Workforce Management Software Needs Time and Attendance Analytics—Here’s Why

Organizations powered by hourly workers face unique challenges as they strive to boost productivity while retaining employees. Striking a balance between workers’ well-being and hours worked requires careful attention to workforce management and scheduling. Without it, the business and employees suffer, and important work is interrupted, delayed, or left incomplete. 

From hospitals, retail, and hospitality to factories and manufacturing, myriad industries depend on hourly workforces, and managing their schedules and needs is essential to staying competitive. With 76.1 million workers over age 16 paid at hourly rates in 2021—almost 56% of all wage and salary workers—the challenge is both widespread and complex. Time and attendance analytics can help organizations connect and make sense of their labor data to improve management and decision-making for a massive impact. 

Adding time and attendance analytics to your workforce management software can give your customers a leg up in managing their most important and expensive resource: their people. 

How attendance and time analytics can help

Understaffed restaurants and hospitals, months-long manufacturing delays, reduced store hours—the difficulties of managing hourly workforces are all around us, and they have only increased since the pandemic. Analytics give organizations and their leaders a powerful new lens to view their workforces through. With analytics, organizations can: 

1. Optimize scheduling and manage costs

By predicting when and where businesses will face increased demand, organizations can schedule employees appropriately to meet demand without overstaffing at slower times. AI-powered analytics can also alert managers to upcoming changes or seasonality and identify scheduling gaps that might have gone unnoticed in the days of paper spreadsheets. With more information about when and where employees are needed, organizations can easily test different scheduling options to achieve optimal deployment of their hourly workforces and manage costs.

2. Reduce unnecessary overtime and manage absenteeism

Overtime is expensive, and when it’s not carefully forecast and managed, it can derail an organization’s staffing budget. Analytics can show organizations when and where they’re racking up overtime hours and help them adjust scheduling to prevent unnecessary overtime. By analyzing employee absenteeism patterns, organizations can identify drivers of absenteeism, explore links between overtime and absenteeism, address employee performance issues, and have back-ups in place in case an employee calls in sick. 

3. Avoid lost revenue and reduce time theft

Lost revenue from shortened opening hours or insufficient staffing adds up. Organizations can use analytics to understand the impact of vacant shifts and make an informed decision about whether the potential revenue justifies increased staffing. Analytics can also be applied to prevent the schedule gaps that lead to unpredictable opening hours, avoidable long lines, and disappointed customers. 

Meanwhile, time theft—when employees overreport the hours they’ve worked—can become a massive expense for organizations, and a survey by Software Advice found that 43% of respondents have exaggerated the number of hours they’ve worked in a shift. Time and attendance software is more reliable than paper spreadsheets or time clocks for monitoring employee working hours and can remedy overreporting by automatically clocking employees in and out. 

4. Improve employee retention

Turnover is predictably high among the hourly workforce, and sourcing hourly workers remains one of the top areas of concern for organizations. To improve retention, analytics can increase flexibility and reduce burnout by taking into account employees’ preferred shift times and making it easier for employees to swap shifts. Hourly employees value control over their schedule—in a recent survey from Shiftboard, 87% of respondents considered it extremely important—and providing flexibility can make it easier to retain them. 

Bringing analytics to workforce management software with Visier

Visier Embedded Analytics Applications for Time and Attendance can help vendors bring game-changing time and attendance analytics to their customers. By embedding Visier’s best-in-class analytics in your solution, your customers will have access to the real-time insights they need to manage costs, reduce wasted spending, and increase revenue. 

Within your solution, your customers will have new insights into: 

• Overtime: model when and where overtime occurs, forecast how absences and vacancies impact overtime, and optimize the ability to find replacement labor at straight time

• Headcount: track the number of employees of various employment types and how many hours they work

• Turnover: track the exit volumes of hourly workers

• Utilization: identify where employees are under- or over-utilized 

Ready to learn more? 

Time and attendance analytics can help your customers make sense of their data and better manage their hourly workforces. And it can differentiate your solution by making it the key component to their workforce scheduling strategy. If you’re interested in adding powerful time and attendance analytics that will give you and your customers a competitive advantage, Visier can help. To learn more or schedule a demo, visit https://www.visier.com/embedded/applications/.

On the Outsmart blog, we write about workforce-related topics like the top talent acquisition metrics your software should offer, how to add insights where they matter with contextual analytics, and how predictive people analytics helps businesses of all sizes thrive. We also report on trending topics like ESG and EU CSRD requirements and preparing for a recession, and advise on HR best practices like how to create a strategic compensation strategy, metrics every CHRO should track, and connecting people data to business data. But if you really want to know the bread and butter of Visier, read our post about the benefits of people analytics.