How to Leverage Time Tracking Software for HR, Payroll, and Team Management

Efficiently managing time is crucial in various aspects of business operations. This holds particularly true among HR teams responsible for payroll and manpower management.

In typical company structures, HR is primarily responsible for hiring and recruitment, providing training, attendance monitoring, identifying loopholes in the organizational structure, verifying the accuracy of billable hours, and releasing wages to the entire company. All of these valuable tasks can be done better and smarter with the right time tracking tools.

According to Acumen Data Systems, time tracking software can eliminate lost productivity and recover over $666,400 in annual wages. Lost productivity is defined as the time spent on tasks that don’t add value to the organization nor the project’s progress. Unfortunately, employees tend to fall into these futile activities more often than you think.

In fact, research shows that employees spend 28% of their work hours browsing social media and reading or answering emails irrelevant to their assigned projects. Collectively, 15% of an organization’s time is invested in unproductive meetings, which is worth over $37 billion in lost opportunities.

Imagine making better use of those 2-5 hours a day spent attending pointless calls or meetings. Do you think these organizations could have made smarter decisions if only they had the proper monitoring and time data?

These situations can easily be avoided with time tracking software. In the HR field, accurately tracking time ensures streamlined processes, fosters productivity, supports fair compensation, enhances employee engagement, and boosts overall organizational success.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of time tracking within these domains, highlighting specific instances that illustrate its impact.

4 Ways to Leverage Time Tracking Software for HR, Payroll, and Team Management

HR teams can take advantage of time tracking apps particularly for manpower planning, payroll, strategic decision-making, and labor laws compliance.

Stay on Top of Employee Attendance

For the majority of employees, time tracking and attendance is considered as one of the most time-consuming operations-related tasks. However, it’s the most fundamental element of manpower management and a critical aspect that says a lot about an employee.

A consistent attendance record shows how an employee values their work and how committed they are to the company. Likewise, it shows how team members respect their colleagues, knowing that any absences without prior notice will disrupt the workflow and potentially cause delays.

An automated time tracking dashboard will help HR accurately monitor every team member’s attendance in real time. This allows them to determine who’s working where, doing what, and who is out of the office. Having visibility over employees across different teams helps HR ensure that all employees are fulfilling their obligations accordingly.

In addition, accurately tracking time spent on tasks is essential not only for effective project management, but also for invoicing clients and employee payroll. Whether your team works on fixed wages or are paid hourly, attendance tracking is a basic requirement to justify employee salaries. HR often works with project managers to verify employee productivity, ensuring that their attendance records align with their output.

Enhance Payroll Processes

Payroll is a critical function of HR that can impact the entire company’s operations if not done right. Miscalculations and delays compounded over time could lead to employee complaints and demotivation. In fact, a recent survey showed that 49% of employees will resign from their posts after experiencing a couple of issues with their paychecks.

Through an automated time tracking software, HR can simply generate time and attendance records for each employee to determine absences, total hours worked for any specified period of time, and the amount of wages due for every person. This streamlines the tedious, error-prone labor of manually encoding timesheets that can be costly from compliance issues and employee complaints.

Make Smarter Decisions Through Employee Time Data

Utilizing automated time tracking solutions in manpower management can help avoid redundancies in hiring, and gain visibility into the productivity and absenteeism of different teams. It allows HR to identify areas that may need additional manpower or recommend specific roles that will best support the team to further increase their efficiency. HR will easily spot these loopholes and develop strategic solutions to address them before it negatively impacts the organization and the results they are able to achieve.

For example, taking a look at the organization’s average employee leaves, you can better understand the collective absenteeism rate. If there’s a high absenteeism rate you will immediately be able to shortlist potential issues in employee morale, burnout, and attrition rates. In the same manner, time data lets you probe further into the amount of work each person handles to determine whether or not employees have fair workloads. In the long run, this enables HR to act on potential burnouts and protect employees before they even think of resigning.

Additionally, time tracking software generates accurate data on manpower operations expenses. Such reports are pertinent for HR managers and directors to make smarter, well-informed decisions on budget allocation and resource management.

Fortify Compliance with Labor Laws

In the United States alone, 43% of businesses are unaware of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)– a law that protects workers by implementing a 40-hour work week and a minimum wage. In fact, FLSA lawsuits have skyrocketed by 417%, costing companies a collective penalty of over $2 billion.

Most of these FLSA prosecutions are driven by overtime violations. Approximately 83% of the penalties collected by the Department of Labor comes from the breach of 40-hour work weeks and unpaid overtime.

Time tracking software can easily and simply help avoid these grueling compliance issues. By properly monitoring and documenting employee hours, you are already strengthening your company’s compliance with labor laws. Simply maintaining accurate records will save you millions of dollars from possible lawsuits as you have solid proof that your organization adheres to employees’ rights.

Now the next question is, what can HR do to implement time tracking seamlessly into your organization?

What can HR leaders do to implement employee time tracking efficiently?

As the department that handles all employee-related concerns, HR is also the primary point of contact in the implementation of new processes, workflows, and tools across the organization.

While a time tracking app seems quite straightforward and easy to use, ensuring that all employees are onboard with it is a more complex process that needs proper planning and execution.

HR leaders can implement time tracking seamlessly through these best practices:

• Develop clear guidelines for implementation and communicate them with the whole organization. Having concrete policies and guidelines in place will standardize your time tracking processes in order to avoid confusion. It should clearly answer the basic questions of:
  • What time tracking is for, and what benefits will it bring them
  • Why your organization needs it
  • When it will be implemented
  • How they should track time
• Be mindful of ethical practices and privacy concerns. Employees often think that the implementation of new monitoring software (time tracking or otherwise), will breach their privacy and data security. It’s important to have security clauses in place aimed at assuring employees that their data will not be compromised or used in any way unrelated to their work. This should be synchronized with governing employee protection laws in your specific business location. Communicate this with your organization that their data safety is a priority.
• Provide sufficient training and support to ensure a smooth transition from your previous timesheets to the new time tracking software. Conduct comprehensive training sessions with your employees to familiarize everyone with the software’s features and functionalities. Some components may be more technical than others, needing supplementary training to ensure that the entire organization can utilize your time tracking app accurately and consistently.

Conclusion

Tracking time is a fundamental component of human resource management which directly affects payroll and manpower planning. Without a proper time tracking system in place, organizations will encounter issues on delayed or inaccurate wages, demotivation that leads to employee burnout, and high attrition rates. However, subscribing to a time tracking software is only the first step. Taking advantage of its features and endless possibilities for monitoring attendance, developing an error-free payroll process, making more strategic manpower-related decisions, and protecting the company from costly labor violations are crucial in your business’ success.

This is why it’s important for HR leaders to help the entire organization understand and see the value in time tracking in order for them to apply it consistently and accurately.

Leverage the benefits of time tracking for HR, payroll, and manpower management through a powerful software solution.

Productively is a time tracker app that lets you elevate work efficiency with advanced time tracking, real-time reports, and powerful analytics. We believe that if you can manage your hours, you can handle everything else.

With a streamlined dashboard that lets you access time tracked by days, weeks, months, or even by client and project, you will be able to make more informed decisions based on accurate data. Its seamless invoicing feature allows you to automatically generate account statements for a more organized billing and receivables system. Altogether, it provides a comprehensive view of your teams’ efficiency, hours worked, billables, and profit.

Bolster productivity, reduce unnecessary costs, and improve the way you do business with the app that will empower you to visualize your capacity and opportunities.

Learn more about us and book a demo in our website.