Managing Attendance Policies |
CNY Centro, Inc. had been using Vista Time for approximately a year when we decided that we needed a better way to track our employees’ attendance points. As part of our collective bargaining agreement we have an attendance policy which includes progressive discipline based on the number of attendance points an employee receives. We took a look at the points tracking system that is offered through Vista Time and decided that it would fit our needs.
The first thing that I had to do was clarify our attendance policy. I know that it sounds like it should be self-explanatory but in our case it wasn’t. I needed to better understand what was considered an absence. I found, for example, that a full day out of work would be considered an absence. Also, leaving before the employee had completed 4 hours of work would also be considered an absence. With some of the absences defined we could then set up our points policies.
The set-up of the policies was very easy once the above information was clarified. See the below screen shot:
We ended up having two point policies. One would be for absences and one for tardiness. I set up the policies based on the definitions in our collective bargaining agreement. In our case once an employee reaches their 8th occurrence the progressive discipline begins. We decided to have an e-mail sent to a designated person once an employee had reached their 8th occurrence. There are other notification options available. You can choose the one that works best for your organization. Within that e-mail we attached a copy of the letter that would be used to inform the employee that they had reached their 8th occurrence.
You are able to adjust the point balance as you see fit. If the employer decides to excuse a specific point they can adjust it to zero and add a comment to that occurrence to explain why it was excused.
The most important piece to setting up your point tracking system is making sure that all your data is correct. If the historical data is incorrect, then your point tracking system is going to be incorrect. I always go back to the old saying “garbage in garbage out.” Within Vista Time, you are able to query the data for any time period you require. Vista Time has set up several pre-set time periods to make it easier to look up the information. These include one month, three months, six months, nine months and one year.
Our other policy was set up to track tardiness. It is set up in a similar fashion as the absence policy. Whenever someone shows up as being tardy an e-mail is sent out to the designated person. The employer determines what is considered tardy. In our case one minute late is considered tardy.
Managing attendance has sure gotten a lot easier with these tools in place.
Linda Montroy
HR Manager
Central New York Regional Transportation
lmontroy@centro.org