tensor_tandauk, Author at Time and Attendance Southwest

New retail units at Cribbs Causeway

1st November 2019 12:07 pm Leave a Comment

The Mall at Cribbs Causeway has signed with two new retailers to occupy units.

The two companies are Space NK, a London beauty shop, and All Good Things, which sells fashion labels. This will be All The Good Things’ first physical unit.

Scott Linard, director of Asset Management at M&G Real Estate said on behalf of the joint owners: "Both All Good Things and Space NK will complement the existing fashion and beauty offering here at The Mall Cribbs Causeway – bolstering our line-up of premium brands.

"These latest signings are further testament to our curated tenant mix approach, which has also seen recent additions, Cornish clothing brand Seasalt and The White Company, join our evolving shopper offer.

“We are thrilled All Good Things has opted to open its first store in this centre – it clearly sees huge potential in the Mall at Cribbs Causeway, mirroring its position as the leading shopping destination for the South West region."

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Accurate clocking in and out is particularly important in the retail industry. While most businesses have identified this and purchased automated time and attendance clocking stations, a disturbing number still trust in old-fashioned paper timesheets.

These are easy for employees to make mistakes on, or to deliberately enter false information into, and they waste the time of your payroll staff who have to decipher everyone’s handwriting on a weekly basis.

An automated system records everyone as they come in and out, so there is no more option for your employees to pretend they did overtime. For extra security, you should opt for a biometric clock in so that employees can’t swap time cards amongst themselves anymore.

You can’t swap, or indeed lose, your biometric data!

There are many different types of biometrics and we offer two affordable and reliable options: fingerprint scanning and hand geometry scanning.

Fingerprint scanning converts fingerprints into a unique code (rather than an unnecessary copy of the print itself), and hand scanning verifies the employee based on the size and shape of their hand.

Timber group aims to minimise employees’ travel time

10th October 2019 4:08 pm Leave a Comment

Premier Forest Group, a timber company, has opened a new office in Weston super Mare, North Somerset.

This is its eighth UK premises; the others are located in Birmingham, Berkshire, Crumlin, Doncaster, Cornwall and Haverfordwest, plus offices in Ireland.

The company is involved in the importation, distribution, sawmilling and processing of timber and timber-based products. The aim of the office is to reduce travel time for staff living in the south west, and thus free up more time for meeting clients.

Managing director Joe Walker said: "Our staff and customers are the lifeblood of the business. We place great value on the loyal and committed team we have built here and aim to retain that, while continuing to service our clients in as efficient a way as possible."

Terry Edgell, group chief executive of Premier Forest Group, said: "This latest expansion is further testament to our commitment to providing the best service possible to our clients and the best facilities for our dedicated staff.

"The business has gone from strength to strength, particularly over this most recent period, and we are on track to record £10-£15m growth for the coming financial year. Being prepared and equipped for further uptake in business is key to our strategy."

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Many office-based businesses don’t see the point in using a time and attendance system, but we know differently.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that all companies need to measure how long their employees in the EU are working for in a day, in order to properly adhere to working time regulations. We can provide multiple different language packs, to help you fulfil this requirement if you have employees over on the Continent.

As well as legal requirements, there are many more sound business reasons to gather and use attendance data. We know from experience that companies find the data we can offer them very useful in building up a bigger picture of their employees’ punctuality and productivity.

For example, HR staff can very easily view and create reports about the absence or lateness occurrences for every single employee in the company. This could give them advance warning about morale problems in individual departments, or allow them to spot who generally rings in sick on a Monday or Friday.

Most importantly for many companies, our time and attendance software is likely to help you significantly increase your payroll processing speed if you currently still use a manual system like paper timesheets.

Our products are available to small business of all sizes.

If you rent your premises, as most businesses do and cannot install any extra wiring, your employees can use our web-based attendance recording rather than our physical terminals.

This is called the Self Service Module (SSM), and it allows employees to clock in and out using either a browser version, or a mobile phone app. They can also request holiday using this app, which eliminates the need for cumbersome paper holiday forms.

New designer outlet planned for Gloucestershire

13th September 2019 11:04 am Leave a Comment

A new designer outlet village in Gloucestershire has revealed its plans.

