There is nothing wrong with sticking to the regular working hours; it has been there for ages. Employees are familiar with what is expected of them and having regular working hours will keep them in line with the company’s imposed disciplines perfectly. Ideally, that is what all employers are gunning for, one system that fits all, having all ducks in a row. In reality however, employees come from diverse economic backgrounds, they have their own set of family history; each carries with them their own set of problems or situations. People have sick family members to take care of, elderly people need attention, children need to be attended to when babysitters aren’t available, and various other problems or there are some employees who prefer to report to work at certain times in order to remain creative and productive.
Applying flexibility in scheduling might not be able to solve problems across the company but it helps to tackle a few common problems of employees and in turn can become a great tool to improve recruitment, retention and at the same time addressing employee diversity, putting the company in a better light as a company that cares.
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| Workload. How heavy is yours? |
How often do you hear your colleagues talk about how heavy their workloads are? Generally when you hear this, there’s no exact indication of the actual load, you just assume that it’s heavy; the weight of the work is subjective. Nevertheless, when it comes to the actual working environment, the management’s definition of workload must not be vague; it has to mean something solid, calculable. It has to be clearly identified and quantified for organizations to have a clear idea on how to manage its available resources in order to match their business demand within the given time frame. In other words, an employee can’t just claim that he is busy and couldn’t handle more; the claim needs to be supported with numbers and an employer can’t assign the tasks without knowing the workload it puts on an employee.
Take for example in a restaurant environment, how do you quantify the jobs? When a cashier infers that she is under heavy workload, what does she imply? Or when a restaurant has many customers on waiting, how to solve the problem? In order to do this, we have to start thinking in terms of numbers to measure the tasks.
Absence is a common issue that can be found in the workplace where employees fail to report to work or to remain at work as scheduled. Every employee is bound to be absent one day or more in a year, regardless of the type and position of the employee. A CIPD Absence Survey conducted in 2013 states that “in relation to unauthorized absence, people are absent from work for an average of 7.6 days a year with workplace absenteeism back up to the levels observed in 2010 and 2011”. Although it is common for companies to expect absences from their workers because there will be instances which employees may not be able to attend work full-time, however absenteeism issues will continue to escalate if the management do not know how to manage the issue while employees adopt a casual attitude towards absenteeism by abusing the system.
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| An absent personnel leaves a hole in everyday's process |
To be able to manage absenteeism in the workplace, first an employer needs to identify and categorize the causes for absenteeism because there are a few types of absences to begin with. Typically, absences can be categorized into 3 types that include planned, unplanned and partial absences.
Planned absences include holidays, vacations, paid time off, personal annual leaves, but they are usually scheduled and approved in advance by the employer, making it manageable. Next is unplanned absences which are disappearances from work unexpectedly due to sickness, compassionate leaves for family’s death, disability, unpaid leaves, family medical issues and etc. The last type is partial absences, which involve lateness, early departure without permission of the employer, running errands during office hours, taking unapproved long breaks, failing to remain on duty at the work site and many more.
Change in organizational process in inevitable but change does not necessarily mean that it is a good thing if it doesn’t produce the improved or desired outcomes for an organization. A company can evolve and adopt a biometrics time and attendance system complete with its fancy management software but if the company fails to gain any positive impact in the long run, the change might not be moving in the right direction or the objectives of the implementation have not been defined clearly. This is the superficial “Change Trap” that a lot of companies fall into and in the end, never understood why they made the change in the first place.
When deploying a biometrics time attendance and cloud-based attendance software such as TimeTec, a company should strive to achieve organizational maturity. Do not expect the system to work its magic in delivering the intended positive outcome because the system is just a tool; maturity moves gradually and when technology process and ROI are moving in tandem, only then an organization reaches maturity.
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| Pair biometrics time attendance time clocks with TimeTec for an efficient attendance management system |
How does a company assess organizational maturity? Let’s go over some key performance indexes that could help you better understand how to achieve maturity with deployment of the latest technology.
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