Utilise an attendance system to address these 5 challenges in your business

Employee productivity, time, and attendance will have an impact on any business. This is primarily because these elements directly impact profitability and business success. Many businesses across industries are turning to innovative software solutions and attendance systems to help address the challenges associated with tracking employee time and productivity. We examine this in more detail below and address what businesses within the cleaning services industry should consider when choosing an attendance management solution.

What is attendance management?

Attendance management is the process of keeping records of your employees’ hours to help you track elements related to productivity, time taken off, and how much time they are working. In the past, this was conducted manually using excel spreadsheets, paper, or punching in time cards. Not only are these methods prone to human error, but they require a large amount of administration and time.

Luckily as technology has advanced, so has the attendance management process. In today’s world, many businesses have turned to attendance software solutions to make tracking employee time and attendance more efficient and effective. These tracking software solutions automate processes to save time and resources while enhancing employee productivity and business profitability, which is the ultimate goal for many businesses.

What 4 challenges does an attendance system alleviate for a cleaning services business?

The cleaning services industry is unique and differs from many other types of businesses. This is specifically because this industry relies on shift work across multiple locations. This means that, unlike companies that have their employees all under one roof, your employees are split across different locations, which highlights the following challenges:

1. Tracking employee’s attendance across locations – one of the biggest challenges that cleaning service companies need to address is tracking employee attendance across multiple locations. This means effectively tracking if they arrived on time, at the right location, and how many hours they worked.
2. Locating and addressing inefficiencies – there is no doubt that inefficiencies impact business productivity in a big way. If employees aren’t getting their schedules ahead of time and this process isn’t managed effectively then they are not able to let you know if there are any issues regarding availability, which in turn could lead to absenteeism and high staff turnover.
3. Holding employees accountable – for employees to be accountable, they need to have the necessary tools available to them and open lines of communication. This is often a challenge, especially if you are running a business with several employees over different locations.
4. Increased accuracy, visibility and productivity – data accuracy and employee schedules are essential when managing shift work, as human error can cost the business. At the same time, measuring employee productivity is also critical to business success. Managing this process requires you, as an operations manager, to track multiple employees, contracts and locations. This requires visibility across schedules, contracts, and employees.

In the past, these challenges were managed manually by the operations manager as best as they could with paper, spreadsheets, and more. Luckily things have evolved, and now employee attendance systems are removing the complexities of this process and making it more efficient and effective.

What benefits can a business expect when implementing an attendance management system?

We mentioned above that an attendance management software solution could solve many of the challenges being faced by the cleaning services industry. The question remains, how? The answer comes down to the benefits that this type of technology can provide, which includes:

• Enhanced Accuracy – the automation of this kind of attendance system minimises the risk of human error, which for many businesses contributes to financial losses. The automation of these processes ensures accuracy.
• Increased Productivity – this kind of solution saves you time when tracking employees time and effort, especially where work schedules are concerned. This technology effortlessly takes the complexity out of scheduling by creating rosters based on job requirements, employee grades, and availability. This ensures that you have the right employees across the right locations performing the right jobs.
• Reduces absenteeism and improves employee communication – automated time and attendance management systems allow employees to access their schedules, get reminders, and highlight conflicts in the schedule. The result of this is increased communication where operations managers are alerted well in advance if there is a problem related to availability.
• Legal Compliance – an attendance system empowers you to track and manage employee hours, overtime and more, so that you can stay compliant with local labour regulations and standards for working hours. Keeping track of these elements also assists your Human Resources department with their payroll needs and processes.
• Reduction in labour costs – labour costs are one of the biggest expenses a business can incur, so managing these costs effectively is essential. An attendance management system will help you identify areas where there is excessive overtime and alert you to any issues or problems that may affect profitability, like absenteeism and employee efficiency.

What are the key elements of an effective attendance system?

There is no doubt that an attendance system answers many of the challenges that operations managers within the cleaning services industry need to manage and address, especially where attendance records are concerned. But as with all technology, you need to find the right fit for your business’s unique needs and requirements. There are several key elements that you should be looking at, which include the following capabilities and features:

1. Integration with clocking technologies for employee time and attendance tracking per location.
2. Staff scheduling per location.
3. Payroll integration.
4. Reporting.

How does EasyRoster tick all these boxes?

The EasyRoster software answers each of the requirements mentioned above for an effective attendance system. This solution will empower you as an operations manager to manage staff deployments in near real-time from the office and at the same time record the added details automatically. 

This employee check-in functionality is conducted either with biometric machines (fingerprint or facial recognition) or proximity card technologies. This ensures that the scheduled employee arrives and leaves at the right locations at the right times. It also helps to identify issues or problems related to over or understaffing at different locations.

This software ensures effortless and efficient staff scheduling across all contract locations, which can be done automatically and manually.

EasyRoster integrates seamlessly into workplace payroll systems and ensures that your Human Resource department has all the necessary information related to your employees’ hours, holidays, sick leave, employee absences and overtime etc.

This innovative solution also has reporting functionality which allows you to pull relevant insights and information relating to workforce management and identify issues, problems, and opportunities for improvement.

Conclusion 

By utilising an attendance management solution for your cleaning services business, like EasyRoster, you will be able to answer to the challenges related to tracking employee attendance, thereby enhancing accuracy, improving efficiency, increasing productivity to ultimately improve profitability. For more on how EasyRoster can solve your attendance management challenges, book a demo today.