“Designer Outlet Cotswolds” aims to be located on junction 9 of the M5. The plans consist of 90 units, restaurants and cafes.

Cheltenham-based developer Robert Hitchins Ltd and ROS Retail Outlet Shopping have submitted the plans.

Thomas Reichenauer, co-founder and managing director of ROS Retail Outlet Shopping, said: "With our specialism in designer outlets across Europe, and our in-depth knowledge of different markets, we see tremendous potential for the UK retail sector.

"This is especially true for outlet shopping which has been bucking trends in the UK for several years generating significant interest amongst top brands and customers in the concept.

"Having been founded in 2011, we’re a young company but with a team that brings experience, expertise and track-record built up over many years."

Simon Tothill, property and development director of Robert Hitchins Ltd, added: "Designer Outlet Cotswolds will be an eye-catching development reflecting the architecture and materials of the historic towns and villages of the Cotswolds.

"We’ll be creating a state-of-the-art retail destination with contemporary and adaptable units suited to the needs of modern shopping and dining."

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As companies move into the new retail park, they will need to make sure that their buildings are fully suitable for their requirements.

Many retail establishments still rely on employees to fill in handwritten timesheets stating their hours worked. Not only does this run the risk of being inaccurate thanks to employees’ forgetfulness, or worse, deliberate attempts to commit wage fraud, but it can also be a massive drain on your office and payroll staff who have to approve and type up all the information.

A workforce management system from Time and Attendance South West would bring your attendance systems up-to-date and reduce workloads considerably.

For example, managers would no longer need to approve every single timesheet every single week or month, and accounts staff would no longer need to laboriously type up the timesheets to enter them into the payroll system.

Instead, the information would be gathered in real-time and stored in an easy to use centralised system, where it can be checked by supervisors for validity, exported to payroll systems such as Sagepay, or made into reports using our report wizard and advanced report creating facility.

All the staff would need to do is clock in and out using one of our terminals, with either a smartcard or a biometric measurement (fingers or hands). If a physical clocking terminal is not suitable for your premises (for example if you rent and cannot change the wiring) then we can also offer our online/mobile app Self Service Module.

Please get in touch for more information, or to discuss a quote!

Sickness absences must be tracked accurately

4th September 2019 11:23 am Leave a Comment

Accurate monitoring of sickness absences is vital in any workplace. This means something more trackable than a phone-call, or an email to their line manager.

Having reliable data allows employers to recognise any developing patterns, or unbalanced amounts of sickness absences.

It is important not to immediately jump to negative conclusions if you discover that employees are taking a larger number of sickness absences than you or your organisation consider acceptable.

There may be many reasons why your employees are taking days off sick, and if you conduct good return to work interviews and have a safe environment, you and your employee may be able to work together to reduce any problem absences and increase their productivity and happiness in the workplace.

It is up to you as a business to set the threshold for sickness absences, but the Bradford Index, which is built into our software, can help you to do so by assigning absences values. Frequent shorter absences accumulate a high score than one longer absence, rather than scoring everything day-by-day and penalising those on long-term sick leave.

In 2017, UK government statistics showed that employees took the equivalent of just over 4 days off. The sickness absence rate (the proportion of working hours taken as sickness absence) for the private sector was 1.7% and 2.6% for the public sector (public sector health workers had the highest rates at 3.3%.)

Businesses can give negative reinforcement for sick days, such as not having company sick pay, or offer positive incentives such as extra holiday time or other perks. These strategies can be effective but you should pay attention that you don’t start suffering from presenteeism, which is when people turn up for work even when they shouldn’t, and is associated with high employee stress levels and low productivity. This is more difficult for employers to detect than absences.

Obviously, no business can eradicate sickness absences, nor, as the linked information on presenteeism shows, should you want to! But with reliable data, honest communication with employees and a fair sickness policy, you can minimise the damage sickness absences do to your business.

Do you have a reliable method of recording attendance?

27th August 2019 8:12 am Leave a Comment

The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU member states must ensure their employers set up:

“an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured.”

(from paragraph 60 of the provisional judgement, found here).

