Managing the impact of staff absence on your operational efficiency

Winter has always presented a challenge for businesses in terms of staff shortages due to colds and flu. The widely reported dramatic increase in the number of sickness days taken recently because of the Delta and Omicron variants has, however, further underscored the need for businesses to upgrade their workforce management systems to ensure they can manage the impact of absences in real-time.

Fortunately, Synel’s fully customisable Synergy T&A software comes with a wide range of functionality, which enables business managers to keep on top of which employees are absent from work and who are available to replace them at short notice to complete specific tasks. In this respect, Synergy T&A, which sits at the heart of Synel’s Synergy Workforce management software platform, can help users maintain operational efficiency by making best use of available human resources and avoid reputational damage by being able to complete projects or fulfil orders on time. It can also assist in controlling costs by being able to accurately manage sick pay.

Synergy T&A’s Presence Information Panel provides users with immediate awareness and a holistic overview of who is available for work and who is absent, via an intuitive dashboard. An icon for each employees’ personnel record is colour coded to reflect their current status, e.g. green for present/at work and red for absent.

Absence Management

Synergy T&A’s Absence Management feature allows businesses to manage employee absence and annual leave with complete, real-time visibility and by providing a clear understanding of which employee is expected to report for work on a particular day and time. Absence Management can be used with the Presence Information Panel to present absence related data in real time and this can be broken down by department, team or location to improve workforce capacity and efficiency.

With Absence Management being part of Synel’s Time and Attendance solution, your business can control and monitor absences via Synel’s software as a service (SaaS) based Workforce Management product suite, or via the mobile application to give you access from anywhere in the world.

With Absence Management, you’ll have access to an Absence Request/Authorisation module, which allows you to effortless receive requests and approve absences from any web or mobile device. You can also easily access and download individual time sheets and reports specific to customisable criteria. A report could, for example, assist in spotting patterns of absence and, as such, help identify employees who are offending sickness leave entitlements.

Advanced Scheduling

Based on their pre-defined skills and qualifications, Synergy T&A’s advanced scheduling feature enables you to assign employees to jobs which absent employees were responsible for.

Payroll

Synel T&A can easily be integrated with a wide range of popular third-party accounting, payroll, CRM, ERP/MRP and HR systems, enabling the captured data to be easily exported for payroll processing or HR management purposes. Staff absences can be marked so that the appropriate sickness pay is applied as Synergy T&A allows you to set predefined pay rules, e.g. basic rate, sickness rate, holiday pay, etc.

Hybrid and flexitime working

With more and more employees working part-time or flexitime from home or other remote locations, it is not surprising that many businesses, (and particularly those which employ many people), might find it a challenge to monitor and manage absences.

Synergy T&A can be easily customised to meet the needs of businesses that may have a varying mix of employees who are spread across office and remote locations, as well as those who are ‘on the road’, working full time from home, or just for some of their working week. In this respect, Synergy T&A provides employees with the option to clock in and out with a physical device on one day and via a mobile App on another day, with the data being processed in real-time in the same way.

Most importantly, the scalable Synergy T&A solution has been specifically designed to help manage a workforce which includes those who have the freedom to work their contracted hours outside the 9 to 5 norm. Fully customisable work-rule templates provide the ability to capture employee’s work time related data regardless of their individual shift patterns, whilst a set of rules relating to the pay rates for standard working hours, nighttime shifts, bank holidays and weekends, can be based on the templates relevant to individual employees.

Invest wisely with Synel

From small factories and warehouses employing just a few people, through to university campuses, healthcare facilities, retail stores and large office complexes, Synel provides customisable, scalable and easy to use systems which will help you monitor and identify opportunities to increase productivity, regardless of whether your employees are office-based, working from home, or are out in the field.

Synel’s suite of workforce management software enables businesses to effectively manage the time and efficiency of employees from clocking in and out, through to scheduling and productivity planning, analysis and management.

Synergy Workforce also provides the opportunity for our clients to take advantage of a wide range of optional workforce activity modules, which can be used on-site or remotely by field-based employees. These include shift scheduling, cashless catering, and time costing, as well as document management, expenses management and visitor management.

With Synergy T&A, there could perhaps not be a better time for you to gain a greater understanding of the effectiveness of your workforce and make it so much easier to manage staff shortages, without cumbersome paperwork trails.

To find out more on how you can do so, please call Synel UK on 0208 900 9991 or email sales@syneluk.com