most time clocks

Track Employee Attendance With a Time and Attendance Software 

The modern business landscape has embraced technology in almost every functional area. Human resource departments can now also benefit from the use of modern tech. 

This approach makes it easy to keep track of employee attendance. Using employee attendance software is among the most efficient ways to track your employees’ attendance. 

The time and attendance software provide next-generation solutions in the quest to streamline your staff’s log-in protocol. This software can track when employees start and stop work. Apart from monitoring arrivals and departures, the time and attendance software can be an effective way to monitor absenteeism.

Advantages

Unlike the pen and paper or the time clocks, the time and attendance software are entirely digitized. This makes it easy to enhance scalability as your organization expands. If you’re looking for a time and attendance software for small businesses that are easy to integrate, you need not look further.  

Employee attendance software integrates a wide range of features. Such features are integral in managing your workforce’s routine register.

The best part about time and attendance software is that their design seeks to ease the aspect of transition as your company’s human resource expands. 

Choose software that encompasses time and labor management solutions and comprehensive mobile applications. With such integrative features, you never have to worry about keeping track of employee attendance schedules. As an added advantage, it would also help to settle for a time and attendance system that allows you to go mobile. 

Drawbacks

Technology is often prone to instances of technical hitches. You might need to update the software regularly to ensure optimal functionality. Further, this option may require that you have a tech-savvy team to help keep track of your employee’s attendance record. 

Time and attendance software present the most efficient way to ensure accountability among your employees.  You no longer have to worry about lost productivity and the hefty cost of absenteeism. 

You Can Now Track Your Employees With Relative Ease 

Human resource teams have a hard task trying to keep up with employee attendance. For you to institute order and maximize work hours, it would help to source for time and attendance software.

Time and attendance software are easily scalable as the organization grows. This is on top of introducing an aspect of efficiency. You can now track your employee attendance better and enhance profitability with top of the class employee time and attendance software.   

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