Why you should keep track of your employees’ working hours, how to do it correctly, and most importantly, what can help you with this?
The principles and peculiarities of organizing working time, accounting of working hours and/or days is an important factor of personnel motivation in any company.
Someone prefers a free schedule, someone defines a strict internal daily schedule with a link to the standard working week, and so on. The effectiveness of the work of all members of the labor collective depends on these principles.
Goals and Objectives of Working Time Organization
Rational organization of work at the enterprise includes: working time, workplace, work schedule, rest, breaks, days off, etc. It is a very significant part of the overall time management of any organization.
What a rationally planned management policy leads to:
- Productivity of each individual employee increases due to the allocation of time to assigned duties.
- The overall costs are reduced, wage costs are optimized.
- Labor relations are normalized, relationships between individual team members are improved. In fact, the manager can regulate the composition of shifts and their intersection with each other, staff rotation between different shifts, interchangeability of employees, mentoring and other details.
- The manager has the opportunity to plan the activities of his service or department in a more detailed and accurate manner.
- Labor is strictly rationed, and employees can plan their personal affairs with reference to weekends and their free time.
- The calculation of wages is simplified. Besides, it is always possible to check the attendance schedule and hours worked against what was recorded in the official timesheet.
It is clear that it is impossible to foresee all force majeure events. But in most cases, the manager can build schedules in a such way as to reinforce the busiest days and even out the absence of individual employees on an occasional basis (family problems, cases of illness, etc.), to be able to mobilize the necessary resources and solve the problem of staff shortage.
Although such skills do not come immediately. Management theory says that professional managers only become managers after someone fails a project entrusted to them, recovers it, passed it on… and so on several times until enlightenment comes.
Who Keeps Track of Employee Working Hours In the Organization
Planning, management and effective organization of working time is always a function of the manager. However, the internal procedure and methods of organizing working time in a production facility, in a budgetary institution or in any other enterprise must not contradict the rules for organizing working time stipulated in labor legislation.
The person responsible for filling in and organizing the accounting of working time of employees is fixed by the appropriate order of the head. Usually it is the head of a department or service. Because it is he who can properly control the actual attendance of his subordinates and account for the working hours, days, weeks (depending on the conditions and procedures of recording) worked by subordinates.
What can the Timekeeping at the Enterprise be organized?
- Casual. This is when an employee works the same number of working hours during one of the working days. Consequently, the accountant only needs to know the number of days worked to calculate the salary.
- Weekly. Such accounting is used when an employee works different hours on different days of the week, but the total number of hours for the week is always the same.
- Summarized. Due to the lack of a clear periodicity, the number of working hours on different days and weeks in the month does not coincide. In this case, it is easier to calculate them as a total sum at the end of the month.
The practice of applying different work schedules is such that there are no universal standards. But the most popular ones are:
- Five-day;
- Six-day;
- Shift schedule.
Programs for Organizing Working Hours
Large enterprises try to minimize the risks of errors in the organization of working hours, in planning work schedules and in recording the attendance/leave of their employees.
For this purpose, special hardware and software complexes — ACS (access control and management systems) can be used. They solve several tasks simultaneously:
- identification of personnel when crossing the territory of the enterprise,
- control of attendance and movements inside (frequency and duration of smoke breaks, lunchtime, etc.),
- reporting and providing an evidence base in case of problems or discussions with employees who do not want to work effectively.
ACS are quite expensive and difficult to put into operation. Only medium and large companies can afford them. Small businesses usually choose more affordable production solutions — with software implementation only.
For example, as systems for organizing working time can be used:
- CRM-systems,
- Special modules bundled with accounting software.
Less common:
- Time trackers (installed on employees’ workstations),
- Spreadsheets (maintained in any convenient editor).
Each of these solutions has its own tasks, goals, specifics, disadvantages, and advantages.
How Сan Projecto Help You?
Regardless of which time management methodology your company uses, Projecto can aggregate all workflow data within calendars.
Calendars can be:
- Personal, aggregating events for only one system user and their invited participants (if desired).
- Work calendars are intended for creating events common to a certain group of people, for example, to a department or service.
- Corporate, available to all persons in the company without exception.
Instead of a calendar, you can create a trip or a resource, and they are displayed in a special way in the list of calendars.
Calendar events can be viewed in grid mode for a week or for the whole month at once. The desired period is easily switched with special arrows on the sides.
With the help of checkboxes, you can hide unnecessary calendars, and then their events will no longer be shown in the general grid.
If you add a selected user to your calendars, the matching mode will be activated. It is convenient to coordinate tasks and events of different employees in this way.
With the help of the calendar, you can visualize all your:
- tasks (recurring and non-recurring);
- events;
- trips.
Organizing your working time will occupy the minimum of your attention. You will be able to more quickly coordinate your activities and plans with other team members, move to necessary projects, documents, profiles, set up recurring events, organize reminders, and much more.
More details about working with calendars can be found in our official documentation — here.
