In attendance management, as with any bureaucratic requirement, employers tend to bet on caution, which often creates customs and myths that can make the work of the human resources department and employees more difficult. It is essential that representatives of companies from the finance, the public sector and other office professions, where working hours and attendance are relatively simple, are not subject to these myths. It is necessary to avoid unnecessary and unwanted complications.
The most myths are connected with the „clock-ins“
Biometric
Are you clocking in to work with a card or perhaps a fingerprint? Your employer is probably being overly cautious. A fingerprint is a biometric data and when it is associated with your name or other data, its processing is subject to strict rules contained in the legislation on personal data. The processing of such data is prohibited* and the employer can only access it if it falls under several exceptions and can properly justify the need for such a procedure. Therefore, the claim that the best way to ensure against the fact that employees do not somehow deceive attendance records is through biometric data scanning is a myth and can cause the company considerable problems.
*differs legislation per legislation
Card terminals
Ok, you don’t use biometrics, so at least cards. You do have the right to that, but isn’t it useless? Why would it be requested to clock in for an employee in a bank or a consulting company? After all, when the accountant does not come to work, you can easily find out, there is no room for lying to the employer. Currently, mainly technological, companies allow their employees to work permanently or occasionally from home when they register their attendance via various mobile or cloud applications. If they have unique login data and fulfill their obligations, the employer gives them all the space provided by the legislation. Therefore, it is not necessary to clock in your attendance directly at the premises. If companies require physical attendance at the office, they must count on problems around servicing physical terminals, lost or destroyed cards, etc.
Simply put, an attendance system is not the same as a monitoring or building access system. You can have both separately or in one, but if you have an access system, make sure that it allows you to enter absences, overtime and other attendance requests because otherwise, you might not have a properly implemented attendance system and pasting records via Excel is ineffective.
TULIP tip:
In TULIP, we often face the fact that manufacturing companies still, understandably, stick with hardware solutions, since the scope of their work does not allow them to work from home and have flexible working hours. It is allowed in creative and administrative industries. But TULIP can be implemented for manufacturing companies that want simpler attendance management for administrative departments. It’s not unusual for a business to have 2 attendance systems: terminals in production/logistics and the cloud for office employees.
The attendance system is not an expensive and complicated whim
Related to the previous point is the myth that a company can get by with Excel or an attendance book and that a sophisticated attendance system is only for large and rich companies. Even the public and non-profit sector today works without problems on modern clouds, where for tens of euros a month they record attendance, absences or even projects and export data for payroll calculation. No monthly rewriting and checking of data. Everything is done automatically in the system directly during data submission by the employee.
Time and attendance management do not have to be complicated and expensive. Next-generation attendance systems are modern applications with fast support and low costs. If only because there won’t be any damage to the cable, card, or reading device. Cause there aren’t any.
TULIP tip:
In addition, the cloud is easily adaptable to different industries. Today, TULIP’s clients include IT companies, classic office companies, state administration, non-profit associations and, to a large extent, retail. Retail is such a specific and large segment that we have prepared our version of the attendance system for it to cover their typical needs such as complex working hours, dividing teams, planning shifts or employing seasonal workers.
The attendance system does not have to be a separate installation
Are you looking for an attendance system? First, ask your current IT service providers if they do not provide it. Maybe you have a tool for distributing pay slips and recording business trips or company benefits, maybe you have a project or CRM system and you have no idea that you can also record attendance in the same tool. Software companies diversify and often do not provide just one type of software. Many times it has several areas/modules/applications that can be linked together so employees work on multiple tasks in one online interface.
Your IT department, supplier and employees will thank you if they don’t need a different service for each task.
