Every medical, optometry, or dental practice needs appropriate attendance tracking. The challenge, of course, is that this tracking isn’t always completely accurate.
This is an understandable concern. In many practices, office managers or practitioners themselves simply don’t have time to properly manage timekeeping, including accuracy and other vitally important measures of attendance tracking.
Here’s the thing: This isn’t an area that you can afford to get wrong. Attendance tracking is vital for various reasons, including determining if you need to write up an employee for poor performance, the accuracy of one of your employee’s paychecks, determining overtime payment, and more.
This means you need the right time and attendance audit procedures, and appropriate software to track your employees’ attendance. Fortunately, at HR for Health, we’re here to help, and our timekeeping software can help you manage your attendance tracking and keep your attendance accurate to the second.
What’s In This Article:
Common Attendance Tracking Mistakes
Communicating Expectations To Employees
Common Attendance Tracking Mistakes
There are many common attendance tracking mistakes that practice owners make! Here are five of the most prevalent:
1. Estimating or rounding time, which can cause hours to be lost cumulatively, resulting in an overpayment or underpayment to employees. Timekeeping should be accurate to the second. Fortunately, HR for Health’s timekeeping software can help you accomplish this.
2. Meal breaks may not be accurately tracked when you don’t use an electronic time clock. With meal breaks, accuracy with the time it is taken is important, along with the duration of the meal break, as it determines if a penalty may be owed or not.
3. Failure to properly manage time and attendance audit procedures. Time and attendance should be periodically audited and checked for errors, ensuring the accuracy of the system. Any errors should be corrected immediately.
4. Having an attendance tracking policy, but applying that policy inconsistently. For example, if you write up an employee for poor performance around absenteeism, you should ensure you handle the situation in the same manner should this occur with another employee . This reduces the risk of claims of a discriminatory process.. You should also ensure that you are appropriately documenting all issues. This is something HR for Health can assist you with.
5. Allowing employees to have someone else clock in for them. This can create huge issues – including fraud. HR for Health’s software can target and resolve this issue for clients.
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What Causes These Mistakes?
These mistakes can have various causes. Most common is the failure to have a system that is either inconsistently applied, monitored, or easily exploitable. Unfortunately, employees may take advantage of the situation if attendance is not closely monitored.
Electronic timekeeping like HR for Health makes it very difficult for employees to abuse. In addition, our software has multiple ways of tracking attendance and hours worked, and it provides practices with additional insight regarding their attendance.
Furthermore, you must ensure that you have the right time and attendance audit procedures. This can make it harder for employees to take advantage of your business. It can also ensure that employees are disincentivized to take advantage of your practice’s procedures.
How To Resolve These Mistakes
Fortunately, since the above errors are common, they are also easy to resolve. To ensure compliance, it is worth considering electronic timekeeping, and HR for Health’s, specifically, because it prevents potential mistakes from occurring to begin with.
Rather than having to be in discussions with employees about their hours and fixing mistakes, you can focus your energy on other priorities. Our timekeeping system can track hours accurately, while also providing visibility on attendance. When there are errors, employees can request that edits be made to correct these mistakes. This triggers a notification to their supervisor to approve or deny the change.
Furthermore, you should develop the appropriate procedures to let your employees know what you expect from them in terms of timekeeping. Be clear that failure to adhere to appropriate timekeeping standards may result in you writing up an employee for poor performance. Also be sure to follow through with any consequences you communicate, documenting along the way.
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HR for Health Feature Spotlight: Electronic Timekeeping
Communicating Expectations To Employees
Your timekeeping policies, as well as your time and attendance audit procedures, should be clear and easily understood by anyone who works for you. Fortunately, there are easy ways to ensure that this is the case. Use your handbook to communicate your policy to employees. HR for Health’s handbook policy on timekeeping is comprehensive and sets proper employee expectations.
With our software, it can easily be sent to employees electronically, and they can acknowledge it electronically. We can also help provide you with a list of items that should be in your handbook. This ensures your employees know what you expect from them, and removes the idea that they may not know what they are walking into on your team.
How HR for Health Can Help
At the end of the day, your medical practice may be too busy helping patients properly deal with issues like timekeeping. If that’s the case, don’t worry: At HR for Health, we’re here to help.
We have a host of resources and experts on-hand that can help you manage your employee handbook, attendance tracking, time and attendance audit procedures, and more. With our help, you can easily run an attendance report for each employee, select an employee’s entire history, and manage the date range from there.
Want more information? Contact HR for Health today to schedule a demo, and learn more about how HR for Health can help you.