Without clear time and attendance data, it is very difficult for employees to prove whether or not they are being forced to work hours which would violate EU health and safety directives such as:

‘Member States shall take the measures necessary to ensure that every worker is entitled to a minimum daily rest period of 11 consecutive hours per 24-hour period’

and

‘Member States shall take the measures necessary to ensure that, per each seven-day period, every worker is entitled to a minimum uninterrupted rest period of 24 hours plus the 11 hours’ daily rest referred to in Article 3.’

(from the Directive 89/391/EEC – OSH "Framework Directive", found here)

Many companies will be unhappy with this ruling. Here are a few objections:

My company is tiny. Do I still need this? How can I afford this?

Yes, all companies who employ staff, no matter what the size, will need to pay heed to this announcement.

Most time and attendance companies are very familiar with the needs of small and micro-businesses, and can tailor their programmes and pricing accordingly. There are many different types of systems available, including mobile-based.

Our Win.TA.NET – Start Edition provides time and attendance management for any company with up to 50 employees.

My staff can use phone/email records to prove when they were working – shouldn’t this count instead?

A time and attendance system is faster, more accurate and more reliable than trying to cobble together a patchwork of different types of records to prove your case. Clock in at the start, clock out when you’re done. Quick and easy.

With our flagship Win.TA system, the clocking data is immediately available on the system for exporting or reporting.

All/some of my staff work remotely. How does this fit with time and attendance requirements?

Certain industries, such as sales, healthcare and transportation will be very concerned about this point. Worry not; as mentioned above, many time and attendance companies have made provisions for remote workers in their products.

For example, our Self Service Module (SSM) allows employees to clock in and out using their browser, along with many other functions, and themobile app even includes GPS in the data collected. This enables your employees to accurately clock-in wherever they are.

My staff have salaries and work at desks. Why do I need to monitor their working time so closely?

It is a common misconception that clocking in and out is only necessary for employees who are paid by the hour, or who work in blue-collar industries which reply on physical production.

The ECJ considers it necessary as a health and safety matter, to ensure that adequate rest is being taken. Obviously, that is still very important for office workers.

There are also many other ways in which all office environments can make use of attendance data.

For example, tracking productivity. HR departments can also find having easy access to computerised attendance data very helpful for absence management.

The UK is likely to be leaving the EU. Does this still apply?

Whether this will apply to UK workers remains to be seen.

Any UK company which has employees working in an EU country will need to comply with the working time measurement requirements for those workers.

Our time and attendance system can be purchased with multiple different language packs installed, enabling you to unambiguously communicate clocking requirements and processes to your employees in their native language.

Please get in touch with us for further details about this, or any point regarding time and attendance systems covered in this article.

Technology is necessary for effective remote working

20th August 2019 10:58 am Leave a Comment

More and more workplaces are needing to grapple with the additional needs of remote workers, as that option becomes steadily more popular. Over the last ten years, the number of UK workers moving into remote working positions has increased by almost 250,000 according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

This has prompted a shift in the way that many employers view the practise of remote working. It has the potential to reduce the costs of running an office building, allows you to recruit from a wider pool of employees and can lead to higher staff morale.

However, many employers are still worried that the productivity of remote workers will suffer from lack of direct monitoring. Not only does technology today allow managers to watch their remote employees through webcams if they so wish, but this opinion demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of remote working.

The practise is not simply an excuse to be at home. It is a move to a different workplace, and if an employee has properly planned for that shift, there should be no drop in productivity. An inflexible employer who assumes that all remote workers are looking for an excuse to shirk work is missing out on a valuable rise in employee motivation.

As mentioned above, technology is essential for productive remote working. At minimum, workers need a reliable, real-time way to communicate with their office-based coworkers, and access to any files necessary. There are many different ways for employers to track productivity if they wish to, ranging from project management software like Trello to web-cam apps for direct check-ins.

Our time and attendance system can help you verify your employees’ working times, thanks to our Self Service Module. This browser or mobile-app based software allows employees to clock in and out, and also to sign themselves on and off jobs. The mobile version also collects GPS information, so that whereabouts can be confirmed.

This information is sent to the central system, so that you can run reports on it and otherwise make use of it. If employees are in areas of low signal, the data will queue to be submitted later.

