How to Monitor and Curb Problematic Attendance

As a company that is passionate about making your workforce management efficient, Fingercheck was designed to provide you with the real-time oversight you need to track your employees’ attendance. Using digital tools you can access online or from your smartphone, you can monitor employees in real-time and identify patterns that need to change. Here’s how:

Monitoring attendance

Punch exceptions: Who leaves early? Who comes late? You can find out using punch exceptions.  Punch exceptions are dashboard notifications that let you know when your employees have abnormal punch activity. You can designate exceptions to flag just about any kind of punch, lack of a punch, or punch pattern, whether it be employees working over/under hours, punching in and out early or late, making unscheduled punches, etc.

Punch notifications: Want to take it a step further? Set up real-time notifications that alert you when an employee punches trigger an alert. You can be notified in the form of an email, text message, or push notification. Unlike exceptions, which only display within your dashboard, punch notifications can alert you the moment abnormal punch activity occurs.

Daily Details: If you’d like to know exactly who’s clocked in, you can go to “Daily Details” and view each employee who is clocked in/out or hasn’t clocked at all. You can locate this handy tool within the Time Card tab of the software, or from your smartphone within the Time Card tab of the mobile app. We make it easy for you to log in and view who working at the moment.

Reporting: One of our strongest features is our reports, which are designed to provide you with a wide scope of data across areas you want to analyze. Our pre-designed Time Card reports are popular for getting a breakdown of your employees’ attendance, i.e. Daily Time Card, Exception Report, etc. You can set up a scheduled task that will automatically send these reports to your email.

Addressing poor attendance

Once you’ve identified attendance patterns you’re concerned about, how can you go about resolving the problem? We reached out to several management-level professionals who shared their professional guidance on how to proceed.

“Ask the employee who has a problem with tardiness if there is any circumstance that causes them to be late so often. If there is and it’s unavoidable, consider things your company can do to work with the employee to solve the problem,” says Founder and CEO of Business Know-How, Janet Attard.

Attard suggests, “For instance, if your company can manage it, consider asking the person if they’d want to change their schedule slightly to solve the problem. Alternately, if it would work in your company, let their arrival time dictate the time they leave each day.”

Matt Edstrom, VP of Marketing at Zacol, suggests creating team attendance incentives. “A great way to address tardiness is by putting the onus of being on-time in the hands of a team rather than the individual. Creating mini “teams” within your department and incentivizing things like attendance, work performance, and any other performance issue will create a positive competitive atmosphere in your department.”

He continues, “At the end of the week/month/quarter, the cost of a nice prize will be nothing in comparison to the amount of work regained on a team.”

If your efforts still aren’t translating into a difference in the employee’s attendance, consider the root of the problem.

“If they are late frequently because of personal disorganization, you might also consider offering them some type of training or counseling to solve the problem,” suggests Attard. “If the employee doesn’t seem interested in solving the problem, and they are non-exempt, warn them of the consequences if they continue to be late. That might be to dock their pay (if they are non-exempt), or perhaps even to fire them.”

If you wind up having to take disciplinary action, says Attard, keep records showing how often they were late, about discussions you’ve had with them, or warnings they were given, etc. “Also, be sure that all employee lateness in the organization is handled the same way to help avoid lawsuits from the frequently tardy employee.”

Fingercheck’s software provides you with insight over your employees’ attendance so you can identify patterns and take action to resolve them.