When the company’s work time management (WTM) is “standard” and employees are working 5 days a week at fixed hours, the accountability is fairly simple. This situation is significantly different by rolling work schedules, shifts, randomly planned working time and finally by cumulative working time result, which requires the more detailed analysis. So, let’s talk about cumulative working time and the daily challenges as well as their possible solutions that organizations face every day.
Challenges
Regardless of the organization’s field of activity - manufacturing, service sector, retail, healthcare, or any other - the main challenges in work time management are usually identified by the organization itself as follows:
- Unmanageable amount of detailed daily entries and changes in schedules or timesheets;
- Worktime managers are not HR specialists and need a simpler tool than the HR|Payroll system;
- Decisions often are taken without full and timely information on worked time during the month;
- A sense of double recording, where remote departments of the organization, work time managers and at the same time HR specialists use different sources of primary information, and finally resulting in “overlapping” the worked time data, etc.
Work time management optimization
There are solutions on the market that make work time management easier and more efficient, so don’t be afraid to look for them and embrace change, as it will make your daily activities easier and ensure the accuracy of the payroll calculation.
The most common work time management solutions include:
- A simplified work time management environment for managers, with the possibility to use shift or schedule notations that they are used to (when they are not HR specialists);
- Allowing work time managers the freedom to simulate situations, record the necessary shift cycles and their validity terms, adjust and transfer until the final validation of the working time, when the entries become visible in the accountability;
- Ongoing adjustments to planned hours, which are visible online for payroll accountants as well;
- Sharing of absence information between all responsible for work time management during the period, regardless of how the information is entered into the system (absences, annual leave, etc.);
- The ability to enter and confirm the actual worked time on a daily basis or at the end of the month, as required by your organization;
- Finally, a unified data management database, where the data is entered once and is visible to the target user groups.
Consequences of ineffective work time management
Lack of user-friendly tools, manual accounting process or usage of different systems to produce the common result naturally leads to a series of undesirable consequences that are often difficult to manage, such as:
- Work time is planned despite the regulations of the LC, as it is done completely or partially manually;
- Waste of specialist time during work time management process when the same information is shared for several times and with different recipients, when overlapping information or same errors need to be corrected in different sources at the same time;
- Errors in payroll calculations and subsequent adjustments due to delayed or “lost” information (human error in manual processing), etc.
Woking time information is one of the basic elements for the payroll calculation for each employee. Having accurate and correct data for each organization is tantamount to its general hygiene, as any error, however small, in worked time can cause lots of surprising issues.