Consistency
The HR team at Aunt Bessie's relies on the accuracy of the Kronos absence information
in order to manage its employees in a fair and consistent manner. Back
to work interviews are prompted by an employee returning to work and clocking
in after a period of absence, and disciplinary proceedings are started
once an employee has three instances of unauthorised absence in a 52 week
period. Carol Fletcher explains, “The management of employees would
be considerably more difficult without the automated prompts we receive
from Kronos. There’s also no arguing with the accuracy of the Kronos
data and in disciplinary cases we’re able to pinpoint every instance
of absence over any given period of time.”
Rewarding good attendance
Rewarding good attendance has also become easier to manage at Aunt Bessie's.
Kronos identifies employees with under 5% absence who are then eligible
to share a quarterly share scheme, where savings are shared amongst qualifying
employees. Employees with 100% attendance during the year are entered
into a draw where one employee receives a £1,000 bonus and an additional
week’s holiday. “Rewarding absence is much more time consuming
when you have to wade through 500 attendance records and manually work
out the percentages,” comments Carol Fletcher. “There’s
also less chance with automated timekeeping that you’ll make a mistake,
which can be very demoralising when you’re trying to reward employees.”
Looking to the future
There’s always room to improve the management of absence and Aunt Bessie's
continues to look for ways to do so. The company already has Kronos Workforce
Attendance™ which brings a number of additional benefits, such as
the details behind every absence stored in the system and any disciplinary
actions taken.
Aunt Bessie's Foods are also in the process of integrating the company’s
Absence Line with Kronos. Employees currently call into an automated voice
prompted absence phone line if they are going to be away from work. Aunt Bessie's
and Kronos are working together to allow the system to populate Kronos
with one of seventy or so absence codes - removing the need to re-key
the reason for absence codes from one system to the other, therefore eliminating
duplication and potential errors.
