3, 2, 1... signed in. How integrated clocking systems improve your internal culture

Our partnership between iTrent and Grosvenor Technology clocks enables businesses to create a positive company culture, focusing on giving your employees work/life balance and your payroll teams streamlined payroll processes.

Prevent long hours and burnout

Working long hours can often lead to burnout and a disengaged workforce. Burnout is the state of physical and emotional exhaustion that occurs from long-term job stress or when you work in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time.

Common signs of burnout include:

• Feeling overwhelmed
• Feeling detached or alone in the world
• Feeling tired or drained most of the time
• Having a negative outlook
• Procrastinating
• Self-doubt
• Feeling helpless, trapped, or defeated

In a study by Mental Health UK and YouGov, 68% of adults mistakenly identified these symptoms as anxiety, which can cause employees feeling like this to further doubt themselves. In turn, this has caused 1 in 5 workers to feel unable to manage pressure and stress at work.

By introducing an integrated clocking system into your workplace, you can create a positive culture of trust, by actively monitoring time and attendance. Your clocking system can help identify those who are overworking to notify their managers. Support can be provided to ensure they meet their duties during their contractual hours, whether that’s reassessing priorities or sharing the workload with other team members. Enforcing the importance of a positive work/life balance can help to increase levels of efficiency and productivity whilst lowering levels of absence, sickness, and most importantly stress.

Create a fair working environment

Businesses operating across multiple sites or on a large scale can often be left in the dark about the hours an employee has worked, and it can create an unfair working environment. For example, one employee could always turn up late, have long lunches and many coffee breaks whilst another might turn up on time, work throughout the shift, take their allocated lunch break, and clock out, yet they both get paid the same. A company operating this way will create a disengaged workforce and over time, employees will fail to see the point of trying their best. 

By implementing an integrated clocking system, it allows managers to see if their employees are in the building when they said they were, or if an employee took an extra-long lunch or various unscheduled breaks throughout the day that would affect the amount of hours they’ve worked.

You can also configure rules to support your workforce. For example, you can implement a rule so when an employee clocks in and out within 10 minutes of their shift, the hours get automatically sent to iTrent to be processed in the next payroll run, saving managers and payroll teams time through automation. However, the rules can also be configured to flag anyone breaking workplace rules. If an employee repeatedly clocks in late, this will be flagged to the employee’s manager for approval before it can be processed by iTrent. Managers can then take the necessary action needed.

Within some industries buddy clocking is a big issue, meaning you could end up paying someone for a full day’s work who hasn’t turned up, increasing your labour costs. Clocking systems have a facial recognition feature, using face graphs to ensure that the employee is clocking in, in person and it’s not a picture trying to be used. This reduces the risk of buddy clocking, saving your labour costs.

For organisations that work in office and off-site, it can be even harder to know if your off-site employees are being paid accurately, especially with many organisations allowing flexible working hours. iTrent’s digital clock uses geo-location, so you know where your employees are when they clock in and out, decreasing the risk of time theft.

An integrated clocking system ensures you pay your employees for the number of hours they have worked with physical records to use as evidence, which creates a fair working environment, decreases disputes, improves employee engagement and your company culture.