What’s the best way to monitor time and attendance?  Is it the honor system?  A swipe card system? Or, should we just trust that everyone’s working a full day?  What factor does trust play in your decision?  The answer clearly lies in the organization, role and position.  These are all good questions.  Regardless, each and every organization needs to make a conscious decision on how they are going to monitor time & attendance.

Not coincidentally, there are just as many vendors out there that can help you monitor your organizations time & attendance policy.  How do you make a choice?  Who’s the best?  What’s right for your organization?  Achievant is in the time and attendance business and I can offer a few things for you to consider.

1)  The overarching goal should be to accurately capture your employee’s time on the job – both hourly and salary.  In a perfect world time data gets sent to multiple systems including those that perform payroll and time off accruals.  Don’t over think the solution hoping to catch someone cheating you out of 15 minutes a day.  It’s much more important to have a seamless and integrated flow of data among the HR applications you’ve deployed.

2)  Your time and attendance needs to be flexible enough to meet the needs of your desk and floor staff.   One size definitely does not fit all.  Swipe and punch systems are the only real alternative for manufacturing/distribution/warehouse floor.  The desk environment can work well with pc based clock in and out.  However, both have a need to track and monitor your time off plans with an associated approval process.

3)  How does your time and attendance decision integrate into your human capital management (HCM) needs?  Most small and mid-sized companies are well served by deploying an integrated HCM platform and not best of breed solutions for applicant tracking, time and attendance, HRIS, learning management, performance management and benefits management.

All of this may seem obvious but when looking at time and attendance applications many organizations can get tunnel focused on finding the “best of breed” system and lose sight of how this application fits into the overall architecture of the HR infrastructure.  Take a step back to get a better view into your time and attendance decision.