Employee absences can cost your company a large amount of capital, as well as depriving you of your employees' skills during crucial moments. Tracking these absences can help you in a variety of ways, from building a successful legal defense in some instances to determining work-life balance requirements and where you may be falling short. Your employees also need to understand how their absences affect your company, and a tracking system can help you explain this to them.
Explaining the Inability to Meet Demand
When your employees miss hours or days when they are expected to be working, it can hinder your ability to meet the demands that your company has placed on itself. Your clients expect a certain level of production out of your company as a whole, and that whole can only operate at a capacity relative to the percentage of its workers who are actually working. In some instances, employees can feel a disconnect between the work they do and the ultimate results of your company. Having an effective absence tracking system in place can help you to explain to employees, particularly those with attendance problems, how their lack of attendance affects the company as a whole.
Legal Defense
In some instances, when an employee's attendance becomes bad enough, it may be necessary to fire them. After all, an employee who is consistently late or absent can bring down the morale of an entire group and reflect badly on the standards of your entire company. By firing them, you open up a job for a person who may have a better work ethic and who may care more about consistently doing their job. However, when you fire someone for any reason, you raise the possibility that they may file suit and take you to court. With attendance tracking software, you have a solid basis for why you fired them, and it becomes far more difficult for the former employee to claim discrimination or any other kind of unfair treatment.
Work-life Balance Development
Work-life balance is a significant part of ensuring that your employees are able to maintain their morale. Keeping morale reasonably high is good for staving off the potential for high turnover. By identifying when employees are more likely to be late or miss days, you may notice trends or patterns that can help you schedule people when they can actually work. Sometimes life and family obligations get in the way of being able to get to work, and intelligent managers work with these trends instead of trying to fight them -- family will win every time with most people.
Identifying Morale Problems
Sometimes morale problems can manifest through passive aggression, including being late on a regular basis or even having suspiciously frequent absences. In these kinds of situations, being able to identify a trend in the absenteeism can sometimes lead to a conversation about what is going on with a given employee. In some larger-scale cases, this may be a larger trend that is at work with your entire workforce. Being able to see these trends with an absence tracking system can make the difference between a series of mysterious attendance problems and finding out why these are the case.
Employee Fairness
People want to be treated fairly, and there is the tendency to select favorite employees as well as singling out perceived "troublemakers." Being able to reliably and impartially track attendance issues allows you to hand out punishments with obvious fairness. This can spare morale issues, avoid legal problems, and sometimes even get to the heart of why some employees have poor attendance.