Revolutionize Engagement with a Time and Attendance System

Managing employee attendance when you run a frontline or hourly team is nothing short of challenging. Employee engagement levels are dropping, with only 21% of employees being engaged at work. Workers with low engagement levels are more likely to be chronically absent from their shifts or late to work, which only worsens performance and morale. 

Tracking employee attendance has a lot to do with enforcing discipline. Yet, with over 50% of employees reporting feeling burned out and frontline workers quitting en masse, modern attendance management must extend beyond blind disciplinary action. 

Now more than ever it’s important to find creative ways to engage hourly employees and the right balance between absenteeism and presenteeism in the workplace. Using employee time and attendance tracking software can help, and in this article we’re going to unpack the difference that finding the right software can make. 

Why Does Attendance Management Matter? 

The obvious answer to why attendance and discipline on the frontline matter is that you need a present and functional team in order to hit your targets and maximize your bottom line. If your employees are not showing up for their shifts, it’s going to get challenging to do, well, pretty much anything. 

Yet, the negative consequences of poor attendance management extend beyond low productivity. Chronic absenteeism has a significant impact on workers’ morale and can make them more likely to want to leave their jobs. With 50% of hourly employees quitting their job in the first 120 days, tracking attendance is not just important. It’s crucial. However, it comes with a number of challenges. 

The Challenge with Employee Attendance Tracking

When it comes to attendance management, there’s a lot to keep track of. Frontline and hourly employees often switch work stations and have unpredictable work hours. They’re not easy to track and communicate with, which makes effective attendance management difficult. 

However, what’s even more challenging than keeping track of your employees’ attendance is finding the right balance between discipline and flexibility. Disciplinary action is necessary & effective, but utilizing disciplinary measures too much can quickly turn unproductive and hurt morale. 

To encourage your employees to work better and be more present, organizations are turning to more positive solutions, such as implementing meaningful employee recognition and rewards programs and gamification. 

Absenteeism & Presenteeism: What They Are & How They Hurt Your Company

Absenteeism is a well-known phenomenon in the modern workplace. It’s when your team members regularly don’t show up for work without a legitimate reason like sickness or a family emergency. The annual cost of employee absenteeism in the United States hovers around $225.8 billion, and it’s one of the most significant issues for frontline & hourly teams. 

Presenteeism is the opposite of absenteeism, but it’s no less harmful. Investopedia defines presenteeism as the “lost productivity that occurs when employees are not fully functioning in the workplace because of an illness, injury, or other condition.” In other words, your employees show up for their shifts, but they’re not productive at work. 

Presenteeism is not as easily or wildly tracked as absenteeism, but it costs your organization money. If your workforce is sick, stressed, and unhappy, the fact that they’re still showing up for their shifts doesn’t make a positive contribution to the workplace. In fact, it’s the opposite. 

If your employees are showing up sick, they’re likely going to spread their illness to other members of their team, resulting in even lower productivity levels. If your workers are stressed, burned out, and, in a word, miserable, their presence can tank the team morale. 

Harsh punitive measures, lack of flexibility, and difficult access to sick leave can all contribute to presenteeism. In the modern workplace, it’s essential to find the right balance between disciplinary action and workforce support. It’s not clean-cut, but using a robust time and attendance software like Secchi can help. 

Why Traditional Absence Management Tools Don’t Work for the Modern Workplace

Having the right technology at your fingertips is key to better attendance management and balancing discipline with flexibility. Modern workplace is nuanced, and the software you use needs to account for these nuances. 

It’s not enough for your attendance management software to simply track if your employees are showing up for their shifts. It needs to give you accurate information that you can make data-driven decisions with, enhance communication, and uncover the deeper issues at play that are contributing to poor discipline. 

Traditional attendance trackers create a lot of waste because they involve too many steps and don’t allow you to easily see the full picture. They’re not only ineffective, but also raise your organization’s risks of litigation because you don’t have standardized documentation and reporting in place.

Choosing the Right Attendance Management Software for Your Organization 

When it comes to deciding on the right attendance management software for your frontline team, there are a few factors that you should consider. 

→ Attendance management software shouldn’t create more work for supervisors & leaders. It should make their lives easier. If they have to go through a sequence of cumbersome steps to perform a simple task, it’s not going to withstand the fast-paced environment of hourly & frontline work. 

→ The software should help streamline communication between supervisors and teams. Effective communication is key to preventing absenteeism and presenteeism. 

→ It’s crucial to track more than just discipline. As we’ve established in this article, attendance management extends beyond enforcing discipline and often involves a delicate balance between multiple aspects of work. 

Secchi is an hourly performance management software that can help you effectively manage time & attendance and increase productivity. It establishes a comprehensive yet streamlined system that frontline supervisors & leaders can consistently rely on. 

Case Study: How Secchi Helped a Leading 3PL Company Reduce Tardiness by Over 50% 

As a leading provider of third party logistics, Secchi’s client understood the importance of keeping their workforce present and engaged, but manually collecting hundreds of supervisor-to-frontline-employee interactions every day proved impossible. It was highly subjective, time consuming, and inefficient. 

The 3PL company decided to implement Secchi into all 18 of its locations for more streamlined processes and better connections. After just a few weeks of using Secchi, leaders started being able to address attendance issues more efficiently and consistently, which reduced tardiness by over 50%. 

To learn more about how Secchi can help your organization create a functional time and attendance system, book a demo today.