Since it has an impact on your overtime pay, customers’ experiences, and overall profitability, you should learn to control your employee attendance.
Your ability to pay overtime, how your customers are treated and your bottom line all depends on employee attendance.
Unexpected absences, tardiness, early departures, and sick workers reporting to work are issues with your employees’ attendance.
Create attendance guidelines, and track employee hours with time and attendance software.
Employers that wish to learn how to monitor and control staff attendance should read this article.
Even while remote work is becoming more popular, not all jobs can be completed from a distance and those that can frequently require definite employee schedules. You’ll need to manage employee attendance remotely for your entire team of full-timers, part-timers, hourly workers, and salaried professionals if you want to keep your staff on these schedules. Although there are numerous moving pieces, you may easily keep track of your employees’ time and attendance by following a few straightforward guidelines.
What is attendance for workers?
Employee attendance refers to their being at their assigned work during the necessary hours. Employee attendance in the retail industry refers to an employee reporting for and completing their assigned shift for the day. It might entail a worker reporting to a remote desk job at 9 a.m. and leaving at 5 p.m. each workday.
importance of attendance by employees
It’s critical to monitor staff attendance for the following reasons:
time stealing
By keeping proper attendance records, you can prevent time theft, which occurs when employees are paid for hours they didn’t work. Since hourly workers can falsify their time clock numbers, time theft is more prevalent among them.
Nevertheless, time theft occurs occasionally among salaried workers. It is considered time theft when salaried personnel browses the internet for personal reasons while at work. However, time theft may not be a problem as long as production is constant if your employees establish their hours or are paid a flat rate regardless of how much time it takes them to complete their work.
Paid overtime
The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not exempt hourly workers, thus you are required to pay them overtime. Both you and these workers are required to keep track of the hours they put in, and you are required to pay time-and-a-half for any hours an employee puts in beyond 40 in a workweek. For instance, if a worker earns $20 per hour and completes 45 hours in a workweek, you are required to pay them $30 (their regular $20 compensation multiplied by 1.5) for each of the final five hours.
Another reason why tracking attendance is more important for hourly workers than for salaried workers is that professionals are exempt from the FLSA’s overtime requirements. This guide to exempt employees has more information.
Absenteeism
Monitoring employee attendance can help identify patterns of behavior, such as specific employees who frequently miss their scheduled shifts. Absenteeism is the term for this pattern of repeatedly skipping shifts, and it can have a significant effect on your income. Your crew may become overworked as a result of a recurring absence, which will lower the quality of your services. Absenteeism can turn into time theft when you unintentionally continue to compensate absent workers.
customer encounter
Customer-facing occupations like retail employees, servers in restaurants, and call center agents frequently have hourly pay. Each team member has enough time to engage with consumers when all employees are present and on time. Customers won’t feel hurried or ignored as a result, which increases their likelihood of making another purchase from you.
production method
Assembly-line workers may be hourly employees in manufacturing facilities, and even highly automated operations may still require their presence. For instance, you’ll have a huge gap in your production if the worker on your dessert manufacturing company’s cake assembly line isn’t available to smooth out the icing. This absence can cause a backlog that throws off the flow of your entire supply chain.
difficulties with employee attendance
You may run across the following difficulties while attempting to track and boost staff attendance:
early departures and tardy arrivals. Consider that you’ve designated a worker to assist the first customers of the day when your business opens at 9 a.m. There may not be anyone there to assist the clients if that person is even a few minutes late. These clients can choose to do business with a rival instead, losing out on potential revenue.
the workweek’s late starts and early ends. Even if you enjoy managing your firm, you surely comprehend why Mondays are so despised by so many people. Nevertheless, you might not feel too sorry for the worker who arrives at work abnormally late at the beginning of your workweek. The same is true for the worker who often leaves early on Friday afternoons. Both phenomena are extremely typical of small enterprises of all varieties.
Too many breaks No one should have to perform an entire eight-hour shift at once, but a worker who takes excessively long or frequent breaks might cause disruptions in your business. Nobody is advocating that you should reprimand an employee for arriving a few minutes later than expected, but you should always have a replacement on hand when a staff member is taking a break.
unanticipated absences Employees still have lives and needs outside of work at the end of the day. They can become unwell, have a family emergency, or simply require time for mental wellness. While you shouldn’t be reluctant to give them time off for these events, you also need to fill the voids that the cause of their absence.
Nothing has changed despite warnings. Even though employee discipline due to absences may be the most frequent, you shouldn’t act immediately after identifying a problem. Give the employee one or two gentle but strong warnings, but keep in mind that not all warnings result in behavior change.
After warnings, there are new attendance issues. Not every employee you recruit will enjoy their job. These workers might arrive late or leave early, and if you forewarn them of one kind of absenteeism, it might take another shape. A disgruntled employee, for instance, might start departing early if you warn them about arriving late.
sick workers. 90% of workers’ presenteeism, also known as presenteeism, went to work sick, according to a survey conducted in late 2019. You should urge sick employees to stay at home even if your bottom line suffers, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. An employee’s brief absence is unquestionably preferable to your entire team becoming ill and missing work due to it.
How to control staff presence
To deal with the aforementioned difficulties, proper staff attendance management techniques are helpful.
Establishing a strategy for evaluating staff attendance will help you manage it from there. Think about investing in timeclocks, biometric systems, or further time-tracking equipment.
Developing attendance guidelines: How to request vacation time or take sick leave should be covered in detail in your employee handbook’s attendance policy. How many of each form of leave your employees are entitled to take place in your policy? The implications of excessive absences or other policy violations should also be covered.
Identifying the cause of an employee’s absence: An employee who frequently gets into a disagreement with another employee may quit showing up at your company. Employees who are overworked or those whose personal situations are covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act may also be affected. Before taking any action, always inquire as to the reason for an employee’s absence so that you can work together to resolve the situation.
Awards for outstanding attendance may encourage your staff to come in on time and produce better work. Great incentives include cash bonuses, “employee of the month” campaigns, and additional paid time off for excellent attendance. Implementing a “no-fault” attendance policy, wherein staff members receive “points” for all absences (regardless of the reason for them), and are subject to discipline or termination when they reach a predetermined point total, may also be recommended as a motivator. These techniques, however, may land your business in legal problems.
Properly educating supervisors: If your business has multiple department heads, each of whom is responsible for overseeing a separate workforce, you should educate these supervisors on how to identify and address attendance concerns. Encourage these managers to keep track of and record absences, and go over how they ought to deal with persistent absences from work.
Flexibility: Although it may not be viable for hourly workers who interact with customers, flexible work schedules can improve employee attendance. Include this in your company policy if you require 40 hours of remote work per week from your employees but don’t care when the day of the week is completed. Even seemingly odd timetables created by employees are frequently more effective.
Using time and attendance software: All of the employee attendance management strategies mentioned above are made considerably easier by using time and attendance software (as well as other remote work business solutions). When selecting your time and attendance software, consider user-friendliness, precise tracking, and a wide range of integrations. Our reviews of time and attendance software also include some brand recommendations.
Attendance sheet for employees
You can use our free template to get started with effective employee attendance management.
Our design contains a calendar of all US public holidays as well as attendance monitoring for every month. It is accessible as a Google Doc, making it simple to copy, edit, and download into several file types.
You should be able to lower your team’s absenteeism quickly if you keep this document ready and keep the employee attendance management strategies we’ve discussed at the forefront of your mind.
