Cloud time and attendance software carries a host of advantages. For one, it is not bound by a single workplace, so your company can expand and distantly working employees can be tracked easily. For another, it facilitates fairness across your entire company. Furthermore, this kind of software allows you to legally defend your decision to administer punishments to employees with consistently poor attendance. Finally, you have the ability to keep records even if something happens to your local servers.
Multiple Work Areas
As your company expands, you will end up with many different work areas. Each of these areas needs to be maintained to the same standards as your main offices. Employees who are on the road, or are in satellite offices, need to know that they will also be held accountable for their attendance. Being able to manage multiple work areas electronically takes away a lot of the "micro-managing" that managers have traditionally had to do in order to keep tabs on employee attendance. With a cloud-based system, tracking attendance can literally work anywhere in the world with equal efficacy.
Company-wide Disciplinary Fairness
Handing out disciplinary actions to employees who are late or fail to show up is a difficult subject in some cases. It is human nature to single out some people who display poor work ethics when they do show up, have a bad attitude or in some other way prove irksome. Unfortunately, this tendency to point out "troublemaker" employees tends to backfire, as the employees themselves sow dissension and become overtly passive-aggressive. Morale tends to suffer greatly when there is the impression that punishments are being handed out to individuals you do not favor, and are being spared from your "teacher's pet" employees. Through a cloud-based attendance system, you can display for anyone who wishes to know precisely why and to whom you are distributing punishments.
Legal Protection
In cases where punishments are seen as seriously off-base, particularly when there are terminations involved, legal actions can occur. Employees or former employees who feel unjustly treated or sleighted can decide to sue you, which can incur large legal fees and disrupt the normal operation of your company. When you use a cloud-based attendance system, you can point out in black and white precisely what attendance issues precipitated all discipline, and to whom. This can derail many lawsuits that may be based on perceived discrimination.
Server Backup By Default
Servers can fail, no matter where they are. One significant advantage to a cloud-based system is that not only do you not have to hire your own IT department, which carries its own sizable costs. You also do not have to be concerned about a single localized issue such as a fire or electrical disturbance eliminating your attendance data. Having this data backed up remotely, and handled by an IT staff that has verified training and who are compensated through a regular fee structure is simpler and more robust than attempting to handle this non-core operation in-house.
Creating Work-life Balance
Work-life balance can be difficult for an employer to provide. However, one way you can begin to investigate when employees require differing schedules is by identifying and analyzing their attendance issues. In some instances, parents may need to start their work days earlier, or have time off mid-day to handle their children's school schedules. By determining when your workers are individually missing or late to work, you may be able to open a dialogue about a need they did not think to bring up, that can increase morale and help stabilize your staffing on the whole.