Stress-free holiday booking procedures

8th August 2019 3:53 pm Leave a Comment

With the summer holiday season well and truly approaching, your company might already have fallen foul of the many problems caused by out-of-date and inefficient holiday booking procedures.

A common problem from inexperienced companies without a specialised HR and accounts system is problems working out what the holiday entitlement is for their employees.

The statutory minimum entitlement for annual leave, except for staff who work irregular hours, is 5.6 weeks. This is calculated using their usual working week, so for example someone working 5 days a week needs to be allotted at least 28 days. A part-time employee who works 3 days a week will need at least 16.8 days of holiday.

Even if your department is armed with this information, it is all too easy for a typo to result in an incorrect annual leave allotment, while a computer system will sort this automatically.

You may well wish to give employees more than the statutory minimum; for example, if you wish to reward loyalty with yearly increases in entitlement. (It is widely considered unwise to give extra holiday days to one or two employees without a very clear transparent structure for how all employees can similarly earn more days.)

Software can come in handy here to automatically update employees’ records with their new extra day. Otherwise, there is a clear risk of the extra day getting overlooked thanks to administrative burdens and backlogs until the employee complains.

Another common holiday booking issue is when more than one employee wants to take the same day off. Usually the counter for this is to operate a first-come, first-served policy, but this can cause friction in situations where holiday requests aren’t instantly applied to a centralised system.

Imagine this scenario:

One employee tells a manager about a specific day they would like to take as annual leave and the manager make a note of it somewhere to add it to the system when they next have time. This then gets forgotten about in the daily hurry of work.

Two days later, another employee asks for the same holiday day, this time while the manager is on their computer and has a spare five minutes. The manager checks the central system – ‘Oh, that looks fine, I’ll put that on for you’.

The first employee would be understandably furious.

Having an automatic holiday requests/approval system will remove the possibility of situations like this from ever happening.

To make your holiday procedure stress-free, you need the annual leave features of our time and attendance system. Please do get in touch for prices or with any questions you might have!

Biometrics in the modern world

26th July 2019 2:18 pm Leave a Comment

Biometrics are measurements and/or calculations of the human body, used to identify people.

There are many different types of biometrics, as there are many parts of the human body which can uniquely identify you.

Security

This is the usage that most people immediately associate with biometrics, thanks to its constant appearance in films. Use of biometrics in security bars access to certain areas to all who don’t have their biometrics registered on the system.

In films, the scanner is often fooled by the villain or anti-hero gorily cutting off relevant body parts from someone with that registered access. Outside of the world of films, this sort of shenanigans would likely to be foiled by inbuilt liveness detection.

The most common security biometric measurement is fingerprints or facial recognition

Time and attendance

Any workplace needs a way to keep track of employees’ attendance, particularly since the European Court of Justice has ruled that companies need “an objective, reliable and accessible system” to measure daily time worked.

A biometric attendance system is the perfect way to ensure this ruling is followed. Fingerprint scanners are most commonly used for this purpose, though some companies use facial recognition.

As well ensuring accurate measurements, biometric attendance stops employees from committing wage theft. With a non-biometric method of measuring attendance, such as swipe cards or a paper register, employees can make co-workers sign in for them fraudulently. With biometrics, employers can be confident that the person clocking in is who they are supposed to be.

Law enforcement

The police force has used fingerprints to help them solve crimes since the early 20^th century. Fingerprint matching techniques have increased in accuracy in leaps and bounds, including not only matching fingerprints from people brought to the station, but accuracy of latent fingerprints left at a crime scene.

In modern times, police forces also use facial recognition biometrics, both in order to catch known criminals and in order to prevent crime occurring.

Travelling

Biometrics are becoming the norm in many airports across the globe, as part of a drive to make passengers’ journeys more seamless. This generally takes the form of facial recognition at passport control, when passengers insert their passports and have their faces scanned to see if the match is acceptable. This is considerably faster than officer-controlled checking.

Banking

Biometrics are fast becoming a vital step in banks’ anti-fraud arsenal; everything from setting up voice recognition when you telephone the bank, so that they can hear someone pretending to be you, up to the more complex ‘behavioural biometrics’.

