Employee time tracking and attendance involves so much more than giving your team members a way to clock in or out. Ultimately, you want a system that creates less work for you, not more. It shouldn’t be complicated or time-consuming to catch and fix missed punches, facilitate shift swaps, or monitor compliance with labour laws.
Not sure how your current time and attendance system stacks up? Consider this list of five common employee time management issues that shift-based businesses face. If you don’t have a fast and user-friendly solution to these problems in place, it’s probably time to change how you handle time and attendance.
Issue 1: Finding last-minute shift coverage all by yourself
While call-outs and no-calls no-shows are common occurrences for shift-based businesses, consistently spending hours trying to get coverage shouldn’t be. Finding last-minute coverage is not only stressful for you and your managers, but it also affects the rest of your staff.
Lack of coverage often leads to understaffed shifts — and burnout — or having employees stay later, leading to overtime. Consistently understaffed shifts will also affect your business’s overall productivity.
Solution: Better communication with EVERYONE
It’s amazing how clear communication can make issues like a lack of coverage almost disappear. Create better communication by using a mobile-friendly scheduling system that allows:
Employees to switch shifts with eligible team members
Staff to easily grab open shifts
Easy texting to the entire staff to fill shifts
Putting more power in employees’ hands allows them to fill in the gaps. There are often employees who want extra shifts; they just need to know about them so they can adjust their schedules.
You should also have a clear call-out policy that defines the consequences of no-calling no-showing and how that can affect everyone’s time management and employee performance reviews.
Issue 2: Staff never know their schedules
If all your staff members struggle to know their schedules, it is obvious the problem is how you share the schedule — not your team. Not knowing schedules can be tied to outdated sharing systems (think paper schedules) or poor communication. Some people may only work one or two days a week and not want to go in on their day off just to see the schedule.
Solution: Easy access to electronic schedules
Using an HR platform like Deputy provides electronic schedules all employees can access. Electronic schedules are better than paper because they can update in real time, providing staff with the information they need at all times.
Staff can log in through our app, pull up their schedule, and build their personal lives around their schedule. Plus, the shift-swapping option in the app prevents Issue 1.
Issue 3: Constantly changing availability and the gaps it creates
Shift work staff are often in a variety of life stages, which can make juggling their availability difficult for managers. For example, students will change their schedules based on their classes and workloads. New parents may need to change based on their childcare needs.
Keeping up with changing availability manually quickly becomes impossible as your staff grows. Creating schedules that potentially don’t cater to your staff’s availability exposes you to absences and last-minute shift fill-ins, as well as frequent turnover.
Solution: Smart scheduling
Using smart scheduling will make addressing changing availability a smoother process. Not only will it be easy to input the changing availability into each employee’s profile, but smart scheduling will consider their availability when creating a schedule.
This means it will be rare to schedule a staff member on a day when they aren’t available. As their availability changes, the smart scheduler will adjust accordingly. It saves you hours of scheduling time and stress.
Issue 4: Inaccurate time tracking
Accurate time tracking is essential in shift businesses — no matter the industry. When staff forget to clock in or out, it becomes a hassle for everyone. Employees have to try to remember the exact number of hours they worked, and HR has to chase down employees to get the right information.
It just becomes a mess. Not to mention issues like buddy punching or time theft.
We’ve already talked about the negative effects of inaccurate time tracking, so let’s skip to the solution.
Solution: Advanced employee management time clock tools
Utilising tools such as mobile, geofenced, or biometric clock-in systems can help reduce inaccurate time tracking. Allowing staff to clock in and out from their phones makes it easier for them to remember to do this task. After all, they already have their phone on them.
Geofenced or biometric clock-in systems can prevent time theft or buddy punching by requiring staff to be at your business before they can clock in.
Issue 5: Unequal shift distribution
Intentional or not, human bias can affect manual scheduling. Some managers may accidentally preferentially schedule some staff members over others.
Not only is this discriminatory, but it also affects staff morale. Due to being paid by the hour, shift-based employees need consistent hours. When their hours change depending on who creates the schedule, resentment naturally arises. This can eventually lead to people quitting and employers dealing with high turnover rates.
Solution: Using AI for Scheduling
Remove human bias completely by using an AI scheduler. AI will look at elements such as staff availability, skill set, shift needs, and more to create an optimal schedule for staff and your business. This will create a fairer schedule for all employees and take pressure off managers.
Prevent employee time management issues with Deputy
Time management can be a time-consuming task. Make time management easy by using Deputy.
Not only can you have scheduling, time tracking, and leave management in one platform, but we also integrate with popular payroll systems. Have all your time management tools in one place!
Explore our time and attendance management tools today!
