Using time tracking software can help your company to save capital, plan your tax and expansion strategies, and make the most effective use of your workforce. As well, having simple time tracking at a glance and the push of a button makes keeping in line with relevant laws far simpler than it used to be. Even morale can benefit from this kind of software, provided it is used correctly and kept as simple as possible.
Know Your Employees
Time and attendance software is great for keeping track of when the schedule says someone should be working -- but it can never identify when people actually want to work. If you do not know the predilections of your employees, such as a tendency to want to be at home to get their children off to school, time tracking will reveal more absenteeism while you will notice morale beginning to slip. By actually learning a few things about your employees as people instead of just as workers, you can plan the schedule to a reasonable extent around what days and times are the most reasonable for both you and them. Often, a mutually beneficial solution can be put together and then automated easily.
Understand General Industry Trends
Your industry has certain times when there is going to be a surge of business to handle, while other times will feature a relative lull period -- both in terms of the time of day and the date throughout the year. The time tracking system can be geared to work alongside other systems your company uses, but ultimately your experience will be the ultimate guide to when you should have the most people on the clock. Through understanding the trends are are often easy to track in your industry, you can set the software to have a preference for scheduling employees at a time when you know it is traditionally busy in your workplace.
Work With the Time of Day
The time of day is an important variable when it comes to time tracking software. On the one hand, your time tracking software is vital to ensure that your locations are properly staffed at every time of the day and night that you are open. On the other hand, your software cannot account for how humans work differently based on the time. Knowing your employees, including their times of peak performance and weakest performance, is vital to ensuring that the most work gets done with the fewest employees.
Maintain Your Attendance Policy
Just because you have time tracking software does not automatically mean that it will build or enforce an attendance policy for you. If you are looking for a full on solution to the issue of absenteeism, your software can track it. However, no piece of software can completely replace having a policy in place that you explain in detail to your workers. When you have a clearly defined policy in place, your employees can choose to either respect it or not. Then, you can identify which employees are not respecting the new guideline and take what you consider to be appropriate disciplinary action.
Ensure Training is Up-to-Date
Even the best software in the world is only as good as the training behind it. If you have not properly trained your employees in how to use their portion of the time tracking software, getting everyone to use it will be an uphill struggle. At the very least, ensure that every employee in your organization knows how to use the software you choose, and can at least clock in and out when they need to.