How to Manage Employee Attendance (Free Attendance Template)

What is employee attendance?

Employee attendance is the presence of your employees at their designated worksite during their required work hours. In a retail store, for example, employee attendance means an employee shows up for and fully works their scheduled shift for the day. For remote desk jobs, it could mean an employee signs on at 9 a.m. and signs off at 5 p.m. every weekday.

If an employee shows up for their scheduled workday, whether in person or virtually, they’ve “attended.” If they don’t show up, they have missed the workday, and you’ll have to decide whether it is an excused or unexcused absence.

How to manage employee attendance

Proper employee attendance management procedures are necessary to track who is working and when and to avoid issues such as time theft and understaffing.

To manage employee attendance at your business, we recommend following these best practices. 

• Monitor attendance. To start managing your employees’ attendance, set up a structure for monitoring it. Consider purchasing traditional time clocks, biometric time clocks or other time-tracking devices that capture when workers clock in and out.
• Create attendance policies. A thorough attendance policy in your employee handbook should tell employees your company’s attendance expectations and how to request vacation time or take sick leave. Your policy should state how much of each leave type team members receive. It should also explain the consequences of excessive absences or other policy deviations.
• Determine why employees are absent. An employee who is often in conflict with a colleague may stop showing up to work. So might overworked employees or those with life circumstances protected under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Before you take action, always ask why an employee is skipping work. This gives you and the employee a chance to address the issue together.

• Give attendance awards. Rewards for excellent attendance may incentivize your employees to show up and do better work. Cash bonuses, “employee of the month” programs and extra paid time off for good attendance are all great incentives.
• Train supervisors well. If your company has several department heads who manage their own employees, you should train these supervisors to spot and handle attendance issues. Encourage your leaders to track and document absences, and discuss how they should approach employees about repeated absences.
• Allow flexibility. Though perhaps not possible for customer-facing hourly employees, flexible work arrangements can bolster employee attendance. If you need 40 hours of weekly remote work from your employees but don’t care when during the week it gets done, state that in your company attendance policy. Employees who set their own schedules, even seemingly bizarre ones, are often more productive. [Read related article: How to Manage a Remote Workforce]
• Use time and attendance software. Time and attendance software and other remote work tools make the employee attendance management approaches above much easier to execute. As you choose time and attendance software, look for solutions with extensive and accurate time-tracking abilities, user-friendliness and ample integrations. Start your search by considering our picks for the best time and attendance software.

Importance of tracking employee attendance

Below, we highlight the biggest reasons why it’s important for businesses to manage employee attendance.

Time theft

Proper employee attendance management ensures your employees aren’t engaging in time theft, which is when staffers mislead you about when they’re working and your company pays them for hours they didn’t actually work. With the right monitoring practices, you ensure that your team members are working when they say they are. 

Time theft is more common among hourly employees, since they can fudge their numbers with time clock rounding depending on the system used. But it also happens with salaried employees; salaried team members who use the internet for personal matters during work hours are technically stealing your time as well. However, if your employees set their own hours or you pay them a flat salary regardless of how much time their work takes them, time theft may not be an issue as long as their productivity and performance are consistent.

Overtime pay

Without solid employee attendance tracking, you may not pay your staff members accurately. Hourly employees are nonexempt from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), so you must give them overtime pay. Both you and these employees must track the hours they work, and you must pay time and a half for all time they work beyond 40 hours in a workweek. For example, if an employee who makes $20 an hour works 45 hours during a workweek, you must pay them $30 (their usual $20 wage multiplied by 1.5) for each of those final five hours. Some of the best time and attendance software do these overtime calculations for you.

Salaried professionals are exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions, which is one reason why tracking attendance often matters more for hourly workers than salaried employees. Learn more in this guide to exempt employees.

Absenteeism

Tracking employee attendance can reveal patterns of behavior, such as certain workers regularly not showing up for their shifts. This repeated missing of shifts is known as absenteeism, and it can have a substantial impact on your business operations. A repeatedly absent employee can stretch your team thin, reducing the quality of your services. 

