Frequent absences often impact performance. It also influences employee management, performance management, and employee wellbeing. Leave and attendance management systems are hence essential for organisations to run efficiently.
Purpose of Leave and Attendance Management System
What is its function as an independent tool or as part of the HR & Payroll Management System?
Every company wants to be competitive and for that it requires the support of its workforce. Paying attention to the employees becomes essential. It is vital to understand how they work, what motivates them and what affects their execution. This understanding comes from data. Over the years, absenteeism has often presented a harsh impact on workplaces.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), absenteeism in the U.S. costs employers $225.8 billion annually in productivity losses. Approximately $1.685 per employee. Attendance and leave management can help HR understand absences by focusing on the reasons that influence employees and affect their productivity.
The attendance and leave records help in addressing the following aspects:
- Whether employees come to work on time?
- How are the breaks managed, how long the intervals usually are?
- Frequency of vacations and pattern of sick leaves
- The type of leaves taken, the current trends, and so forth.
Advantages of a Leave and Attendance Management System
Leave and attendance management serves a definite purpose. What started with employee working hours being recorded on paper has now moved digital. For a very long time, punching time cards and spreadsheets were (and still are) used for the same.
However, as the employee number increases, manually handling this becomes cumbersome, and online attendance software makes such tasks simpler. As technology improved, new systems like Leave Management System and Employee Management systems have entered the scene.
Employee attendance and leave management come as an inclusive feature, assisting in data recording and analysis. How does employee attendance and leave management system benefit an organisation?
1. Improved Efficiency
Collecting and keeping attendance records one at a time is a time-consuming and backbreaking task. It involves hours to process paper sheets and time cards, creating schedules, leave approval adds to the workload and then comes the issue with calculating overtime and creating payroll.
Automated attendance and leave management systems help in efficiently handling administrative tasks. It reduces both the time and effort on the process and also aids in maintaining data accuracy. An automated system enhances the overall efficiency of the process.
2. Minimises Error
Processes like repetitive data entry often are error prone. Even with various checks and methods, manual processes have a margin of error. Automated attendance management systems ensure that the time records are accurate and prevent omissions that may lead to penalties or losses.
The data accuracy also helps in efficient performance and payroll management.
3. Cost Reduction
Manual processes take time and effort. Any error in doing so may lead to unjustified losses. Financial losses, because of manual errors, often lead to financial losses. A leave and attendance management system allows meticulous time reporting and reduces absenteeism, tardiness, and overpayment.
An automated system can save money otherwise lost through errors and potential payroll fraud.
4. Reporting and Analytics
As a result of an automated system, we may easily find what we need with just one click. While time reduction is one aspect, the system also helps in generating reports on hours worked, absences, overtime, and more with a single click.
We can customise most leave management systems to create precise reports to analyse performance, identify patterns in leaves, and even summarise monthly activities. Managers can use a graphical representation of data to strategize performance enhancement plans and more.
5. Flexibility
Organisations have been growing in scale, both locally and globally. Having centralised systems accessible from anywhere, hence, becomes a necessity. The prevalence of remote and hybrid work models influences the growing need for attendance and leave management systems.
An automated system can track employee time using data from connected devices, including smartphones, internet networks, swiping cards, and biometric scanners. Hence, better flexibility in terms of data collection.
6. Integration with Other Systems
How is the data collected, how is it recorded? For this to happen, integration becomes necessary. We can easily integrate a leave and attendance management system with third-party attendance hardware (swipe, biometric) or other connected devices to collect data in a single place.
An advanced system allows customised entry for attendance shifts, attendance cycles, mark in/out rules, leave deductions and holidays for each employee. It makes calculations simpler, too.
7. Compliance
Manual entry of time and attendance can be error prone. In the long run, it can cause serious ramifications. It is necessary to maintain accuracy in data.
An automatic attendance and leave tracking system helps in ensuring accurate data recording. It also helps stay compliant with the labour laws.
8. Data Security
Attendance management systems have reliable security systems. The design often helps to prevent fraud and false entries. The biometric system helps to prevent time theft. It prevents buddy punching and reduces the cost spent on retrieving lost ID cards, login credentials, etc.
Data access with layers of checks helps to prevent data theft.
Leave & attendance management systems benefit the organisations and also make the employee’s life easier. Listed below are a few benefits it offers to the employees.
- Supports remote working
- Helps in calculating leaves, assists in online application and approvals
- Allows employees to plan their time offs.
Challenges in Leave and Attendance Management System
As with any other system, any Leave and Attendance Management System may need a few tweaks to accommodate your organisation’s needs. Here are a few things that pose a challenge.
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Different Leave Policies:
Organisations with operations at various global locations have to handle the leave policies and holiday calendars, which are different too. The leave and attendance management system should tackle different leave rules, too.
This includes work-weeks, overtime rules, encashment policies, and more.
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Empowering Employees:
Another common issue is that systems are usually designed with an administration-first approach. It is, however, essential to consider employees too. The system needs
to be device agnostic so that it doesn’t affect employee mobility.
It is also imperative that it works as an employee self-service portal, giving control to the employees.
TopSource Worldwide offers a complete solution for HR, payroll, and employee management. For years TopSource Worldwide, a global employer of record services provider has assisted organisations in automating and taking leave and attendance management online.
The carefully curated services cater to the needs of the customers and also help in scaling operations without affecting performance or compliance.
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