This is a multi-factor form of identification, where software learns everything from your usual shopping habits to the way that you move your mouse or type on a keyboard or scroll and tap on a phone.

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If you’d like to find out more about the biometric time and attendance systems supplied by Time and Attendance South West, just contact our dedicated product team or Book a Demo, our representatives will be more than happy to answer any questions or queries you might have.

Goonhilly Earth Station has opened up a new data centre

17th July 2019 3:20 pm Leave a Comment

Goonhilly Earth Station, a radio-communications site, has opened up a new tier 3/4 data centre.

This centre is built to be as ‘green’ as possible, using locally generated solar and wind power to support its 500kW requirements.

It is one of the first UK organisations to ameliorate the effects of high performance computing by immersing the computers in liquid.

Goonhilly have designed the data centre to suit the needs of the automotive, life sciences and space and aerospace marketplaces. It is hoped that the centre will advance the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Chris Roberts, head of the data centre, said: "There are people working on some clever algorithms to save our planet from climate change.

"The irony is that these models require heavy processing power. Fortunately, new technology is helping, such as immersion cooling which is 45-50 per cent more efficient than air cooling, cuts electricity demand in half, and also allows us to use the exhaust heat elsewhere."

Ian Jones, chief executive of Goonhilly, said: "Through our strong partnerships with industry and academia we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of innovation.

"Our new green data centre is no exception. It is satisfying to open our doors to the many businesses and organisations with data-intensive applications who can benefit from this facility and the community we are creating."

Source: Insider Media South West

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Building your new premises from scratch is the perfect opportunity to install a new time and attendance system, since it enables you to control the wiring and the placements of doors and other useful factors.

Time and Attendance South West offers a contactless smartcard and biometric clocking terminal with clocking options ranging from smartcard only right up to 3 factor authentication of smartcard, PIN and biometrics. This hardware registers staff entrances and exits as they present their identification, and delivers the information to the central software in real-time. It is a quick and user-friendly process.

Our Biometric Fingerprint Reader is designed to give absolute peace of mind that the correct person was present when scanning. Once registered on the fingerprint scanner, the image of the patterns usually found on the fingertip is converted into a code through a secure algorithm, which is then stored on the time and attendance system database for future comparison and authentication.

To learn more about Time and Attendance South West’s secure and affordable biometric time and attendance systems, please give our dedicated team a ring and they will be happy to help you with any queries.

Entrepreneur gets own office with which to grow company

12th July 2019 1:32 pm Leave a Comment

Lazy Dog, a software company, has progressed in its business development by moving into a unit at Bond’s Mill, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire.

Lazy Dog Ltd develops, debugs and tests software for a wide range of platforms. Its clients include Schlumberger, McLaren, Virtuosis, Metric and Indra.

The director of the company, Chris Smith, previously worked from his home, and was looking for the perfect setting.

Smith said: "It was just the professional lift I was searching for to take my business to the next level.

“I chose Bond’s Mill because it is a thriving business centre in a charming old mill, perfectly located near major road networks.

"It has excellent facilities with parking and a café. I saw many offices in my search for a business location and when I was shown my office I knew it was perfect for my needs."

Property company Robert Hitchins’ Helen Hawke said: "He has chosen a lovely office which overlooks the 18th century courtyard in The Wheelhouse with one of the mill races below his window."

Source: Insider Media South West

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Moving to new premises is the perfect time to assess your time and attendance system.

Many office-based companies don’t believe that they need a structured attendance monitoring system. As we say at Time and Attendance South West, having a time and attendance system doesn’t mean that Big Brother is looking at your every move, it just gives you the big picture!

The European Court of Justice has ruled that all companies need to measure the duration of time worked every day by their employees.

With our centralised time and attendance system, you can see everyone’s clocking data for whom they have permission, and quickly and easily export this or format it into reports using our report wizard or advanced report creation settings.

You can clock in either using our physical terminals, which work with fingerprints and/or radio-frequency smartcards, or if physical terminals can’t be installed then we can offer an online/app-based clocking in service called the Self-Service Module (SSM).

Our system is available for businesses of any size, including microbusinesses.

For more information, please get in touch today.

Author Archives: tensor_tandauk