Real-time tracking and analytics | Why your business needs both
What comes first – the chicken or the egg? Real-time employee attendance tracking and analytics are the same.
One without the other is impossible. And without both, a business can’t harness the full power of business insight.
Without even knowing it, you have a wealth of data at your fingertips to draw on to improve workforce management and become more competitive.
Everything from clocking in and out, to absence, pay rates, departments and more can be translated into understandable data.
This data is then used to ensure you make the right business decisions wherever you are, 24/7.
What is workforce analytics?
Workforce or ‘HR analytics’, is the use of data for the people management side of the business.
The data will be your ‘people-data’ – for example, information collected by HR systems ie. payroll, absence, etc. Or other business information such as operational performance data, or a combination of the two.
Thanks to businesses increasingly embracing monitoring technology to improve business performance. Manual monitoring processes are being updated with the automated real-time tracking of employees.
When analysed, this data is a powerful tool for highlighting trends, problems and hopefully successes.
How can real-time tracking and analytics help your business?
Businesses spend a significant chunk of their outgoings on staffing costs.
It makes sense therefore to take advantage of the latest methods to improve all elements of workforce management.
Here’s what real-time data and automated analytics can help you do:
Learn more about your business
Do you know which HR policies are working for your businesses, where recurrent problems are cropping up and where things are working well?
Use your people data to learn more about your workforce and business operation.
Inform your decisions
Use your data to inform the decisions you need to make to take your business further.
You may have a hunch about high levels of absence or low staff retention rates and analysing clocking in data will reveal overall patterns and problems areas.
It is then easier to design improvements armed with the objective evidence collected.
Know who’s in and who’s out
At its basics, real-time tracking allows employers to know who’s on-site – which staff have, and haven’t, clocked-in for work – by employee, department or company-wide.
You can set up email alerts if staff clock in late, or clock out early. You can even monitor lunch and other breaks in to ensure that there is sufficient cover during those periods.
Sickness monitoring
Be alerted straightaway when workers are off sick so that you can arrange cover for their work without delay.
Absence reporting can also serve as an early warning about potential health problems or low employee engagement so that managers can take action.
Fine-tune your business
When job tracking is combined with real-time tracking, you can see in the hours worked against specific jobs; this enables you to analyse, benchmark and optimise the way you deploy employees on jobs.
How can businesses improve their analytics?
To make the best use of analytics in workforce planning businesses should re-think how they gather data.
Rather than manually-created spreadsheets or error-prone paper records an automated workforce management system is ideal.
Not only can data be far more easily and accurately collected through time and attendance systems, but it can also be shared with line managers and other relevant staff e.g. HR and Finance teams.
The increasing adoption of cloud-based software makes data sharing even easier.
An automated time and attendance system will collect and process your clocking in data online, providing you with an easy-to-use real-time analytics dashboard 24/7, 365 days of the year.
Once the system is up and running it’s simple to use, paperless and easily scalable to grow as your business does.
uAttend is a market-leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) employee management system that helps businesses save time and money, freeing them up to spend more time on getting new business.
To book a demo and find out more about real-time employee tracking and analytics, click here.
To watch a pre-recorded demo, click here.