Time Clocks Encourage Employee Accountability, Offer Advanced Benefits

Accurate time tracking is crucial to every organization, but often times the burden of time tracking falls on the employers. Many organizations rely on supervisors and HR staff to ensure accurate time tracking of each employee, creating major administrative headaches. With the right tools, these administrative tasks can be minimized, shifting many time tracking responsibilities to the employees.

With accurate time tracking, an organization benefits in many ways, including:

Correct, timely payroll
Ability to track and predict labor trends
Better labor cost budgeting
Automated leave accrual
Accurate historical records
Government compliance
Avoidance of wage-and-hour litigation

Implementing accurate time tracking comes with several challenges related to incorrect time entry, missing punches, leave time balances and requests, and “buddy punching.” These inaccuracies can cause major problems for the organization, but leave the employee free from any accountability.

With many of these challenges in mind, organizations are moving to increasingly automated time tracking solutions in order to alleviate the administrative burden of ensuring accurate time tracking.

The Benefits of Accurate Time Tracking

Many employers view time clocks merely as a way to automate the punch in/punch out process, but today’s time clock technology offers significant advantages beyond electronic punching.

With the right time clock, employees can be empowered and encouraged to better manage their time-related activities, allowing supervisors and HR staff to focus on more strategic, long-term priorities.

By encouraging employees to manage their own time and attendance records, employers can avoid the battle of trying to convince employees that accuracy does, in fact, affect them.

To best empower employees to manage their own time, there are several time clock features to consider. With each additional feature, supervisors and managers can streamline administrative tasks associated with managing each employee’s time-related information. Some useful functionalities include:

Adding missing punches to employees’ time cards when necessary
Crediting dollars or hours to individual workers
Marking lunches as paid
Enabling or disabling punch restrictions
Transferring employees between workgroups or departments

With touch screen technology, employees are offered a more intuitive experience, making errors and inaccuracies less likely to occur. When an employee clocks in, they are able to see any error alerts, indicating that action or information is required. These alerts prompt employees to take immediate action as it may relate to missing punches or “minimum time out” punch restrictions.

Biometric scanning is also available to identify individual employees, protect the employee’s personal information, and make “buddy punching” an impossibility. Secure scanning also allows employees to view leave accrual, leave balance, and leave time taken so that they can request leave directly through the time clock interface when desired.

Employees tracking time between multiple workgroups, teams or departments are able to use the department transfer functionality to allocate time accurately. Schedules are also available so that employees can be made aware of their schedule and offers them a chance to identify any discrepancies.

BenefitMall TimeFocus: An Accurate Time Tracking Solution

BenefitMall has partnered with Attendance on Demand to bring you the latest in employee-managed time tracking. Adding to BenefitMall’s extensive portfolio of benefit and payroll products, TimeFocus™ was designed to make typical administrative tasks easier and faster for supervisors, while ultimately putting error detection and correction at the fingertips of the employee.

The right time clock can be a robust tool that encourages accountability and empowers employees to better manage time tracking to the benefit of the individual employee and the overall organization. When employees are responsible for addressing time-related issues, supervisors and managers are freed from many day-to-day administrative tasks. Employing the latest in time clock technology, TimeFocus™ offers organizations the tools to effectively manage time while encouraging employees to own their time-related tasks.