Total workforce management 2013 the state of time and attendance

Total Workforce Management 2013:

In association with:

The State of Time and Attendance

2 | Total Workforce Management 2013: The State of Time and Attendance

Introduction Tracking time and attendance is at the core of workforce management. From Fred Flintstone marking his timecard with the beak of a Pterodactyl to GPS-enabled apps and biometric data-collection devices, organisations always have a need to know who is in attendance and be able to track when and where they are working. Based on the latest data collected between May and June 2013, this Research Brief is the first in a series addressing critical workforce management issues, looks at the trends influencing time and attendance today, and how time and attendance interacts with other critical workforce management systems, including payroll, rostering, and absence management.

Total Workforce Management 2013: The State of Time and Attendance | 4

The Case for Workforce Management

The theme that emerges as organisations think about their workforce management initiatives is that of keeping up with change. Organisations are struggling to develop an agile and flexible workforce and use data to help them make better decisions about both their labour and their spend (Figure I).

Figure 1: Pressures Driving Workforce Management Initiatives

Source: Aberdeen Group, July 2013

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Marketplace demands require a more agile and flexible workforce (ability to scale up and down, change staffing ratios, etc.)

Rapidly changing business conditions require better access to workforce data to drive decision making

Economic conditions require better control over labour spend

44%45% 33%


To truly respond to these challenges, organisations must consider the full scope of total workforce management. Aberdeen defines total workforce management as core HR (HR and employee data management and system of record), payroll, time and attendance, rostering, and absence management, and we’ll go into detail on many of these topics in this research series.

Time and Attendance Strategies

Managing time and attendance is a critical element to an organisation’s ability to understand who is working for them on any given day, and on any given task, and is often the first link that organisations establish between HR and financial systems such as payroll. This data collection and integration is critical to organisational decision-making around talent. As organisations look to tools and technologies that help them solve these critical workforce management challenges, time and attendance strategies should focus on an organisation’s ability to standardise, automate, communicate, and integrate.

Standardisation

In order to tackle the kinds of challenges outlined above, the first phase organisations look to is standardisation (Figure 2). This is important because automating poor processes only gets you to the wrong result more quickly. And it is clear that today’s organisations are working towards this standardisation before moving to automation.


Organisations need to start by standardising workforce management processes, not only to ensure that they are the most efficient and effective possible but also to support transparency. Organisations need to have consistency and transparency in how they track and calculate hours worked, pay, and overtime and time-off policies for two important reasons. One, it helps managers and employees understand their workforce management process and how it impacts them, and it builds their trust with the organisation by ensuring that everyone is treated the same way. And two, organisations must be transparent to external parties, to local, state, and federal governments as required by law, to any unions representing their employees, to shareholders, or in the case of public sector organisations, to the taxpayers who fund the organisation. The ability to track and report, and prove that policies are executed consistently, is of critical importance for compliance as well as for manager and employee engagement.

Figure 2: Workforce Management Strategies


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Standardised workforce management processes across the organisation

Integrated workforce management data with business /financial data for more accurate reporting and forecasting

Automate workforce management processes to improve accuracy


Organisations need to integrate their workforce data with other business intelligence to perform analytics. This also requires standardisation to ensure that data has been collected in a uniform way. All organisations want to have better control over every aspect of their business, including labour spend and return on talent investment. Integration allows organisations to understand the impact of various workforce decisions on the overall health and profitability of the organisation. This line of sight also helps business leaders truly connect their business plans with their workforce strategies.

Automation

Once organisations have established standards and processes, automation is the next logical step to improve efficiency and effectiveness. As illustrated in Figure 3, while nearly a third of organisations still have manual time and attendance processes in place, they are more likely to automate time and attendance than they are to automate rostering.It is also interesting to note that 41% of organisations with automated time

Figure 3: Source of Functionality


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Fast Fact: While nearly a third of organisations still have manual time and attendance processes in place, they are more likely to automate time and attendance than they are to automate rostering.


Figure 4: Benefits of Workforce Management Automation

and attendance utilise tools that are part of either an integrated workforce management suite or part of their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. Using these kinds of tools for automation may help organisations tackle issues with one solution, both automating and integrating their time and attendance data in one step. Presumably, functionality within an integrated workforce suite will allow for easy integration of time data with critical areas like rostering and payroll. When time and attendance is part of the ERP solution, it can help feed this data directly into dashboards and analytics tools that combine business data with workforce management.

There are many potential benefits to workforce management automation, but Figures 4 and 5 identify some of the most significant. Figure 4 looks at the overall benefits that organisations that have implemented automated workforce management solutions have experienced.Freeing up the time of both HR and business personnel is a critical benefit,

Fast Fact:41% of organisations with automated time and attendance utilise tools that are part of either an integrated workforce management suite or their ERP solution


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Improve accuracy of data

Reduce time spent on WFM by the business

Reduce labour costs

Reduce time spent on WFM by HR

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ensuring that the organisation’s time is spent on strategic activities and not just administration. This is particularly important in organisations like retail or manufacturing, where you want managers on the sales floor of the shop getting work done instead of managing timesheets. Organisations also see improved data accuracy as they reduce the number of manual touches and reduced overall labour costs as a result of increased visibility.

These same kinds of benefits are quantified in Figure 5, which looks specifically at the results achieved by organisations automating their time and attendance solutions. These organisations see a significant reduction in manual workforce management transactions, as well as increased accuracy of their workforce management data. Accurately tracking time off can result in significant cost savings, ensuring that paid time-off (PTO) is paid out as it is actually taken so that at the end of a year, or even upon an individual leaving the organisation, employees are not owed for untaken leave.