In cases where you accidentally still pay absent employees, absenteeism can become time theft and hurt your company financially. However, monitoring attendance and incorporating time tracking into your payroll practices can help stop absenteeism problems before they worsen and ensure you pay team members only for the hours they truly worked.

Customer experience

Shift scheduling and attendance management are especially important for customer-facing roles, such as retail associates, restaurant servers and call center agents. When you track employee attendance, you can ensure you have enough staff on hand to provide the experience your customers deserve. As a result, customers won’t feel rushed or neglected and will be more likely to patronize your business again.

Production process

In manufacturing plants, assembly-line employees are often crucial for even heavily automated processes. For example, if the employee on your dessert production company’s cake assembly line isn’t around to smooth out the icing, you’ll be left with a massive gap in your production process. This absence could lead to a backlog that disrupts your whole supply chain. You must know who is working when and be able to make adjustments accordingly.

Challenges of managing employee attendance

Below are some of the challenges you’re likely to encounter with employee attendance. These are yet more reasons why time tracking is vital and why you should follow the best practices for attendance management outlined above.

• Late arrivals and early departures: Let’s say you’ve scheduled an employee to handle the day’s first customers when your storefront opens at 9 a.m. If that employee arrives even a few minutes late, there might not be someone present to help your patrons. These customers might go elsewhere, sending would-be revenue to a competitor.
• Late starts and early ends to the workweek: Even if you love running your business, you probably understand why so many people hate Mondays. That said, you might not feel a ton of sympathy for an employee who comes in excessively late at the start of the workweek. The same goes for a worker who always takes off early on Friday afternoons. Both occurrences are quite common at all kinds of small businesses.
• Excessive breaks: No one should have to work a full eight-hour shift in one go, but an employee whose breaks are too long or too frequent can disrupt your operations. You don’t need to scold an employee for returning a minute or two later than planned, but you should make sure another employee is available whenever a staff member is on a meal or rest break.
• Unexpected absences: At the end of the day, employees are still people with lives and needs outside of work. They might fall ill, have family emergencies or just need mental health days. You shouldn’t hesitate to grant them time off for these occasions, but you also need to fill the gaps that these employees’ absences leave.
• No improvement after warnings: Although absenteeism may be one of the most common reasons for employee discipline, you shouldn’t jump straight from observing a problem to acting on it in the most severe way. You’ll want to give the team member a kind-but-firm warning or two — but remember that warnings don’t always lead to change. In that case, termination may be warranted.
• New attendance problems after warnings: Not everyone you hire will be happy at work. These employees may show up late or leave early, and if you warn them about one type of absenteeism, their absenteeism could change form. For example, if you scold an unhappy employee for failing to show up on time, they could start leaving early instead.
• Sick employees: A survey by MagnifyMoney found that 45 percent of workers have gone to work sick due to a lack of paid time off. The short-term absence of an ill employee is certainly better than your whole team catching that person’s illness and calling in sick, but you still may need to juggle schedules.

Employee attendance template

To get started with proper employee attendance management, you can download and use Business News Daily’s free template. 

Our template includes an attendance-tracking framework for each month and a list of all U.S. public holidays. It is available as a Google Doc, which makes it easy to copy and customize it or download it as another file type. 

Download the template, and complete the information in each tab. First, update the public holidays observed by your company, including their dates for the current year. Then, work through the tabs for each month, adding the necessary employee information. Under each date, enter the total number of hours each team member worked, or use the key to add things like “H” for holiday or “ST” for sick time. Finally, total the hours for each employee’s row and make any notes.

By looking at the information you record, you may notice patterns, such as excessive no-shows by one employee, and can take corrective action.

Make it easy to manage employee attendance

With our employee attendance template and the employee attendance management strategies we’ve outlined in mind, you should be able to reduce your team’s absenteeism and ensure your company is operating at its full capacity. Taking the proper steps to manage attendance accurately and fairly helps eliminate business risks and build more productive teams. For a more streamlined process, consider using high-quality time and attendance software, which can automate many tasks related to time tracking and improve shift planning.

Casey Conway contributed to this article.