Companies pay a huge price due to employee absenteeism. It is absolutely essential in the present day scenario to be very particular of processing a working solution to the problem of Employee absenteeism. Attendance Tracking System is part of one such solution which provides accurate and meaningful data to the upper management about the attendance data of their employees.
The truth is that absenteeism can devour as much as 30 to 35 percent of an organization’s payroll directly or indirectly. That percentage comprises the direct costs – such as salary continuation – and the indirect costs of paying absent workers. Indirect costs include overtime pay for employees that are present and who will need to do the absent employee’s work, temporary help, and reduction in sales and profits due to lost productivity.
In any organization, absences are inevitable, still the management is supposed to see that the work must get done in time. The absenteeism of employees directly affects the work and eventually the business.
Complete absence monitoring through attendance tracking systems is an enterprise approach to manage the employee’s absence. It provides clear visibility into the workforce, while securely managing all absence information in one system.
With the technology growing in a tremendous way, it is easier to track the attendance of employees. There are various methods of tracking the employee’s attendance and some of them are as follows:
- Manual Recording (Muster Roll) of In & out time of employees.
- Maintaining the Time sheets (in MS Excel or web based)
- Mechanized Systems
- Biometric
- Finger Print Reader
- Face Reader
- Voice Reader
- Retinal recognition
- Non Bio-Metric :
- Punch Card Reader
- Smart Card Reader
- Proximity Reader
Manual recording of in & out time of employees: This is the most primary & simplest method of recording the employee incoming & outgoing times. It can be recorded in a Register or in a MS-Excel or in Book etc. The muster roll register is available in stationery stores and it can be used for manual entry of incoming and outgoing times of employees.
People have now been adapted to automated solutions and this has been outdated. With the growing complexities and requirements, manual recording of employee’s incoming & outgoing time is no longer a complete solution. Since, it is manual recording; it may lead the employees asking for favors to go out and come back often.
Time sheets: Time sheets are used to track the start and end of the tasks by which employer will get a detailed breakup of the tasks accomplished by an employee throughout the total work. The same information can again be used in determining the estimation and time management.
Now-a-days, time sheets are widely used online. Some companies provide web based services for time sheets, through which the employee’s working hours can be tracked effectively.
The main advantages in tracking the employee’s working time will lower the costs and employer will be able to determine the exact time to finish a job/task after considering the time sheet of similar job/task done by the employee. The time spent on a particular activity by an individual can be examined and compared through which employees roles can be realigned based on the outcome. Time sheets also provide the employer with employee’s productivity. This will reduce the administrative work to a considerable extent.
Mechanized systems: Under this category, a record bearing the in & out timings of employees will be generated automatically after giving the inputs. A person need not check every time employee goes in & out. Here employee has to swipe/register every entry in to the office and exit from office in a day.
However, an automated system of tracking the employees attendance would be more effective than the other methods, as the manual work need to be done is less and is more reliable. The advantages with a mechanized system of tracking the employees attendance include, faster processing of data, accurate records, minimal supervision, less manual work, report generation, easy to integrate with a payroll software etc.,
Biometrics: A biometric system provides the functions like Verification and Identification.
Usually the template captured is compared to the saved one against the registered user either on smart card or database for verification purpose. Identification of users is done from the biometric characteristic alone without using smart cards, usernames or ids etc.
All the records in a database are compared to the template and the closest match score is returned. It authenticates the closest match with in the allowed threshold.
There are two different classes in biometrics in which one is physiological and the other is behavioral.
Physiological biometrics include, capturing and comparing the finger prints, hand, face, iris etc., of the person. Of which, most widely used is Finger prints. Behavioral relates to the behavior of the person which includes the recognizing the voice, signature and key strokes etc.,
Basically, in the offices, the biometrics is used with physiological verification of Finger prints and Retinal recognition.
Access cards/ Swipe cards: Access and swipe cards can be used to provide access to the user after swiping the card. It stores the data on a magnetic stripe and thus also called as Magnetic stripe card.
Proximity card readers: Proxy cards are contact less integrated circuit devices used for secured access. Proximity cards, also known as proxy cards have a range of 0-3 inches and allow the user to leave the card in wallet or purse etc. These proximity cards can be used in the applications such as ID cards, key cards etc.
Although there are pros and cons to the above discussed subject, any one system is not too good or too bad for any organization. All the attendance tracking systems generate a record which bears the employee’s in & out timings through which the salary calculation depends. Based on the size and requirement of the organization, any attendance tracking system can be opted.
