Track Time and Attendance the Smart Way

It is a legal requirement that unless an employee has ‘opted out’, they should not work more than 48 hours a week on average – normally averaged over 17 weeks. This law is sometimes called the ‘working time directive’ or ‘working time regulations’.

As an employer you must be able to prove that your team haven’t worked over 48 hours per week if they haven’t opted out. This essentially means that you have a record of the hours they have worked to prove they haven’t done over 48.

Also known as ‘Buddy clocking’, this is the practice of getting a colleague to clock you in rather than doing so yourself. Prevalent in large teams where tardiness may not be noticed and notorious in construction in years gone by where subcontractors’ hours are rounded up or sometimes completely fabricated! The familiarity between junior management and teams can lead to an overstatement of hours due to persistent lateness or extended breaks or off-site appointments.

Persistent Buddy clocking alienates punctual employees that are doing their full hours over time, don’t allow offenders to demotivate your conscientious employees!

Any new time and attendance system implementation should be accompanied with clear information and explanation for your team.

It’s important that they know why you are implementing this and the benefits of more transparent reporting, easier absence requests and more.

You should conduct a data privacy impact assessment to be compliant with the GDPR regulations.

Biometric time and attendance require the employee to be enrolled in the system, by being enrolled they are consenting to use the system. Employees should have the right to request an alternative method of clocking in.

Provided the steps above are followed and reflected in your employee handbook, records can be used in disciplinary processes.

The technology and encryption levels are acceptable for GDPR purposes. The management and implementation of T&A systems and the compliance of such is determined by your management team and processes.

Essentially, we provide a system that is designed to be GDPR compliant, but we cannot enforce you using it compliantly. If you don’t set complex passwords or lock down access to key, mandated personnel for example, then you wouldn’t be following the principles of GDPR. This would be a process failure rather than a technological one.

We advise all our customers on their responsibilities and have templates that will help you communicate to your team.

Did you know that time and attendance sheets have been around for over 4,000 years?!

That said, not much then changed until 1890, when jeweller Willard Bundy patented the first mechanical time clock, or punch clock. That’s where we get the modern concepts of ‘clocking in’ from.

Read our articles on the evolution of T&A tracking here

We know you want a price straight away! But the right solution for you depends on many different considerations.

The size of your site, whether you’re a multi-site operations, the number of employees, the types of devices and the complexity of your shift and employee patterns all determine how much your time and attendance solution will cost.

The best plan is to get in touch and start with an initial consultation where we will start to help you narrow down which will be the best time tracking solution for your business.

If you’re still tracking time manually in your business, you’re missing out on a multitude of benefits including:

• Paying staff accurately and give your team better visibility of their pay, hours and absences
• Reducing tardiness and time theft
• Saving your management, HR and payroll teams hours of admin time
• Better planning of space and production through accurate attendance data
• Compliance with working time directive and other labour law requirements