Sunday Business Post : Effective Time Management
Article By Jason Walsh Sunday 2nd May 2010
Punch the card and start work. It's an old fashioned scenario. But just because punch cards are on the decline, it doesnt mean that time and attendance management is.
The image of the factory worker clocking on and off may seem to belong to another era, but employers still need to monitor attendance for payroll purposes and increasingly, performance and security. They are turning to technology to do it.
Time and Attendance management is well understood in factory environments. Workers clock on in the morning and off in the evening. Offices, though, also use time and attendance systems- often in more sophisticated ways. Dublin based FlexTime, for example, has been in the market since 1983 and sepcifically targets offfcie environments.
"We came in on an early wave of plastic, card-baseed systems" said Ciaran Rowsome, Managing Director of FlexTime. "They were optical cards at first and then magnetic swipe cards".
FlexTime sells it's Irish-developed time and attendance systems nationally, as well as in Britain, the Nederlands and Germany. "Today, even magnetic swipe cards are almost entirely gone. People now use localised RFID (radio frequency i.d.) cards". He said.
RFID cards are typically designed to work approximately two inches from the time reader or if in use with an access control reader, from the door pane, in order to make data capture deliberate. "The more deliberate the action, the more sucessful the data capture" said Rowsome.
"Some people are using fingerprint i.d., particularly in manufacturing... maybe working shifts that were too long or in other cases people cloking in on behalf of each other". he said.
"We try to be light touch on this. That people are willing to clock on at all, in the first place is an achievement" he said.
For FlexTime, as the company name suggests, one of the key benefits of time and attendance is the implementation of flexible working.
Rather than the industrial image of cloking on and off, the compnay like to promote time and attendance as beneficial to both employers and employees. Employers get to manage and monitor staff activity, while employees gain more control over their jobs.
"If I am in a factory, I will need to be there for a specific shift period. That's usually not the case in offices, even if people are in nine to five(jobs)",said Rowsome.
Rowsome recalled the story of Messerschmitt AG, which in the 1960's, realised it had a huge congestion problem in its workplace. "A sociologist came in and asked the obvious question, "Why are so many people here nine-to five?"
Using VisionTime, FlexTime promotes the use of flexi-time, and has found success in state departments, local authorities and insurance compnaies in particular. "People can work within a flexible bandwidth of, say, 7am until 7pm, coming early or arrving late - as long as they key hours are covered" he said.
In line with this focus on the office, many FlexTime users use their PCs as their clocks. "People can log in using a pin code. If you have 1,000 people it means you eeffectively have 1,000 clocks" said Rowsome. He also said the view of time management as a means of workplace management was inaccurate.
"It's a 50-50 agreement between staff and management. Yes, management can check the pattern of people's attendance but it creates rules that people know and understand. It gives them control over their jobs, allowing them to set their hours and even build up a flexi day (off work), an increasingly popular concept".
Employers get the productivity and forecasting they need and employees get to free themselves from the stresses and strains associated with nine to five life. It's based around fairness" he said.