The basic tasks for the modern systems that support this area include:
- Support for planning of the subordinate employees’ working time by the managerial staff .
- Record keeping of hours worked (including support for various models of time worked recording).
- Working time banking.
Let’s learn more then about the key functionalities of the modern working time management system.
Working time planning
A few years ago the only person who has participated in the working time planning process was a manager (of the production department, point of sale, call centre etc.). The system was to warn him or her against errors and the risk of code violations as the manager focuses primarily on business and does not specialise in labour law – it is the software that is supposed to lead him or her through the meanders of law and shorten the time spent on planning.
Today, a modern system supporting working time management must offer much more. First of all, the software should generate an optimal team schedule taking into account the requirements of the manager, code constraints and availability of staff. Secondly, in the majority of industries we want, or even need, to take into account personal preferences of the employees.
The situation on the labour market is not favourable for employers as parts of thereof are demographic decline, huge demand for working staff, new generations (Y and Z) with different expectations and competing for employees not only with the direct competitors.
In order to attract and keep an employee one must offer at least 2 things:
- possibility to influence the working time schedule,
- mobile access to the software (in this case related to the working time) as attractive as the consumer applications used by potential employees on a daily basis.
How should the working time plan be developed? The manager defines his or her needs for selected days (in a form of, for example, repetitive week pattern).
For the point of sale the demand (e.g. 2 cashiers, 3 salesmen, 1 decorator, 1 manager’s assistant etc.) can be generated from the sales system. This, among other things, ensures perfect matching the workload with the sales peaks.
In manufacturing companies, the demand should be drawn from the production planning system. Employees can, in addition to leave requests (e.g. holiday), submit their working time preferences. By the term “preferences” one understands both information about days and working hours on which the employee prefers not to work and the preferable working time.
If talking about the retail sector, it has a key meaning especially to the “Y-generation”. In manufacturing companies, these preferences can be used to record information on which employees are willing to work overtime or weekends. At the end of the process there is always a manager who can take the preferences into account or ignore them for various reasons.
So let’s conclude – we have needs, absences and preferences. At this stage, an advanced IT system provides the manager with the ability to automatically generate working time schedules (taking the information mentioned above into account) that are optimal in terms of reducing overtime and in line with the Labour Code.
How can this be done? Applications use algorithms commonly known from operational research, which, due to so many variables and limitations, give better results than manual planning. As a result, the preparation of a work schedule for the next month will take a few minutes, not hours or days.
The advantages of planning process support by the software include:
- dramatic reduction of planning time, where the saved hours can be spend on strategic tasks;
- employee satisfaction – in planning we take into account their preferences;
- working time cost reduction – algorithms enable reducing overtime;
- in the long run – satisfying customers by providing them with the right service on time (by bounding the working time planning with the production requirements and sales systems).
Recordkeeping of hours worked
There are two most common models of the working time banking: negative and positive. Negative model assumes that employees work according to the plan and only deviations are recorded (e.g. absences, overtime). In the positive model, we usually record time events such as arrive / leave (start / end of work).
In the case of the negative model, the support provided by the IT system is simple – we should give managers and employees the opportunity to record absences and deviations. In the case of the positive model, the working time management application should offer an interface with an external RCP system or possibility to record events by mobile devices.
In some organisations, it is desirable to have a detailed recording of working time that takes into account the type of task performed during the shift, a production order, cost centre, workstation or production line.
Working time banking
Time worked should be settled in the payroll. It is our software that should evaluate the working time by comparing the working time plan with the time worked and, on this basis, sent to the payroll system an information about salaries.
Function lacking in many IT solutions, i.e. taking into account retroactive adjustments of working time (e.g. related to employee complaints) is a very important feature on this stage. From the managerial point of view any retroactive adjustment should be limited to the recording of the updated data. The system automatically sends an information about adjustments to the Payroll Department where it is taken into account while calculating next payroll (or in the corrective list).
Delegation
At points of sale there is often a need to delegate an employee (e.g. to another shop in the same city). In manufacturing companies assigning employees to different teams for a particular period of time is a common practise.
This apparently simple task includes a number of activities such as communication between the managerial staff and the employees with regard to the delegation, changing the working time plan, changing the cost centre, ordering a job and many others (that frequently engage the HR Department).
System supporting working time management should allow such a process to be carried out with just a few mouse-clicks. Finally, the relevant costs should be borne by the place to which the employee has been delegated.
User experience
Developers of time management support systems must offer users an experience comparable to that of consumer applications, especially if we are talking about a new generation of employees. To make this user experience attractive, the application needs to:
- be available on all mobile devices in order to allow the employee to access his or her work schedule, submit leave request or working time preferences from any place at any time;
- inform interested employees in a real time (by a message and / or SMS) on changes relevant from the point of view of their working time or on the request status;
- be visually attractive, and the bar is set quite high at this point (Facebook, Instragram, Uber,…).
Platform, Updates, Integration
More and more companies notice the advantages of cloud solutions. In the context of the working time management applications we shall mention few of them:
- scalability – the growth of the company does not affect the efficiency of the solution;
- reduction of costs related to the maintenance of hardware and software resources – as part of the subscription we have disk space, platform and updates;
- safety – big players (such as SAP) offer very high level of safety beyond the reach of other suppliers.
The best working time management support systems are integrated with leading HR and ERP systems (SAP SuccessFactors, SAP HR, SAP ERP,…). The automatic exchange of information between the different landscape components accelerates decision-making processes and provides managers and specialists with precious time.