Attendance

The Importance of Employee Time Tracking and Why It’s Fundamental To Business Growth

Time, perhaps, is the most crucial resource that’s often wasted and utilised inappropriately. For organisations, the misuse of time has a negative bearing on all other important resources: funds, knowledge and human resources.

Companies, all across India and the world, big or small, struggle with managing time. To be specific, they want all their employees to make the best use of it as possible. But it’s no easy task.

Monitoring how time is being managed by a handful of employees may be easy. But what do you do when the numbers keep swelling? It can and will be difficult, especially for your HR team, to track employee time and come up with a time and attendance policy.

With more employees coming in, new roles emerging, the nature of work transitioning from on-site to remote to hybrid, cut-throat competition for market share and talent, and the ever-changing nature of technology and consumer behaviour can all throw a spanner in the works. That is, if you’re going to do it manually with a team, which might work for some time but will eventually fail.

The way forward for companies — who want to get a handle on how time is being spent — is HRMS. One that brings in the future-forward elements such as automation, machine learning, and the best of tech, built around the human equation.

That is to say, your HRMS platform must be people-centric. You’re within your rights to know how time is being managed by every employee when at work. But you don’t (ever) want to overdo it, even with a software, because that will reflect distrust. You’ll look too suspicious. Moreover, nobody wants someone breathing down their neck all the time.

The bottomline: start tracking employee time with HRMS software. But before that, you must understand why doing it in the first place is the need of the hour for your organisation. And what are the various benefits you can reap once you start doing it.

Employee Time Tracking is Essential for Businesses

Eventually, your customers and your employees will grow in numbers. And you have to find a way to strike a balance.Jobs in the future will have to be planned to keep up with customer demand. You’ll need personnel, pay their salaries, and ensure that the right talent bags the correct role within your organisation.

So, a lot of calculations must be made. The last thing you want is to tick off your customers for not fulfilling their needs because you were short-staffed or you didn’t have enough time. That’s where time tracking can help. You’ll know exactly how many people you need and the time they take to finish tasks (which, by the way, have their own timelines).

Before customer demand even spikes, you will have a clear understanding of the number of people you need and how much of your yearly budget you need to set aside for their salaries.

Long story short, customers are happy, you have talented employees, deadlines are met, and you have a hold over the hiring outlook and the associated costs based on calculated predictions about the demand-supply chain.

But is that all? Well, not quite. Tracking employee time brings a lot to the table. Let’s understand why it’s important and what you get in return for enabling it for your company.

Take Problem Identification To A New High

Problems will persist regardless of how much planning and thought goes into nullifying them. But you can surely take the necessary actions and prepare for it, long before the problem spirals out of control.

It’s all about identifying the problem early and coming up with a containment plan. To do that, you need a bird’s eye view of what your employees are spending their time on. A brick-by-brick breakdown and assessment of time allocation will do the trick.

To demonstrate what this entails, take the example of a task that comes across for a specific team or department. Now, if every employee is struggling with the same task then a slight re-tweaking of the process or system should suffice. However, if the issue only persists for a handful of employees then you could think of upskilling or reskilling them.

Guarantee Customer Loyalty By Being Precise

At the end of the day, you want your customer close, and your employees , closer still. Customer loyalty must be the absolute end-goal no matter what. And you can ensure it as long as they’re being informed about how and where their money is being spent.

For instance, if your company bills customers for using your software or product by the hour, they’ll have an accurate understanding of their expense. You bring in the element of trust, which is always good for business.

Yes, they might not even look at it. But what you’re providing is proof of your professionalism, and your team’s relentless efforts to keep them happy. That is why you bill them, with invoices cataloguing the billable hours and every item that they purchase (or use).

When you do that, they know that they’re being charged fairly as they’re aware of the time that your team spends on providing a service in return. This means you get more referrals and repeat business. The icing on the cake is your reputation, which retains its credibility.

Keep Authorities From Penalising Your Company

You’re supposed to pay your employees for the work they do, not for the hours they’re logged in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen at all because most companies do not track time.

In India, companies are always being monitored by central and state governments. They make the rules which must be respected and followed at all times. A small slip-up can often lead to hefty fines and never-ending legal hassles.

This is all the more true for something like payroll. Make a small error, pay someone less than they actually deserve, do not comply with tax and labour regulations and your company is done for.

However, if you track time and the hours spent by your employees, you considerably lessen the risks of making payroll errors. What’s more, time tracking and accurate payroll will keep statutory penalties at bay and also keep your employees satisfied.

You also end up making the right hiring and firing calls. If you feel that a certain employee isn’t putting in a good shift at work, you can think of finding a replacement. You’ll have all the proof if you want to dismiss the employee.

The same proof can also help if you just want to warn the employee about their work attitude and ask them to bring about a change.

The time data you possess can also help you understand your employees better. If someone is really struggling with work, and it has nothing to do with their skill, knowledge, or work attitude, you can know why. Perhaps it could be a personal, financial, or health-related issue that’s holding the employee back. And if that’s the case, you, along with the HR team can intervene at the right moment.

A Central Database That’s Legitimate

Sooner or later, everything you do at your company that requires it to be documented on paper will be binned. With technology, you can harness the benefit of going paperless.

The on-the-surface benefit isn’t only the positive ecological impact of reducing waste and saving trees. There’s so much more to it. For instance, when you go paperless, you’re bound to have a centralised data point, one that securely houses all your documents and time-keeping records.

With such a system, you will not be wasting time on guaranteeing the veracity of each and every document or entry. In other words, you could say that you’ll be taking away the stress, reducing confusion, and ensuring that every little information is correctly entered without any room for errors or manipulations.

Managers and team leads can better plan their day-to-day activities as well. For instance, if you realise that a data analyst is done with their analyses for a particular team, you can allocate them to another team or department who desperately need their inputs.

With time-keeping software, you can allocate your skilled (but idle) human resources to areas that require attention. In plain simple words, you assure complete utilisation of your resources when you efficiently monitor and manage employee time.

Time tracking, without a doubt, can be beneficial for your business. When done correctly with the right HRMS tool, like BetterPlace HRMS for instance, you can retain top talent, improve customer service, enhance productivity, and ensure repeat business. And that, in itself, is the recipe for company growth and success.

Shalini L

One of the prime contributors for this blog, Expertise in Staffing and Recruitment, Content Strategist by Profession. A Music Lover & Traveller by Choice.

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