Businesses find that labor is one of the expenses taking a big bite out of their budgets every year. They strive to find a balance between labor and workload for optimal performance and cost effectiveness, but leave themselves vulnerable to serious risk without the proper tools and processes in place. Although a large cost, labor can be controlled with a few best practices.
1. Control Overtime
Overtime enables you to manage higher workloads without increasing staffing levels. When used properly, overtime can be a powerful tool; however, overtime that is out of control can be costly. Paying overtime at a premium and working overtime that was not accounted for in the budget draws critical attention, which often results in managers looking for ways to minimize overtime hours. According to the Labor Management Institute, a good rule of thumb is to keep overtime at less than 5 percent of the total hours worked.
2. Automate Time-Off Requests
Eliminate unnecessary paper trails and empower employees by giving them online access to the time-off request functionality through employee self-service portals. Employees can view available time and request time off, for which supervisors are notified immediately. Now you can put that pad of sticky notes to better use. They make for a great office prank, which I would know nothing about unless you ask Sarah.
3. Automate Time Entry
If you have 100 employees rounding their time up by five minutes per day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, you’re losing 2,167 hours a year. At $8 per hour, that’s an annual loss of $17,336! By automating your time collection, you can save on the hours and dollars you’re losing to inaccuracies.
4. Consolidate to One System
Consolidating to one system improves the efficiency and accuracy of your time and attendance data collection. Employee information is entered into the system once and only once for all functionality. It eliminates redundant data entry, errors and omissions. Forget having to manually calculate time sheets and key that information into your payroll system; with a single-database solution, you simply update payroll with the time and attendance data, eliminating the additional work and possible margin for error.
Simplify the timekeeping process; eliminate errors, redundancies and omissions; and reduce spending for improved workforce productivity. Who doesn’t have time for that?