Tag: Attendance Tracking

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

Employee absenteeism, payroll calculation and fake attendance are problems that take away lot of time from an HR’s work day. Time spent on tallying attendance, checking for proxy and matching leave with payroll can be saved by a good attendance tracking system for your employees.

But what is a good attendance tracking system. Does your current system have any faults that are causing problems?

Let’s look at the features a good attendance tracking system should have. This will help you to upgrade your current system or get a new one.

What should a Good Attendance Tracking System Have?

Minimum Hardware Requirement

A good attendance tracking system should have minimum hardware requirement. With cloud solutions and a smartphone in every employee’s hand there is no need to spend money on expensive biometric trackers and other equipment.

Attendance trackers also need maintenance and have failure someday despite it. Having an attendance tracking software that runs with employee smartphone and on cloud is the solution you should look for.

This will need no investment and also reduce wait time in front of RFID machines as each employee has his own tracker now.

Ability to Track Productivity Time Accurately

It is difficult to track working hours where the trackers only marks punch-in time. There is no way to know whether the employee left right after punching in.

Even if punch-out time is tracked, things like forgetting to mark attendance, leaving without punching make it difficult to record the productive hours spent by employee. Cases of absenteeism can increase in such a scenario.

For this reason an ideal attendance system should track the actual time spent by an employee in the office. This is possible today and wifi attendance system uses the office wifi to track hours spent in office along with employee location.

Prohibit Buddy Punching

Buddy punching is a practice that is very harmful for your business as well as your work culture. It is very easy for employees to mark attendance for their colleagues with RFID tags or manual desktop log-ins.

Biometric prevents this problem but has its own set of limitations. With a wifi technology this is taken care of as attendance can only be marked in area which has office wifi.

Work with your HRMS

A professional attendance tracking system should integrate with your HRMS. Without this payroll calculation, leave management, productivity tracking as become a frustrating task.

You want system that automatically feeds in this data into HRMS so that you don’t have to do it manually. Also check that data formats are compatible.

A lot of tasks can be automated today and HR should take full advantage to technology so that they can concentrate on strategic work.

Customized Alerts

You may need customised alerts or reports according to your business and teams. This could customise alerts for late arrivals to team supervisors. Sales and on- site workers may also need customization.

You may want to customize your attendance tracking as your business operation and employee count grows. Attendance tracking system should be able to scale with your business and change according to your needs. Some systems also support web API that allow you to customize your attendance systems.

Error Free Functioning

Errors in attendance tracking can interfere with so many other HR activities. Downtime of attendance tracking means regularisation of attendance, changes in leave management and errors in payroll calculation.

Make sure you choose a professional vendor with reputation of minimal errors.

Final Thoughts

Good attendance tracking system is essential for maximizing employee productivity. Without it your company can face problems of absenteeism, low productivity and insincere employees affecting the culture of your company.

Thanks to wifi attendance technology you can now install an attendance system that requires minimal hardware investment, tracks location and prevents proxy marking.

When choosing a system always make sure that it integrates well with your current HRMS, can grow with your business and functions error free.

Posted on by Wifi Attendance Super Admin

Many small start-ups begin with minimal to no attendance tracking. It is understood when your employees are just four founders who are putting their heart and soul into the business.

However, as the company grows, tracking of attendance becomes necessary. Many companies realize this too late after paying for wasted man-hours. Lack of attendance tracking can lead to losses where employees are taking you for a ride.

Some companies do have an attendance tracking system in place but it is simply inefficient. To help you avoid losses we have put together the 10 most common attendance tracking mistakes we come across. Each point also includes a solution for you to avoid them.

Missing an Attendance Policy?

The power of written word cannot be understated. Having an attendance policy in place makes employees take attendance seriously and avoids casual attitude. Have a written attendance policy detailing:

  • Official working hours
  • Expected productive hours
  • Annual leaves
  • Process of leave approval
  • Provision for half
  • Definition of tardiness or abseentism
  • Consequence of breach of attendance policy

This policy should be available and signed off by every new employee. If it’s the first time you are introducing the attendance policy, then it should be shared with every employee in organisation.

