COVID-19 has been a distressing time for everyone. No one could have ever expected such a thing to happen. The entire world was shut, and people were locked into their homes. It seemed like the world had become a big jail, where everyone was imprisoned in their own home. No one could come out of their houses, and even if they wanted to, they had to carry a mask with them all the time.
Things started to change. Things started to become digital. Everything that used to be done offline, like meeting friends, attending classes, going to the office, attending meetings – all became online. Classes were replaced by Google Meet or Zoom, while Slack and Discord replaced cubicles. Online mode was gradually replacing the offline system, but it could never be the perfect alternative. Gradually, people started becoming accustomed to it.
Several small things that were considered normal in offline mode had also become online, for instance, time tracking of employees in an organization. Confused about what exactly is time tracking? Let’s read more to find out.
What exactly is time tracking?
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As the name implies, time monitoring is simply a system used by many firms to measure how much time a person spends at their workplace. In another way, time tracking is the mechanism that keeps track of each employee’s working hours at any given company.
Employees are paid depending on how much time they spend at the company once an appropriate judgment has been reached. BuddyPunch is one of various applications and services that assist with time tracking. There are various applications, software, and technologies on the internet that have streamlined the process of time tracking for employees while also reducing the strain on enterprises.
However, numerous organizations took the manual, non-automated way in the past, requiring each employee to manually input their needed time data, such as entry time, exit time, etc. Each month (or whenever the payment period is determined, depending on the firm), a suitable tabulation is created based on the time tracking analysis from the employee’s data, and the needed formalities are completed based on this.
How can time tracking software help companies?
Managing the employee’s time is an extremely important part of an organization. Since you denote the number of hours of your day to the company, you must state that you are productive throughout the day. Moreover, all companies have a dedicated paid leave schedule for every employee.
Taking the employee’s attendance in this form not only enables the company to keep track of how many days you are present or absent at work but also gives them the flexibility to determine whether leave should be granted or not. Apart from this, time tracking also helps in overtime compensation.
As per the laws regulated by the Government of the United States of America, any individual who works for more than 40 hours in a single week can become eligible to get compensation for the overtime that they have gone through. The hours of work can be easily tracked through dedicated time tracking software like BuddyPunch, which can easily calculate how long you have been working in the company for a week.
As laid down by the Fair Labor Standards Act, the overtime pay acknowledges every employee to get compensation as high as 1.5 times their base salary if they exceed the 40 hour limit at work every week.
Manual versus Automated Time Tracking – How do they fare?
As one can guess, manual time tracking is when each employee has to physically fill in their entry and exit times that are maintained in a record register. Given this, it can only be imagined what a long pile of notebooks will be generated for each passing employee over the years. It would be a tough task for the person in charge who will analyze the notebook’s data.
Automated time tracking is one in which, as one would expect, the process of time tracking does not need human intervention. The users, who are employees in this scenario, would simply need to register their fingerprints each time they log in or log off the system.
With the help of inbuilt mechanisms installed inside the time tracker, as soon as one enters their fingerprint, the system matches it with the database that has been updated with the fingerprint details of every employee. It then updates the status for every employee accordingly.
As can be seen, it not only eliminates all of the shortcomings of the manual mode, because the process is extremely quick, there is no time wasted, and because the machine does time management, there are no risks of human mistake, allowing the company to track employee time more efficiently.
How did COVID 19 disrupt the time tracking methodology?
It is now a fact that everyone knows, after spending close to two years in the pandemic era, that COVID spreads through physical contact. Naturally, considering a normal scenario wherein the company employees will perform their time tracking task – all employees have to use the same pen or the same notebook and fill in the required information.
Naturally, this is nothing but indirect physical contact because even if one among them is infected, in a way, all others are going to be affected similarly. Similarly, time tracking through fingerprints is also the same – all employees have to register their fingerprints at the same spot, which is nothing but indirect physical contact.
In cases like these, we have to rely on certain automated software because when the world goes digital, no one would be physically present at the office to fill in, so there has to be something that does the same job for them digitally, isn’t it? Adopting measures like these will only facilitate the spread of the virus, nothing else.
What can be the proper alternatives?
Now that it is established that in the COVID 19 era where everything has gone digital, there is also a need for a digital time tracking system that can do time tracking for you in digital mode, without you having to go to the office or organization physically.
One such digital software is BuddyPunch, the solution to all your time tracking needs. It has all the capabilities to track your on and off time on the system, for how long you have been active, and generate various reports and statistics with the help of data visualization.
