How to track employee absences?
There are 3 ways to manage employee absences:
1. Tracking absence on paper
2. Using spreadsheets
3. Managing absence with an absence management product
You can use punching machines and biometrics to record attendance, but those tools are not suited to managing absences. That’s because they can imply an employee's absence only if they fail to punch in for the day - not in advance.
Let's expand on the types of absence management trackers in the increasing order of efficiency:
1. Tracking absence on paper:
This method was popular before computers came along but some small businesses still use it today. Essentially, an employee who intends to take time off fills out a register with dates of unavailability.
This step is followed by oral communication to the rest of the team. This method of recording absence and communicating it manually works for super small businesses like 5 employee strong consultancies that do not have plans to scale.
It causes confusion as the number of employees increases and for today’s businesses, it’s not viable.
The next best option is…
2. Using spreadsheets:
Spreadsheets make it much easier to track absences - compared to doing that manually.
Spreadsheets let HR record absences efficiently and let them give selective access to employees to ensure data safety and time off tracking. However, it offers limited capability.
For example, what if the HR or the employee fails to send a team-wide mail announcing their absence? The team stays in the dark till the day of absence and scrambles to manage workload.
Spreadsheets are not good absence management tools because they rely heavily on human intervention, and thus are prone to errors.
Today, the best way to manage absence is by…
3. Using a Staff Absence Management Product:
A quality absence management tool can not just record absences but also automate the approval workflow. They come with the employee self-service feature that lets your staff enter details pertinent to their absence and submit for your approval.
Managers receive the leave requests as soon as it's applied, and can approve/reject it at the click of a button. Employees are notified of the approval status immediately and can plan their holidays accordingly.
Once the absence is agreed upon, the employee can inform the team about their absence.
Such a streamlined process saves your time in checking the leave balance of an employee, if the absence requirement aligns with your time off policy, if the team knows about the absence, etc. You can invest that time in making key business decisions.
FAQs
What is an online absence management software?
The system that lets you manage the employee time off and absence data on cloud - without having to store them on physical servers that are maintained by you or another vendor qualifies as an online absence management software.
This means, with an online absence tracker like Freshteam, you can input employee information without having to worry about where it’s stored, how safe it is, or how it’s retrieved. We take care of that for you at no extra cost.
Why do you need an absence management software?
An absence management system will contribute to making your team better aligned with each employee's absence. It will also help you track absence in alignment with your company’s policy. It will save you hours by automating approval workflows which you can invest in core business tasks.
Each employee has a key role to play in your team. This means the absence of one employee disrupts the balance. Other employees have to fill in and manage two tasks at a time. By tracking staff absence, you can manage team activities better and reduce the impact on productivity.
But if the whole team is aware of someone’s time off - well in advance, they can plan work better. A staff absence manager tracker will help you get that alignment.
