Poor employee attendance can have a negative effect on your company's production levels and profit margins as time goes on, so it makes sense to consider investing in an attendance management service of some kind. There is no shortage of service providers and management plan options available on the market to choose from. So look for the following features when selecting an attendance management solution to ensure that the service will meet your company's long-term needs and expectations:

Cloud-Based Time Clocks

You should be able to set up cloud-based time clocks for each of your employees to make clocking in and out easy and efficient. Instead of having to line up for a turn at the manual time clock when showing up for work, your employees should have access to their cloud-based time clocks through their mobile devices and on their work computers so they can clock in and out as they walk through the front door.

The attendance management solution you invest in should offer telephone IVR support too so employees can check out for the day if they forget to before leaving the office. And your time clocks should be able to read fingerprints, barcodes, and even scannable badges to manage employees' attendance accounts.

A Management Dashboard

The attendance management solution you choose should also provide everyone on your payroll with access to their own personal attendance management dashboard through your intranet or an online website. The dashboard allows employees to complete tasks such as:

• Review time stamps for any given workday.

• Request paid time off.

• Submit doctor's notes and other documents to accompany missed days or lost hours.

• Submit completed virtual time cards for management approval.

Your management team should be able to see and edit the information that employees put into the system so they can seamlessly plan for scheduled absences and reassign workloads when necessary.

Job Tracking Options

If the amount of time an employee spends on a particular task during the day is important to your company's overall production levels, choose an attendance management solution that offers job tracking options to take advantage of.

This type of tool will allow your employees to document when they start and stop a specific task throughout the day so you can track exactly how much time is being spent on any particular project.

Your managers should also be able to assign specific projects to employees with time limits in place to ensure that no more time than you expect will be spent on said projects during a given time period.

Being able to track jobs in real time will allow your management team to reallocate man hours to different projects when necessary in order to balance workloads and optimize overall products levels. And job tracking can come in handy if you want to pay different rates for certain tasks and projects.

Analytical Reporting

To keep production levels high and effectively manage employee turnover in the coming years, the attendance management solution you invest in should offer access to analytical reporting on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Any time you want to see attendance statistics or verify how many hours have been spent on a project, you should be able to generate a report in your attendance management system that gives you the exact information you need – nothing more and nothing less.

Analytical reporting will make it easy for your company to keep tabs on attendance problems as they start to develop, before it's too late to correct the problems. When production levels start to slip, pull up your analytical data to quickly find out if absences, tardiness, or a lack of proper job tracking is the culprit. And use the analytical information to complete performance reviews for your employees on a regular basis.