Many businesses use time and attendance systems to account for their employees’ whereabouts. They can be particularly crucial if you have workers who provide services in the field rather than from a centralised headquarters, for example, since workers who are out and about, particularly ones who work alone, can sometimes claim to have worked longer hours than, in fact, is the case. Time and attendance systems are also important in manufacturing industries, especially among factories and assembly lines where shift patterns are in operation. There again, you might run a hospitality or leisure sector business and employ workers casually who might only need to account for their work time once a week having only been in attendance for a few hours, if at all.
All in all, digital time and attendance systems help to streamline all of the processes associated with traditional attendance tracking. Typically, such systems should provide Chief Financial Officers, Heads of HR and business owners with the details they need to pay employees correctly while also ensuring that recorded information is accurate and that they’re not being defrauded. In many cases, time and attendance software saves money and boosts employees’ productivity because it makes it easier and less time-consuming or them to account for their time at work. That said, some employers overlook another crucial aspect of adopting a digital time tracking system – holiday entitlement. Read on to find out more about the sort of benefits that modern time and attendance systems offer organisations of all sizes when it comes to holiday allocation, shift management and employee satisfaction
Ensure You Have Enough Staff at Work
To begin with, one of the biggest problems that businesses in Ireland face when it comes to managing holiday entitlement is ensuring that there are enough people to do the work that needs to be done. Some employers do this by only allowing a certain proportion of their workforce to book holidays at the same time, of course. This may work out in some settings but it isn’t always the smartest approach to take. For example, if you run a factory and order numbers are low, then you might want to raise the threshold at which additional workers can book time off. There again, lowering it when you know your order book is full and you need more workers to fulfil orders might be a good idea. With a digital time tracking system monitoring holiday allowances, you can operate in a much more dynamic way that takes into account shifting commercial priorities.
There again, you might want to ensure that your holiday allocations are able to cope with peak demands, typically around the school breaks. What might work for your business at Christmas might not apply for the rest of the year, for instance. Some systems cannot cope with seasonal differences like this but the best digital solutions for tracking employee time and attendance can be configured to deal with whatever your firm’s seasonal employment needs might be
Leverage Skills-Based Holiday Monitoring
Setting a threshold after which no one is any longer allowed to book leave – unless someone cancels theirs – is one thing but you can still face significant operational issues if even a few of your key staff take time off at the same time. Therefore, you need to be able to accept only holiday requests that will not leave you without the skills you need to operate. Let’s say, as an example, that you have to adhere to particular health and safety standards in your sector. If you allow all of your compliance officers to book the same two-week holiday in the summer, then you might not be able to get any work done or signed off until they return.
Equally, you might want to ensure that you have enough managers on hand for workers to liaise with at any particular moment. If several middle managers or supervisors are on holiday simultaneously, then senior managers, including CEOs, CFOs and Operational Directors, might need to get involved with day-to-day tasks instead of focusing on more strategic commercial decisions. By deploying a suitable advanced holiday allocation system within your wider time and attendance solution, you can avoid such avoidable problems.
Ensure Holiday Allocations Are Fair and Seen to Be So
One of the problems with analogue or even spreadsheet-based approaches to holiday entitlements is that they are not very accountable. When someone is turned down for a leave request, then – whatever the reason may actually be – they can sometimes feel aggrieved, especially if someone else’s request has been approved. There may be many good reasons including the need for certain skills to be retained. However, the feeling that decisions have been made unfairly can rankle leading to unwarranted but understandable resentment.
To avoid this, employers should invest in a system that takes into account all commercial priorities when allocating holidays in a fair way, whether that is on a first-come-first-served basis or according to seniority or length of service. With a fully digital approach, you should be able to ensure that all your workers feel equally valued and that the system is fair even when their holiday requests haven’t been approved.
Make Sure Employee Details Are Secure
Switching from a paper-based holiday scheduling system to a digital one worries some employers who imagine that important and potentially sensitive personal information may be recorded in such a way that it could be hacked. Imagine someone booked a day’s leave to attend a funeral or for some medical treatment they’d like to keep private and for this to be accessible to third parties. In short, it wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone concerned for the security of this information to be breached.
What is, therefore, crucial to realise is just how secure modern time and attendance systems are these days. With encrypted information, it would not be possible for anyone intercepting data to make any sense of it. Therefore, any employee holiday requests and the reasons for them would necessarily remain private. Managers and approved HR personnel will, however, be able to access such records as and when they need to, even if they’re not in the office and working from home, subject to the proper verification processes.
Deal With Unexpected Leave Requests Efficiently
Finally, there is one key area that causes a problem for SMEs with a dozen or so employees right through to big corporations with thousands of people on their payroll. This is when all of the best plans surrounding holiday bookings and leave arrangements are undone by last-minute requests for compassionate leave. All forward-thinking employers want to offer flexibility to their workers when exceptional circumstances apply, such as the need to look after a family member unexpectedly or following a bereavement.
In these situations, time and attendance software shouldn’t lose the human touch. Managers need to be able to apply discretion when approving compassionate leave and overrule what the system might otherwise say. In many cases, the best time-tracking software has holiday allocation modules that offer this degree of flexibility so that urgent and extreme cases can be handled with the compassion they deserve. What’s more, managers should be able to handle these requests promptly without taking up an unnecessary amount of their time.
Find Out More About the Advantages of Attendance Tracking System for Holiday Allocations
Whether you need cloud-based payroll and time and attendance solutions that integrate with one another or you’d like a reliable employee time-tracking system that can cope with today’s demand for flexible holiday scheduling, Snow is here to help. Take a tour of our world-class digital time and attendance monitoring system and see for yourself just what improvements adopting it would make to your business, large or small.