Summer can be a challenging time for logistics firms. Employees are likely to take summer holidays all at once over the months of July and August. Firms risk being short-staffed, at a time when demand is already high.
To ensure proccesses continue smoothly during the summer, operations managers need to be proactive and prepared. This blog post will explore how implementing a time and attendance system can help manage summer absences efficiently, saving your firm from potential chaos and disruption.
Understanding time and attendance systems
A time and attendance system is a tool that tracks employees' working hours, absences, and leave requests. These systems help businesses automate and streamline workforce management, ensuring accurate record-keeping and efficient operations.
By adopting this system, firms can gain a comprehensive view of their workforce, enabling better planning and resource allocation. This technology can transform how operations managers handle employee schedules, especially during the summer holidays.
Learning from previous seasons
One of the primary benefits of a time and attendance system is its ability to provide historical data. By analysing attendance patterns from previous summer seasons, your team can identify specific time frames when employees are most likely to take holidays. This data allows you to plan ahead and recruit additional staff to cover these periods, ensuring that your operations remain seamless. When it is easy to create shift schedules using automatic rostering, you can make sure that certain skills profiles are always represented in a rota – ensuring that your fleet or warehouse is never left operating with a less capable summer workforce. You should never have to sacrifice quality for the sake of the summer holidays!
By anticipating and addressing potential gaps, your firm can maintain service levels and meet customer demands effectively.
Enabling employee self-service
A significant advantage of time and attendance systems is the self-service feature that allows employees to manage their own leave requests. The summer sees a high volume of requests come through, which can bog down your team when managed in a legacy system. Rushed or overwhelmed staff make errors.
By empowering staff to book holidays themselves, you can streamline the entire process. Employees can check their holiday requirements and availability in real-time, reducing the burden on HR and operations during leave-heavy periods.
This autonomy leads to better planning and fewer disruptions. Employees are more likely to plan their holidays in advance, giving your operational leaders ample time to arrange replacements and adjust schedules accordingly.
Seamless integration with payroll systems
It can be harder to keep paying your employees efficiently and accurately during the summer, as the staff members in charge of payroll and HR are likely to be taking leave too! Add to this the fact that your part-time and irregular workers may also be requesting their holiday pay, requiring complex calculations, and it is easy to see why this time of year can place strain on your payroll function. A time and attendance system integrated with payroll ensures that there are no errors in salary calculations, even when multiple employees are on holiday.
It ensures that all employees are paid accurately and on time, maintaining their satisfaction and loyalty.
Summer absences in the logistics industry have the potential to create problems, but a time and attendance system smooths processes and introduces ease wherever possible. By empowering your employees to manage their own working lives, giving your HR teams the gift of foresight and ensuring a foundational accuracy, strong time and attendance software paves the way for summer success.
OneAdvanced’s Time & Attendance solution simplifies absence tracking and allows HR teams to easily record and manage staff leave. Our solution empowers you to proactively manage absence requests – not only holidays but sick days and other types of time off too. Find out more about how Time and Attendance can streamline your summer absence process – and beyond – here.
Read more about other summer challenges faced by logistics firms here.