Employers are working under a whole new set of time and attendance demands spurred by COVID and rapid software innovation. As a provider of a software platform, you must be able to guide and counsel your customers on the trends and regulations applicable to employee time and attendance tracking that will have a big impact in 2022.
1) Time and Attendance Tracking During a Phase of High Employee Turnover
The labor force is acting fickle now. The Great Resignation of 2021 has yet to end as people feel free to leave a position before locking down a new one. Finding employees who will stick around is getting harder. Your customers have never needed to get ahead of high employee turnover more than they do now. Here are some of the best ways you can help them use their workforce and time tracking software to help retain their employees.
Absence Management
Your customers should be proactively addressing absenteeism in employees so it doesn’t drag down productivity. Since they already track individual workers’ rates of absenteeism, they can use that information to identify people who may be ready to leave. Frequent absenteeism or new patterns of absenteeism can be flags that an employee is disengaging, possibly even interviewing elsewhere.
When HR learns which employees have a high level of absenteeism from the time and attendance tracking software, they can intervene proactively. Since the purpose of the intervention is to keep the employee, this meeting should be about listening to the causes of the uptick in absences and working together to resolve them.
Managing Employee Burn-Out
Absenteeism is only one flag of employee burn-out. Employee time and attendance tracking can also reveal other potential flags. For example, chronic tardiness or leaving early are also classic signs of a disengaged employee. Employees trying to be at work less may be burnt out.
What can burn employees out? One cause could be working too much overtime. There’s a balance between employees looking for overtime because they want the extra pay and driving them into the ground with forced overtime. Does a team have 15 employees when they really need 25 to meet productivity goals? Suggest to your customers that they can use time tracking data and analysis to assess whether they’re working with too few employees and over scheduling them.
Employee Mental Health
We seem to live in particularly stressful times. According to the CDC, 71% of adults reported at least one symptom of stress, such as a headache or feeling overwhelmed or anxious.
Workers may be dealing with personal stressors that are affecting their ability to be present and productive. These stressors can certainly lead to people quitting altogether.
The HR teams and managers using your time tracking software may not be aware that the time clocks they use can be tools to help people manage their mental health. Employers can push out positive affirmation messages to employees when they clock in or out. They can run sentiment surveys from the time clock that HR and managers can use to assess whether a worker needs special attention.
Employers can also provide employees with an attestation on the time clock to inquire about how they are feeling at the end of the day. This information can help HR teams provide employees the tools they need to help them deal with the stresses of today’s work environment.
Addressing employee well-being is a win-win. As the CDC discusses, “by addressing mental health issues in the workplace, employers can reduce health care costs for their businesses and employees.”
Direct Impact of COVID on Retention
COVID has affected industries in different ways. Here’s a quick look at how just three major industries have been affected:
- The travel, leisure, and hospitality sector has been hard hit with so many losing jobs when the industry had to shut down. Travel is coming back, but aggressive incidents are at an all-time high, leading to employee mental stress.
- Hospitals and healthcare services are seeing upticks in nursing turnover rates, along with increased nursing position vacancies. High usage of more expensive travel nurses (i.e. temporary nurses) is increasing hospital payroll. A payroll analysis of time paid for in-house versus temporary nursing staff can help hospitals reduce turnover and payroll costs.
- The manufacturing industry was already suffering a skills shortage pre-COVID, and the problem has only grown, along with employee turnover. Absenteeism is a huge issue for manufacturing companies; time and attendance data analysis can help them get in front of absentee issues.
As a best practice, stay current on how different industries experience their retention challenge so you can offer targeted guidance on ways they can use your time and attendance system to help them meet that challenge.
2) Track Employee Negative COVID Status with a Time Clock
Regardless of whether a company is requiring employees to maintain vaccinations, they can also use the time clock to track employee COVID status. You can customize the time clock software to display an attestation which could collect COVID test data. When an employee clocks in, the time clock could push out a message requiring them to confirm when they are feeling healthy, not having any symptoms or being exposed to someone who was recently tested positive for COVID.
3) Flexible Time and Attendance Tracking Integrations + Functionality
Your product development team is in a perpetual state of overdrive as new customer needs increase urgently. From improving how your software helps your customers manage schedules, to addressing increased workplace health concerns, you can help them stay on top of their time and attendance eco-system with creative solutions and functionality.
