Higher Education: Everything You Need to Know About Workforce Management
Time and Attendance: The Core of Workforce Management
Technology is Vital to Robust Time & Attendance
Finding a time and attendance solution is often the first step when higher ed institutions want to level up their workforce management approach. Maybe you – or your faculty and staff – are tired of manual timecards, or you’re finding it tough to get accurate reporting. Or maybe it’s a leadership desire to work smarter, not harder. Whatever the reason, time and attendance is where the journey begins when it comes to using the power of technology for better workforce management.?
Workforce management is an organizational process that includes all the activities required to maintain a productive workforce, including managing mobile or remote staff, complex scheduling of a diverse staff, leave management (including sabbaticals), and document management. Thanks to technology, workforce management now incorporates tools and software that support management, front-line supervisors, and workers across the entire university. While robust, integrated solutions are key to true workforce management, time and attendance remains at the core of it all. Determining how your staff clocks in and out, when they work, and what functions they perform while at work are all key elements of optimizing your workforce.
Time and attendance is also at the top of the list as an essential part of HR technology. It’s one of the ways HR needs to meet its core contract with employees, according to George LaRocque, founder of the HR technology research and advisory firm HR Wins.
“For many small functions, [adopting automation] means looking first at payroll, benefits, and time and attendance technologies. I’ve surveyed thousands of small businesses, and executives usually see the biggest ROI in those technologies because they want to see costs associated with those areas contained, measured, and managed,” LaRocque told the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing most schools to adopt remote work and remote learning, employers have an obligation and need to effectively track the hours faculty and staff work both onsite and remotely. Accurate employee time and attendance is both essential to meet requirements put forth under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and important for effective operational management. As part of field management, data collection, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling, and analytics — time and attendance play an essential role in enhancing your overall workforce management strategy.??
Integrated solutions are key to true workforce management, time and attendance remains at the core of it all.
How Time and Attendance Can Enhance Your Overall Workforce Management
As the intersection of time and attendance with workforce management continues to deepen, it’s essential for colleges and universities to have a system that supports workforce strategies now and for the long term. This key component is no longer just about tracking time, it’s now essential to improving staff engagement and key to what you need to support the organization.
There are many ways time and attendance can support and enhance your workforce management. Three of the primary ways are:
Automation Reduces Errors and Frustration
Automating your time and attendance system reduces the outdated and sometimes frustrating manual process that administrators, faculty, staff and management must do to keep their records accurate. When you’re relying on pen and paper, spreadsheets or other manual processes to track hours, there are many opportunities for errors. Automation reduces the chances for human error, which can save time and money.
Today’s higher ed staff members, especially its student workers, are accustomed to using technology in nearly every part of their lives, and work is no exception. They expect their employers to have efficient and accurate workforce management technology in place. Whether it is clocking in and out or having more control over their schedules, hours, or PTO, faculty and staff want visibility into their work records.
In fact, NOT having an automated time and attendance system to help ensure accurate payroll could be problematic when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. HR Dive reports that nearly 55% of members of the U.S. workforce are impacted by payroll problems . That means trouble for employers. After experiencing just two payroll issues, almost half of all workers will look for a new job.
Self-Service Options Empower Employees?
In addition to accurate payroll deposits in their bank, workers also appreciate the visibility of time and attendance systems. With the right platform, staff members can access their data and see the same information as their manager (accruals, messages, requests). This type of transparency creates opportunities to fix issues and builds trust between staff members and their managers. According to Gartner, 31% of CHROs say employee experience will remain a top priority in 2021.
Faculty, staff and managers, as well as HR and Payroll teams, appreciate the self-service functions modern time and attendance systems offer. Self-service features provide faculty and staff more access to their data and help streamline communication between staff members and managers for time approvals, requests for paid time off (PTO), and even scheduling. For example, when a staff member requests PTO, a notification is sent to their manager, ensuring that the request isn’t missed.
Keeping time-related communications in one system helps managers, faculty and staff efficiently manage requests, approvals, and attendance issues. The two-way messaging in self-service allows staff members to read and review manager messages when they perform a clock operation versus digging through their inbox for an email they received weeks ago. Similarly, it’s easier for managers to manage and track all time-related questions and issues for their faculty and staff in one place.
Data Informs and Improves Workforce Decisions
Time and attendance data inform every aspect of workforce management. Reporting pulls information from time and attendance, leave management administration relies on the integration with time and attendance, scheduling is useless if you don’t track what hours people work, and payroll uses calculations based on the records from time and attendance.
For organizations that manually process time worked and staff schedules, it’s hard to achieve efficient and effective workforce management because time and attendance information isn’t readily available and is not reliable. Without HR tech for time and attendance, errors and issues typically come to light at the end of a pay period – when hours are tabulated and reviewed. Or even worse, a time tracking error may become apparent only after you run payroll, requiring additional time and effort to correct. As for building your workforce management capabilities on time and attendance actions, that becomes next to impossible without technology in place.
But payroll and HR don’t need to suffer through these time-related issues. Today’s technology can put real-time data at your fingertips, making time and attendance relatively seamless and providing opportunities to leverage other workforce management capabilities that will help you drive business results.
“Our ability to collect and analyze data is evolving at an exponential rate. We collect vast quantities of data every second and are only beginning to understand the true potential impact it can have on our businesses,” states a recent Forbes article .
“All this data is an ever-expanding mountain of gold, waiting to be mined and transferred into new, profound capabilities that will help us become more adept at predicting the future. Fundamentally, this capability transforms organizations from reactive environments -- being managed by static and aged data -- to automated continuous learning environments in real-time.”?
“Our ability to collect and analyze data is evolving at an exponential rate.”
—Forbes
The Value of Real-Time Data Analytics
Indeed, with access to real-time data and reporting features, administrators and managers can make better- informed decisions quickly. For example, the data related to time and attendance can help:
Modern time and attendance software plays a vital role in helping HR and university leaders stay on top of organizational goals and KPIs.
Six Features That Set TCP’s Time & Attendance Apart
Some of the organizations we encounter, even those using an “electronic” timekeeping system, typically supplement time collection gaps by relying on manual or paper-based timesheets, email and even “sticky notes” to manage staff time and attendance. Other universities and colleges believe that adding purpose-built time collection options to their time management will resolve any issues they’re experiencing.
Based on our experience, we know that a robust time and attendance platform can and should include capabilities that will improve overall operations, from staff punch to payroll. TCP’s workforce management solution is built on experience and a robust time and attendance foundation. That foundation is at the core of how we help higher ed institutions become more effective in managing their workforce.
It may be tempting to think of time and attendance as “just clocking in and out.” But the right system offers employers so much more than just a time clock. Here are six important ways TCP sets itself apart from other providers...
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Multiple methods to collect time
Each organization needs to collect staff time worked in a feasible manner for the job, location, and employer need. TCP has a configurable, customizable time clock that can have up to five attachments or methods by which an employer can collect time.
Based on your unique needs, TCP can collect time via thermal sensors, fingerprint scanners, and badge-readers. We also offer a USB option for a fingerprint scanner, a mobile app (increasingly critical for higher ed), and a browser-based time clock option. We have yet to hear of any competitor that offers so many customizable methods for time collection.
Flexible job tracking options
Colleges and universities manage a highly diverse workforce and some faculty and staff may take on distinct roles that require different levels of work, job costs and codes. That’s why TCP enables you to track up to six layers of labor. Faculty and staff can have as many job and cost codes as necessary on their profile, and they can switch between those codes at any point.
Many student workers have limits to the number of hours they can work, which is difficult to navigate especially if they work multiple jobs. TimeClock Plus’ exceptions and Benefit Status Monitor can be used to keep student worker hours in check.
This ability to accurately track jobs and roles enhances the precision of labor tracking. That flexibility in code selection creates a snowball effect of benefits that includes reporting, analytics, and improved day-to-day workforce management. Many of our competitors cannot match the flexibility of tracking that we offer.
Numerous options for labor and OT calculations
Many organizations lose money and waste valuable time around labor and OT calculations. TCP provides numerous options that remove that risk of wasted time entering calculations and fixing related errors. We offer flexible pay periods, shift differential, and adjustable work weeks — by individual faculty or staff member or department. For OT calculations, TCP includes 12 different threshold types: weekly, biweekly, daily and others.
To address time and attendance needs that come up regularly, we have calculations in place to address such things as comp time and weighted overtime. Advanced overtime settings are also in place for situations such as when a staff member works on a holiday. None of our competitors can match the breadth or configurability of the calculation options that TCP offers. We understand that to help our customers save time and money, it’s essential to make calculations as dynamic and configurable as possible.
Dynamic accrual set-up
As you work on managing PTO, sabbaticals and other forms of leave, it’s important to have the ability to configure accruals in a way that matches your attendance policies. TCP provides some of the most flexible configuration capabilities in the industry.
Based on your needs, you can configure flexible posting periods, as well as accruals that distribute based on hours worked, or based on a flat rate. TCP also allows for negative balance limits, configurable caps and resets, and all settings can be adjusted on a master, departmental, or individual staff member level.
Expansive configurability
The risk of capturing data that is inaccurate or not useful for your organization can severely impact both your HR strategy and the larger organization. TCP is designed to offer as many configurable options as possible, including calculations, staff set-up, and faculty and staff interaction capabilities.
Our platform can adjust to most configuration needs. We’re also not limited to one configuration – we can make changes on a level that applies to the organization, a department, an staff member, or even individual timesheet segments. This level of configuration is unique to TCP.
Extensive exception options and an interactive view
Exceptions are an important element in time and attendance tracking. They show anomalies in the hours a staff member works. Whether it’s shift exceptions, overtime, comp time, a short or long break, missed punches, or nearly 30 other exceptions, TCP helps organizations efficiently track the data they need to optimize their staff’s time.
Thanks to notifications and settings in TCP, managers can be notified of exceptions, view those irregularities, and take any necessary action. In our platform, there’s no need to run a report to verify; these exceptions are available on-screen and in real-time. This interactive view of hours also enables managers to view exceptions and make the changes as needed.
Integrations Level Up Your Workforce Management
At TCP, we believe robust time and attendance solutions aren’t complete until they are integrated with your payroll and ERP/HCM systems. Our customers frequently rave about how these integrations can take related processes, like running payroll, from days to hours. We work with all the major payroll providers, including ADP, QuickBooks and Sage, to offer specially configured payroll integrations. Whether your integration is seamless, a one-click, pre-coded module, or a flat-file export, we make it happen.
Don’t see your payroll provider? We maintain relationships with payroll providers to create the integration your organization needs and to ensure you have the best customer service.
Looking for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Human Capital Management (HCM) integrations? Our time collection solutions are built to operate with your existing systems and can result in substantial savings.
ERP/HCM integrations
Sometimes even the most robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions lack time collection capabilities sophisticated enough to meet your needs. Our time collection solutions are built to operate with your existing business system(s) and can result in substantial savings. Optimized data handling, seamless communication and industry leading labor calculations helps you complete your time and labor strategy with a more comprehensive solution. We integrate with PeopleSoft, Oracle HCM, SAP and Workday to deliver the capabilities you need.
Questions to Ask About Your Time & Attendance Tool??
As part of your process, keep in mind that a single, fully integrated solution that meets multiple requirements is better than using two, three, or four disparate systems to achieve your workforce management strategy. Ensure that your time and attendance system is dynamic and evolves to keep up with the growth of your workforce. Organizations must examine important factors and ask questions as they seek out potential time and attendance and workforce management solutions.?
With the big picture in mind, identify your organization’s unique needs and non-negotiables. Then do your best to find a single system that offers everything you need to support the business from a workforce management perspective. When a time and attendance system is thoughtfully implemented as part of your larger workforce goals, you can automate outdated processes, improve faculty and staff engagement, and make better-informed business decisions.
Time and attendance is at the heart of what TCP does, and it’s where we began. How your staff clocks in and out, when they work, and what they work on are the core workforce optimization. We’ve taken what we know about time and attendance and evolved the TCP platform to offer an expansive range of workforce management capabilities. Each component has been carefully designed to support the needs of each organization.
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Want to learn more? Check out Chapter 2 of our eBook, "Reduce Workforce Friction with Integrated Scheduling ."