Figure 5: Impact of Automation


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Fast Fact:Organisations using automated time and attendance saw 57% fewer errors in paid time off accrual calculations.


Communication

Also essential to transparency and engagement is the ability for individuals and managers to access their data. Self-service access to workforce management data and processes has been a growing trend for a number of years for several reasons. First, it is much more efficient as it allows both employees and managers to access information on demand as opposed to having to call someone in HR. This also frees up HR resources to focus on more value-added activities. In addition, it can help improve accuracy as individuals can maintain data such as contact information and changes in status versus filling out a form that must go through manual entry. The fewer times data has to be entered or subjected to human error the better. Currently, 62% of organisations surveyed provide employee self-service, and 61% of organisations provide manager self-service to workforce management data.

As illustrated in Figure 6, nearly all organisations with self-service provide manager access to critical timekeeping activities via browser-based portals. Mobile access via smartphone apps and tablets is also beginning to take place, but its availability is much less common. This trend holds consistent across employee self-service as well, with the majority of access provided through the browser.


Figure 6: Manager Access to Self Service


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Automated time and attendance tools that allow for self-service also affect engagement. Organisations with automated self-service reported 72% of employees rated themselves highly engaged, as compared to 64% of employees in organisations that do not have automated time and attendance in place.

IntegrationIntegration of time and attendance data with other aspects of workforce management helps organisations not only improve accuracy but also provide the foundation for analytics. 70% of organisations currently integrate time and attendance data with their rostering solution, and 66% integrate time and attendance with payroll. Integration with rostering is important, as it helps

Fast Fact:72% of employees in organisations with automated time and attendance solutions rated themselves as highly engaged compared to 64% of employees in organisations without automated time and attendance.


organisations look at historical performance data, combined with historical attendance data, and understand who their high-performing individuals and teams are. This data can then be fed into the rostering process to improve business results.

Payroll is another facet of workforce management that benefits from integration with time and attendance data as it keeps overhead costs down, decreases the amount of manual workforce management transactions, and leads to fewer errors in tracking time worked and handling payroll processing. As demonstrated in Figure 7 below, organisations that integrated time and attendance with payroll had an almost 30% lower rate of payroll processing errors, saw a 32% lower error rate in the tracking of actual time worked, and avoided the 6% year-over-year increase in manual workforce transactions

Figure 7: Payroll Integration Means Greater Accuracy


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Increase in manual WFM transactions

Payroll processing error rate

Tracking actual time worked error rate

1.9% 2.2% 2.9% 0.1% 5.9%

Time and attendance is integrated with payroll

Time and attendance is not integrated with payroll


experienced by organisations without integration.

Organisations that integrate time and attendance with payroll end up spending less money and use fewer resources to execute critical HCM processes. With savings like this, organisations can allocate these freed-up resources to reinvest in their business, focus on strategic priorities, and improve overall business performance.


Case Study — Sabre Holdings

A global travel technology company that provides services to both consumers and large travel companies worldwide, Sabre Holdings employs about 10,000 employees in 60 countries. Founded in 1960, Sabre Holdings has four major business units — Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, and Travelocity — operating across the globe with customer care centres in the United States, Argentina, India, Poland, and Uruguay. With such a large network of employees situated across the globe, it could be very easy for an enterprise of this size to lose sight of unique individuals and cultures that make up their company. But when rolling out their automated time and attendance solution, Sabre managed to implement a global system that took into account the unique needs of each of its locations. Prior to implementation, each location had their own manual processes for tracking their employees’ time and attendance and leave, which meant management had to sort through an extensive amount of varied information to understand simple data points. Some locations used home-grown tools, others used Excel spreadsheets, and some managers even scrawled notes on loose-leaf paper to record who had taken time off, all of which were time consuming and ultimately an unproductive use of time for Sabre’s management. The time and attendance tools were originally sought out as a way in which to appropriately monitor and report on employees’ activities worldwide.

With leadership buy-in from the onset, Sabre focused on identifying local stakeholders and decision-makers and ensuring they were on board with each implementation. They took the time to understand the unique needs and culture of each location and map

out an appropriate implementation training plan to fit that location. Before implementation, Sabre handpicked local experts, (or “timekeepers” as Sabre called them), who were employees around the globe who trained extensively so they could be resources for their colleagues when issues arose. From the very beginning, Sabre used face-to-face training, webinars, and WebEx’s for all branches far and wide. So no matter the location, Sabre sent representatives well versed with the technology to train with each branch for weeks at a time to ensure all employees had an idea of how to use the technology. Sabre made sure to cover all avenues for implementing the tool, so even when language barriers cropped up between training management and local employees, trainers had clear, example-driven instructions to provide their employees.Sabre focused on wins for both employees and managers. Employees now have self-service access to request time off, and managers no longer have to manually update rosters, reduce vacation balances in the system, or perform manual tracking when an employee requests time off. Sabre corporate management experienced a multitude of benefits from rolling out time and attendance, most notably the accessibility of centralised information for management worldwide. This automated tool has eliminated the need for manual processes and has made it even easier for managers with employees spread out across the globe to manage leave. What’s more, Sabre created a uniform platform for across the globe so a manager in the US, who may have team members in multiple locations, now sees employees’ leave data in a uniform way. With such processes in place, Sabre effectively centralised their workforce management resources, which allowed them to use previously allocated resources such as money, time, and energy on other business challenges.


Key Insights

Time and attendance is just one aspect of total workforce management, but it is often a critical foundation for further process improvement, automation, and data integration. As organisations look to improve and automate their time and attendance solutions they need to keep in mind the importance of standardising processes, automating to improve efficiency, communicating to ensure transparency and compliance, and integrating to allow for better decision-making.

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Total workforce management 2013 the state of time and attendance

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