“You can only manage time if you track it right”

Just 10 words, but this quote from Spica.com sums up the Time & Attendance quandary perfectly. So how can a single sentence summarise so eloquently a challenge facing most Australian businesses, and more importantly how can you take action in this area? Let’s break it down into the 3 key components: 

1.What does it mean to manage time?

This can be as simple as knowing who is working or on site today to being able to ensure employee wage calculations are correct. However it could be more intricate and include  enabling schedule optimisation or providing reporting opportunities and insights to improve your business operations and increasing productivity and profitability. 

2. What to track and how?

You might be simply tracking the number of hours worked per day, or you could be capturing precise start and stop times for shifts and breaks and allocating time against projects or costings. Furthermore, some businesses may be required to track time to be compliant. For example, with the updates to the Banking and Finance Award in 2020, some businesses are now required to track time when it was not previously. What you track is going to depend heavily on your business, however, the more information you have the more insights and actions you have available to optimise your business. 

Once you know what you are going to track, the options for how to capture time can be considered. These can vary from manual timesheets to biometric capture on time clocks or even mobile app capture with geofencing restrictions.

3. How do you know if you are tracking time correctly?

You may be tracking time within the business, but how do you know if you are tracking it ‘correctly’ and what does that mean in a practical sense? The definition of ‘correct’ will vary depending on which industry you operate in, but a best practice to work towards would be having real-time visibility of data. This visualisation can then be utilised in reporting and analytics to gain insights into the business and allow you to change business behaviours and practices to achieve optimisation. Tracking it right includes not just gathering the data, but reviewing and acting on the insights. 

So for effective Time & Attendance management within your business, make sure you are taking the following key actions: 

? Capturing the data you require for your business needs

? Developing appropriate reports and visualisations on the data 

? Utilising insights and learnings to create actionable strategies aimed at optimising business practices.