Getting Back to Basics: Time and Attendance for the New Normal
Increasingly complex timekeeping use cases, unpredictable compliance legislation, limited visibility into on-site employee work abruptly turned remote – in the midst of a pandemic, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the change and uncertainty. When it starts to feel like everything is hopelessly overcomplicated, sometimes the smartest course of action is simply going back to the basics. So let’s start from the beginning: can you rely on your time tracking solution?
If you hesitated, you have your answer. If you didn’t, take a moment and consider whether you’re genuinely enjoying the benefits of streamlined time and attendance processes, or if you’re just settling for less. Not sure? Read on to learn what to look for when exploring the best options for truly transformative time tracking:
One Truth For All
Meeting most time tracking challenges can become exceedingly difficult when time-capture is inflexible and stitched together from disparate systems across geographies. Different global locations will naturally have different needs, and accommodating those needs is the greatest hurdle a time and attendance solution must clear in order to be adopted across an enterprise. Manual, cumbersome processes, such as getting employees to fill out their timesheets, approving each one, and leaving HR or Payroll teams to check for errors open the door to inaccurate timesheets, payroll oversights, ineffective job costing, and compliance violations. A solid time tracking solution becomes the system of record; the one centralized platform housing all your company’s time and attendance data that everyone can use to reach a consensus on time, pay, and labor cost metrics. This information can help manage any employee type, lessen labor costs, and create useful benchmarks across different locations. With clear insight into employee punch in/punch out tendencies, requested time off, and scheduling, it’s easier to manage their time as a key business asset.
Leveraging Mobile & Next Gen Tech
The future is now, and intuitive, mobile and cloud technologies, native apps, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are indispensable tools within the evolving landscape of time and attendance. Today, modern, self-service mobile capabilities are critical components in meeting all the needs of a newly remote and deskless workforce, and empower employees to have an impact on outcomes. Leading-edge capabilities like touchless time clocks, geofencing, GPS tracking, crew timesheets, chatbots, and intelligent approvals help to increase data accuracy, democratize next gen technologies, and alleviate safety concerns around high-contact surfaces. Cloud-based frameworks provide scalability, redundancy, and accessibility as business needs evolve. Ultimately, an effective solution provides supervisors with 100% visibility into employee time, and enables them to capture real-time information to monitor performance and use that information to optimize productivity – and ultimately, profitability.
Compliance-as-a-service
Not long after it became clear that COVID-19 would require a major transformation in workforce operations, a slew of new labor laws, regulations, and policy adjustments swept the globe. Countries, states, regions, and even cities were subject to new policies effective almost immediately – and businesses without a platform designed to handle wage-and-hour compliance were left struggling to keep up. Thankfully, businesses have access to solutions capable of automatically updating new policies and pay rules in real time, and they should expect nothing less. Whether an organization maintains statutory compliance or union rules and complex bargaining agreements, today’s organizations today require a comprehensive, up-to-date, out-of-the-box solution – one that works integrally with their time-keeping system to reduce errors and offer the flexibility to support any compliance need.
Smooth Integrations
Many organizations rely on a combination of systems like payroll, HRMS, CRM, ERP, and more to work in harmony with each other – and in order to do that, they must be able to communicate with each other. Businesses require the ability to seamlessly integrate and share data between these complex systems in order to share time and attendance data for processing pay on time and error-free. More importantly, effective plug and play capabilities can accomplish this without disrupting the existing ecosystem. This way each system can deliver ROI and ensure the right people can have access to the right information at the right time.
So sit down, take a deep breath, and relax. In unprecedented times like these, the best antidote for uncertainty is to ensure that you can depend on your time and attendance solution to cover all the bases. Armed with the knowledge of what to look for, you can examine the building blocks of your business and equip yourself with the tools for timekeeping success.
Looking to make life a little easier for your business? Contact us for a customized demo of Replicon’s global time and attendance solution today:
