Attendance Management: A Way to Reduce Costs & Increase Work Efficiency
The experience of many businesses has proven the fact that attendance management 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.
Select the Right Tool to Keep Track of Absences
There is a variety of special tools that companies find helpful in attendance management. Some prefer using clock in / clock out cards; others implement software that monitors users’ computer activity. There are businesses where biometric attendance tracking systems are considered a reasonable solution. However, experience shows that in most cases there is no need to go this far: there are more cost-efficient and easy ways to keep track of employee attendance.
actiPLANS is a self-service tool that allows regular employees to submit their leave requests and gives an overview of absences for team and project managers. This helps distribute the workload for future dates, estimate availability of workforce, and set realistic deadlines.
A mobile app is an additional useful tool for informing your colleagues on last-minute changes in your schedule — for example, when you are coming in late or leaving early. It integrates with the main application and provides an easy way to submit leave requests and absence notes when you are away from your computer.
Summary
Careful collection and analysis of employee attendance data are 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 the negative effects of unscheduled absences and increase the performance of their teams.