Allowing for Proxy

No company wants to deal with proxy attendance but some systems can be manipulated by employees. An example could be a physical paper register or system log-in. In both the cases attendance can be marked by a colleague or friend of an employee.

A good attendance tracking system should verify the identity of the person. Biometric systems and wifi attendance system are examples of attendance systems which will not allow for proxy. 

Not tracking the log out time

Another mistake is not noting the log-out time of employees. This means the system only captures the log-in time and counts the employee present for the whole day. This is dangerous because you will have no way to know if the employee marked the attendance and left in an hour.

This does not let you count the total hours worked and hence there is a possibility of manipulation. To avoid this always have a system that counts the total working hours with log-out time in the office. 

Not Implementing Attendance policy

So you have an attendance policy clearly communicated to everyone in the company but are you monitoring its implementation? Expecting everyone to follow the rules with no supervision would be foolish. The HR must ensure that the policy is being followed by monitoring attendance.

Of course, it will be impossible for HR to monitor each and every employee. For this reason there must be software system that automatically raises a red flag every time attendance for an employee falls below standard.

Another important part of implementation of policy is support of managers. Every manager must be told that it is his/her responsibility to report low attendance, absenteeism, tardiness etc.

Confusing Leave Policy

Unclear rules or contradicting clauses can lead to confusion among employees. An example could be mention of 10 public holidays in the policy but only showing 8 in the leave management system. Make sure there are no discrepancies in the written word.

Sometimes confusion is caused simply by rumours and grapevine.  As your company grows bigger you will find that this is a common problem.

This is why it is important for HR to have a formal channel of communication regarding attendance. This could be done via personalised mails detailing monthly leave report in addition to bulk mails to address any confusion.

Leave Application System

Leave application system informs employees of available leaves and maintain record of leaves availed. It also requires an approval by reporting manager and HR.

Today automated leave management systems (LMS) have made it easier for everyone to manage leaves. Many vendors even provide mobile app to make it convenient.

Make sure your LMS is integrated with payroll for easier processing.

Not counting Absenteeism or Tardiness

Absenteeism and tardiness are other ways work hours are made unproductive. This is a phenomenon where employees are absent without informing, coming in late, leaving early, taking undue long breaks or simply being unproductive by surfing shopping sites for hours.

These habits are equally bad if not worse to taking a full day leave. They increase your expense and spoil the atmosphere of the company. Absenteeism affects the culture slowly killing off motivation of other employees too.

Sometimes the reason for absenteeism is in the office. If there are only a handful of employees showing absenteeism then it’s definitely their lack of motivation. However, if this is a widespread norm in your company then your company culture needs a major correction.

Unfair Implementation

Implication of attendance rules must be equal for all employees. Having different rules for different departments or management levels can create resentment in employee’s mind. For example, working hours should be applicable to all levels of management.

It is unfair to expect an employee to come to office at 9 am when his manager turns up at 11 am every day.

Not Analyzing Attendance Data

There is a lot of data collected on attendance from attendance systems, leave management systems and employee monitoring. One of the mistakes companies make is to this data go waste.

There is so much that can be done to improve the attendance and office culture with this data. Leave patterns can tell you when employees are likely to take leave and plan accordingly. You can also calculate productivity hours of employees and link to their performance.

Most importantly you can know where you are in attendance and how you can improve by analyzing this data and experimenting with solution.

For example, if it is noticed that most employees take a leave on working Saturday you could experiment with declaring it a holiday anyways and checking for change in productivity from Monday to Friday.

Not integrating systems

Sometimes more than one system is required for employee monitoring to work smoothly. For example, it would be a good idea to install CCTV camera at punch-in points to catch proxy attendance. This is not required in case of live location tracking like in wifi attendance.

Your attendance tracking system also needs to work with other systems such as payroll, leave management and internal communication channels (chats, instant messaging etc.)