Here are some underutilized functions that your customers can use with the right time clock integrations:
- COVID has permanently established new expectations of workplace safety best practices. You can create a touchless time clock experience, so employees rarely have to touch it. Or, let the time clock do a thermal screening and block employees with temperatures above a set threshold from clocking into work, like our new IRT thermal scan time clock add-on.
- A web-enabled time clock can integrate with other cloud-based services, like e-signature software. Customers can collect employee signatures on documents through a time clock used as a dedicated employee self-service (ESS) station.
- A time clock with advanced camera and speaker communication, like our stride80, opens a variety of possibilities to improve attestation, and time and attendance documentation, provide interactive training, or enable real-time communication between employees and managers.
The best way to ensure your customers are getting maximum value from your time and attendance solution is to update them regularly on your software’s new functionality and the new ways their integrations also amplify its value.
4) Innovative and Worry- Free Surveys and Attestations
Attestation and survey functionality at the time clock presents you with endless possibilities to help your customers customize their time and attendance installation to do far more than time tracking.
Sometimes, you want to collect an attestation, like if the employer wants to collect COVID health status or vaccination confirmations. Let your customers know you can also customize the time clock software to use its data collection functionality to conduct short employee surveys. When employees can take the survey right at the time clock, they’ll make it easier to get full participation.
Diversity + Inclusion Surveys
Employers can collect worker demographic information and then conduct broader data analysis on a variety of critical issues. Payroll distribution and department diversity are just two ways they can use this data to track and improve their diversity and inclusion efforts.
Employee Mental Health Surveys
Besides running sentiment surveys on how employees feel about their work and level of engagement, companies can also run surveys that explore employee mental health more broadly. How employees feel about their work-life balance, what mechanisms they use to support their mental well-being, what tools they might want HR to offer; these are just a few potential survey topics.
Building Skill Development Solutions
Everyone wants improved skills training. Employees want to know they have a path for growth. Employers want to make sure they have access to the skills they need. When the time clock has a high-resolution touchscreen monitor, it becomes a very user-friendly tool for delivering quick skills training. If the needed skills require more intensive training than is suitable for a time clock, your customers can push out messages promoting their in-house skills training programs.
Keeping Employees Safe
Use employee attestations to document compliance with various regulatory demands. These attestations can include:
- Clock-out attestation where the employee attests whether they witnessed a workplace accident. This is real-time data that could be critical when investigating a safety incident.
- Break and meal-time attestations to ensure they confirm they took the full, legally required break time.
A huge part of regulatory compliance management is having the documentary record showing compliance. Using the time clock to collect attestations is an easy, thorough way to build that record.
Prepare HR Department for Hybrid Remote and In-Office Trend
Many post-COVID workplaces have morphed into a hybrid remote + in-office format. This creates a new wrinkle for your customers as they consider what tools to use for employee time and attendance tracking. The versatility of advanced time clocks makes them the preferred time tracking tool for onsite workplaces, especially with a time clock vendor to manage the integrations with your software solution .
Mobile time tracking presents several challenges, making it a less than ideal option to track employee time for onsite workers. However, it’s a valuable tool to collect time and attendance data for employees who work from home or in the field.
Consider Offering ESS (Employee Self-Service) on the Time Clock
Providing ESS, or employee self-service, at the time clock is the most effective way your customers can maximize the value of the time clock integration with your time and attendance software. A time clock that will work as an ESS station must have the software, processing capacity, and high-quality monitor needed to create a positive user experience.
We’ve heard from customers who are excited about the time and cost-savings ESS functionality can provide, but concerned that it could create a shift-change backlog at the time clock. It’s great that an employee can submit a vacation request at the time clock, but other employees may be eager to start or end their shift. Let customers know they can install some time clocks as designated ESS stations and others as attendance tracking time clocks. This way, an employee who wants to check their upcoming schedule can use an ESS station and not slow down employees who want to clock in and out.
Help Customers Do More with Their Time and Attendance System
Your time and attendance software can do so much for your customers, besides tracking employee time and attendance. Make sure they know that. The best way to raise customer lifetime value is to be an active partner that helps them learn all the ways leading-edge time and attendance solutions and integrations address their developing needs.