Why recording employee time is important for your business
The need to record employee time is important for your business for a host of reasons. The most important being, you need to know your labour costs.
Without this information profit margins, productivity and more are almost impossible to report on.
In today’s article, we’re going to cover why you should record employees’ time, how recording time can help with productivity and the software that can help you achieve this.
Reasons to record employee time:
- Getting the correct wages to each employee.
Making sure you have the correct wages means recording hours worked.
- Employers must comply with employment legislation such as Working Time Regulations, Minimum Wage rulings and other tax and national insurance obligations.
Recording time will help you record your compliance. You can find some useful advice on Gov.UK about the workforce records which employers need to keep.
- Line managers and supervisors need this information to assess performance and productivity and keep track of absence, sickness and lateness.
An accurate record of an employee’s time means that holidays and other entitlements are easy to calculate.
Busy dealing with so many other aspects of their organisation, managers can often overlook the crucial requirement of ensuring they have an accurate time recording system.
Why managing time is important for productivity:
If your employees are performing well it means the company is performing well. It’s all part of good performance management – it’s also vital to your company’s productivity.
In any organisation, large or small, some departments may lag behind others. It’s your manager’s job to discover the reason.
All businesses should understand their strengths and weaknesses and identify simple practical steps to get the best out of their staff.
One important aspect to consider is the time management of your employees’ time.
In certain sectors, for example, such as construction, hospitality and cleaning, it can be a particular challenge to manage the time of staff on variable contracts and different sites.
But ignoring warning signs such as lateness, absence, or long breaks could be your key to working out the issue.
Not only will the employees responsible for the tardiness be causing a productivity issue. But watching their behaviour go unchecked, can also create a chain effect across the department.
Instead by recording employees’ time, you’ll ensure all workers are held to the same standard and productivity levels don’t slip.
So what are your options to record employee time?
Our customers come to us because they’ve become increasingly frustrated with manual records and timesheets. This is an inefficient and outdated way of dealing with time and attendance.
So how can you record T&A?
One option is to use software systems based on local PCs, but these can be limiting because of the lack of access for multiple managers and employees. Particularly if you want to offer employee self-service for holiday and other absence bookings for example.
Many businesses are therefore turning to cloud-based time and attendance systems.
Cloud-based systems capture clocking in and out data and automatically compile this timecard data into payroll reports. These reports can then be easily exported for speedy payroll processing.
How uAttend can help:
- It’s cloud-based so there’s no software to install or update – you simply sign-up for an account and log in.
- Staff can be given a choice of ways to clock in and out. uAttend collects this clocking in information and aggregates all the data in your online account – it’s simple!
- uAttend’s time management system automates the collection and processing of time and attendance data, improving accuracy and significantly speeding up data processing for payroll. Accurate time clocking data is sent for payroll processing – no more fiddly reconciliations!
- uAttend also simplifies the management of holidays and sickness.
- Managers and supervisors can use real-time dashboards to see immediately who’s in and who’s not by employee, department or company-wide.
- Managers can approve timecards online; they can view and print individual timecards and email them to employees. You can set up email alerts that you get if staff clock in late (or out early).
- uAttend administrators can assign ‘supervisors’ to departments who can view, edit and archive employee profiles, view timecards and run reports.
Ready to take the next step?
Above all, having the right tools is an important step in making sure you are maximising your company’s productivity and getting the maximum output from your labour.
An effective attendance management system such as uAttend can help you keep track of staff and plan the tasks which they should be doing.
It helps you to see the bigger picture so that you can make the right decisions for your business.
You can then monitor progress, results and assess if there appears to be a problem or more room for improvement.