Major airlines’ recent financial struggles have reverberated throughout the ground support industry, driving businesses to seek new ways to increase organizational efficiencies and profitability. Although technology has always been an avenue towards these goals, implementing new technologies can be time-consuming and expensive. The good news is that ground support businesses with little time or money to spare can still realize large gains by stretching existing technologies and infrastructure.
Different ground support businesses have different technologies at their disposal, but nearly all of these organizations utilize time and attendance software to track employees’ hours for payroll. Employees enter time punches or total hours worked using electronic time clocks, handheld devices or software interfaces. The time and attendance software applies business rules to calculate each employee’s total pay period hours.
While tracking employee hours for payroll is a standard functionality, many of today’s time and attendance systems are capable of far more complex functions that can help the ground support business tackle larger problems. Some of them are “out of the box;” others may require additional software or custom reports. Two examples of advanced time and attendance functions that can make the business more efficient—and ultimately more profitable—are integrated workforce scheduling and employee incentive programs.
INTEGRATING TIME AND ATTENDANCE WITH WORKFORCE SCHEDULING
Scheduling employees can be a headache for ground support operations that juggle union regulations, shifting workloads and other workplace variables. Although most time and attendance systems include a scheduling component, these software modules often fall short of the complex scheduling requirements of ground support businesses. Indeed, businesses with complex scheduling processes typically use a separate workforce scheduling application that takes into consideration parameters such as seniority, skill levels and demand, while also allowing employees to bid on specific jobs or shifts.
The drawback of stand-alone workforce scheduling systems is that they are not linked to the organization’s time and attendance software. As a result, supervisors must turn to two different software systems in order to compare employees’ schedules to what actually happened on any given day. This makes it extremely difficult to accurately track exceptions such as instances of tardiness, absence and abuse of break policies. Separate data sets also make it difficult to adjust schedules in the middle of a pay period in order to prevent employees from reaching weekly overtime situations.
Although combining employee schedules with time and attendance data may require custom reports or an additional software module to integrate the two systems, the benefit of linking the systems is that supervisors are able to more actively manage the workforce. Employees can be disciplined or rewarded based on adherence to attendance policies and schedule adjustments can easily be made based on current time and attendance data. Best of all, supervisors can take action at any time rather than waiting for end-of-pay-period reports. This increases employee productivity, reduces labor costs and helps supervisors retain top-performing employees.
THE NEXT STEP: AUTOMATING INCENTIVE PROGRAMS
Integrating workforce schedules with time and attendance data enables supervisors to better monitor employee behavior and manage weekly labor costs, but the catch is that supervisors must periodically review and act upon the data. For example, a company policy might state that employees cannot be tardy more than five times per year, but it’s up to the company’s supervisors to penalize employees who are repeatedly tardy and reward those who are not. The solution to the problem of human intervention is to automate the incentive program.
Automated incentive programs typically function by assigning a balance of points to each employee and then tracking those point balances over a set period of time such as a calendar year. When an employee breaks an attendance policy—by arriving late or taking a long lunch, for example—he or she automatically receives a demerit point that is applied against the point balance. The incentive program alerts supervisors when employees accumulate enough demerit points to trigger penalties, such as a warning or even termination. Conversely, employees who do not receive demerit points are automatically rewarded with extra paid-time-off hours or a cash bonus.
Automating your company’s incentive program may involve developing a custom report or software program or purchasing one of the incentive management programs that time and attendance software vendors are increasingly offering as add-on modules. Regardless of how it’s accomplished, ground support businesses that automate their incentive programs benefit from improved morale and productivity, better retention of top-performing employees and decreased liability in employment termination situations.
SUMMING IT UP
In today’s economy it’s essential for businesses to seek competitive advantages wherever possible, but time and money constraints make it difficult to implement expensive new technologies. However, businesses can realize significant gains by seeking new applications from existing technology such as time and attendance software systems. Ground support businesses that find innovative ways to leverage existing technology will be positioned to improve organizational efficiency and profitability without breaking the bank.
