Employee Attendance Tracking sounds a lot like micro-managing a team. It’s quite the opposite. Or at least it should be. Clocking in hours at a job is what we think of when we think of attendance. However, properly planning time off, handling overlapping leaves and sick day requests are all part of employee attendance tracking. You might think these elements are important, but have not yet determined a foolproof way to track these for your team. Below are 10 benefits of employee attendance tracking that you might not have considered.

1. Prevent Pay Errors

A proper Employee Attendance Tracking system ensures that no one skips a week of pay or gets overpaid when they are taking unpaid time off. A good employee leave tracking software can help your team members track how many vacation days they have remaining. This software should also simplify the creation of reports. With the right reports and the correct information regarding employee leaves, your HR department will ensure that there are no pay errors on your team’s pay cheques.

2. Employee Accountability for Time Off Requests

With an employee leave tracking software such as Vacation Tracker, every employee is accountable for his or her own time off requests. Vacation Tracker is Slack-integrated leave management and attendance tracking system. It allows managers to keep track of when their team members are on vacation or away from the office. However, a manager does not need to run after their employees. With this Employee Attendance Tracking solution, team members are solely accountable for their own time off requests. This saves time for all parties involved. It also increases an employee’s sense of accountability, responsibility, and engagement.

3. Prevent Micro Managing

That being said, it might sound at odds to implement an Employee Attendance Tracking system, while becoming more of a hands-off leader. It is not. With Vacation Tracker, managing leave is not complicated. It in fact saves a manager a lot of time. Receiving and approving or denying a time off request can be done in just a few clicks. It lets busy managers move on to more important tasks. Reminders about time off or vacations within the team are also taken care of by the Vacation Tracker software.

4. Easily Communicate with Remote Workers

With remote teams, it’s not always easy to keep track of attendance and schedules, because there is rarely any face-to-face interaction. Therefore, Employee Attendance Tracking becomes even more important. For remote teams to function effectively, it’s important that they communicate frequently about their planned vacations, absences, or days off. A good employee leave tracking software can help them ensure that this communication happens. With the Vacation Tracker app, notifications can be programmed to ensure that every team member stays in the loop about current or upcoming time off. These notifications can be customized to appear on the Slack channel of the administrator’s choice. The frequency of the notifications can also be modified.

5. Boost Employee Attendance

This might seem counterintuitive, but tracking employee attendance can actually improve overall attendance. Here’s how it works. When people know that there is a reliable employee tracking system in place, they aren’t as stressed about asking for time off. When employees know that they can request leave, vacation time, or a half day to take their child to the doctor, they are less stressed. Hence, they are less prone to burnout and to sick leaves. Therefore, there is a boost in employee attendance and in employee morale.

6. Go Paperless by Using an Online Tracking Tool

The most eco-friendly alternative to traditional employee attendance tracking is to use an online tool. As a manager, you can get rid of paperwork by using leave-tracking software such as Vacation Tracker. As an added benefit, this move to paperless will instantly boost productivity. Your HR team will no longer need a person to process paperwork for leave requests. Processes that would require multiple back-and-forth communications, scanning, or emailing can now be done in just a few clicks.

7. Monitor Vacation Days for Each Individual Employee

Not all employees have the same amount of allocated paid days off, or the same amount of vacation days rolled over from the previous year. With a software solution such as Vacation Tracker tracking everyone’s unique situation is a piece of cake. Each person’s vacation bank is automatically debited once vacations have been taken. HR teams can easily stay on top of this information, without getting any paper cuts!

8. Everyone Always has Access to Their Information

The upside of having an easy-to-use Employee Attendance Tracking system that is also Slack integrated is that everyone always has access to their records. On Vacation Tracker, they can view their remaining time off, the different types of leave they can request, and a history of previous leaves. Again, this saves time for HR people who don’t need to answer questions or go digging into filing cabinets to get this information. Employees will appreciate the transparency of the whole tracking process.

9. Boost Employee Morale

This transparency in turn is a great morale booster. When scheduling leave is no longer a dreaded 10-day process, but can be done in merely 10 seconds, everybody wins. Efficient processes demonstrate to employees that their time is valued. However, it also suggests that time off is important and must be taken. With the Vacation Tracker app, team members can simply type /vacation into any Slack channel and they will be able to write up and send a leave request in no time.

10. Make Informed Business Decisions

Some Employee Attendance Tracking systems come equipped with reporting functions. These reports, when used appropriately can help make informed business decisions. For instance, it could help bring absenteeism issues to the forefront. It can help to identify certain leave-related trends. Or it can help to identify which periods are the most popular for taking vacations. Such findings can then lead to proactive decision-making.

Kristina Ousmanova

Kristina recently left behind fast-paced life of Human Resource Business Consulting to freelance as a Content Writer. A regular Vacation Tracker contributor, she can be found working remotely from her home in Montreal, usually while eating a variety of snacks.