One of the most important ‘Best Practices’ in the timekeeping arena is the separation of pay and attendance policies across the timecard. Generally this means that what you do as far as paying the employee is isolated from what you wish to set as tardy or no-show attendance thresholds. A simple example of this would be rounding an employee’s punch back to the hour if it is up to 7min after but still being able to track every time they are late as part of a stricter attendance policy – say 1 minute for tardiness. Legally speaking, companies have to pay people for the time they work (rounding is allowed if it averages out or favors the employee) but they need to counsel and be able to terminate employees in cases of chronic tardiness or absenteeism.
Of course it doesn’t stop there. Kronos’s Workforce Attendance Module (WAM) is very good at tracking not only complicated occurrence and point-based policies but also helps tremendously in the workflow associated with notifying managers, producing warning letters, and tracking management’s obligations in enforcing what can be numerous policies from different unions and groups within the same departments. Typically, if an employer doesn’t consistently track and follow through on all the occurrences based on the system of record and according to the policy than they can easily be challenged on any case they wish to prosecute. In short, do it right or don’t do it all.
Companies who have not exactly been doing it right, however, are not exactly out of the woods once they configure the attendance module with all their triggers and policies. This is the ‘beginning balance’ problem of rolling out this module when some employees already have occurrences that the company does not wish to reset to zero. While you can simply key in the historical occurrence data (or even just a beginning balance of each type of offense) you have to make sure these starting points meet your evidentiary criteria for prosecuting cases—particularly where unions are involved. Your new attendance module might be unimpeachable on the 5th and final-allowed tardiness but if you can’t back up the first one (because it pre-dated the implementation of the module) then perhaps the employee has only four…or three.
This, of course, is no fault of the attendance module—just the GIGO principle showing itself again. What this means for a company implementing an existing policy/occurrence portfolio onto WAM is that any historical data used to start things off must be vetted as sufficient to prosecute before going live. This doesn’t mean you have to re-create all the trigger elements that caused the occurrence within Kronos—in fact, this is often technically impossible because of closed period and other limitations. It does mean that you may have to maintain some other legacy systems of record (eg: spreadsheets, email, paper notes!) outside Kronos until the reset periods expire and Kronos can fully be the system of record for tracking time, dispositioning excused/unexcused events, and processing the workflow associated with issuing warning letters, counseling sessions and other policy required activities.
Krono’s Workforce Attendance Module does some amazing things but cleaning up your historical data is not one of them.
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