What are the benefits to implementing workforce management software? 

Published on February 5th, 2013

What are the benefits to implementing workforce management software? 

Live data

Using a time and attendance system, companies don’t have to wait until the end of the week for a time sheet or a clock card to get an idea of the lateness, overtime, and absences that occurred during a given period. 

Companies can see in real-time whether people have arrived late, worked overtime or did not show up. 

In addition, live data driven from a time and attendance terminal, phone or web page also shows the actual time the employee arrived/left, giving a true reflection of a work pattern – rather than a typical 9-5 time sheet that the employee fills in. 

Decentralised administration management

As data is now stored on a database and users have password restricted access, companies can comfortably empower managers to view, edit and delete information on a system, knowing they are working within the defined rules of their administration rights. 

This empowers managers to gain access to information previously unpractical to view.  It also enables them to start to managing patterns of overtime, lateness, absence and sickness within their teams. 

Most well-designed time and attendance systems will provide a self-servicing function that enables employees to change personnel details, view holiday entitlements, make holiday requests, swap shifts and clock in/out online. 

This greatly reduces internal administration time, removes potential errors or lost forms and creates a history of holiday requests. 

Payroll export

With data managed electronically generating a payroll report literally takes seconds, and it’s even quicker to export it into CSV file format, which payroll members can send to internal or bureau providers. 

Automation of ‘Working Rules’

Activities that previously took an age to calculate on various spreadsheets can now be automated.  Typically this includes overtime, lateness and holiday entitlement by accrual, not to mention Working Time Directive.  This removes the time spent making these calculations and removes any error in miscalculation. 

Enabling employee reward systems or management flags

Quite often companies consider attendance bonuses to remunerate reliable workers, but then reject the idea due to the time taken to calculate who qualifies.  Similarly, companies that want to adopt sickness and absence alerts (like the Bradford Factor) decide not to implement them as the administration burden is too great. 

With an automated time and attendance system, once the rules are defined, the system calculates and reports automatically. 

Cultural change

Once employees start to realise that their pay check is driven by their clocking records then attendance naturally improves and lunch breaks or rest periods aren’t extended. 

Employees are also often happier that any overtime (paid or unpaid) they complete is noted and possible for review later in the year. 

Simplified reporting

Immediately upon installing a time and attendance system your business can report upon sickness, absence and holiday by department, percentage, employee turnover reports, Bradford Factor, Working Time Directive flags, next month’s rota cost, last month’s overtime and so on. 

The time taken to produce these management reports and send automatically to managers takes seconds. 

Reporting by exception

When using a paper time sheet or a clock card system, users spend hours looking through all the records to identify any anomalies or exceptions that may have occurred.  Using an automated system those issues are flagged and highlighted automatically, significantly reducing the administration time. 

As an example, rather than looking through 200 people and the in/out time of 5 five working days (a total of 2000 records), an automated system can identify the 5 people that didn’t clock correctly each day i.e. late or did overtime, meaning the user only has to deal with 50 relevant records. 

Visual calendar and rotas

With information stored electronically users can now see graphical displays of all worked and non-worked days, rotas, sickness, absence, holiday and overtime occurred in a month, quarter, half year or year. 

This makes for a valuable tool when completing monthly/annual appraisals, and also as a day-to-day indicator of issues within rosters surrounding lateness, sickness etc.