“An attendance manager is an HR professional tasked with keeping records of employee attendance, syncing them with regional holiday norms, registering productivity hours, generating payroll-ready information, and preventing non-compliance.â€
Table of Contents
- Who Is an Attendance Manager?
- 7 Essential Job Duties of an Attendance Manager
- 5 Skills Necessary for Success as Attendance Manager
- Professional Qualifications to Boost a Career in Attendance Management
Who Is an Attendance Manager?
An attendance manager is an HR professional tasked with keeping records of employee attendance, syncing them with regional holiday norms, registering productivity hours, generating payroll-ready information, and preventing non-compliance.
To do this, an attendance manager usually works closely with other HR sub-functions.
An attendance manager may be called by other terminologies such as:
- Time & attendance manager
- Time & attendance administrator
- Payroll administrator (time & attendance)
But despite the difference in terminology, all these titles refer to a similar job role. The attendance manager will frequently report to a senior payroll professional, who, in turn, reports to the overall workforce management/ HR lead.
Time and attendance are pivotal to the operational success of an organization. A 2018–19 global survey of 1,600+ organizations revealed that apps for attendance management represent the most widely adopted technology for workforce management, with over 90% adoption rate among these surveyed companies.
Labor-intensive industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, etc. must mandatorily employ an attendance manager to oversee employee productivity. And, as the nature of workplace operations change to more remote working environments during and post-COVID global lockdowns, it is critical to have qualified attendance managers who can keep pace with changing tech and work environments.
Attendance managers have always been a staple for large organizations like AT&T, IBM, and Google, however, now in response to coronavirus, the role’s demand is expected to grow even more, making it a highly lucrative career track.
Learn More: 10 Key Features of Attendance Management SystemsOpens a new window
7 Essential Job Duties of an Attendance Manager
On the surface, it might seem like the attendance manager has a one-dimensional role – they use the requisite software to record attendance and check for alignment with company/regulatory mandates. But there are several other duties you would expect in this job role daily. These include:
1. Resolving employee queries regarding attendance and time management
In a large workforce, employees are bound to have doubts, queries, and grievances around attendance. There could even be conflict scenarios where employees have applied for leave, but it is outside of the specified regulatory guidelines. The attendance manager must resolve these queries with a human touch, without appearing as insensitive or impersonal. In fact, this has a significant impact on employee experience – which brings us to the next point.
2. Shaping employee experiences
A company’s attendance mechanism is central to the overall employee experienceOpens a new window . Employees need to interact with attendance management portals and systems quite regularly in some organizations even multiple times a day, where they need to register productive hours and break-time. In other words, having a smooth and functional employee attendance and time management system is one of the keys to a good employee experience that contributes to better retention and referrals.
3. Implementing new technologies
A company’s time and attendance system fetches data from the larger human resource information system (HRIS)Opens a new window database and feeds it into payroll management. In other words, the software is tightly coupled with your existing HR tech ecosystem, and any upgrade implies a change in the time and attendance mechanism as well. Therefore, attendance managers will have to oversee technology upgrades/implementation, retire outmoded features, and maintain close to 100% uptime for the software.
4. Analyzing and reconciling data
While much of this process is automated through software in most organizations (especially in mid-to-large firms) today, attendance managers would have to check on data patterns and ensure that everything is in-line, at regular intervals.
For example, a remote employee may have registered attendance across the month, but it wasn’t entered into the database due to a technical glitch. A fully automated system could assume that the person is on unpaid leave, and it would reflect on the payroll. The attendance manager can prevent such scenarios by keeping an eagle eye on data and flagging any anomaly.
5. Training new employees
What is the first thing a recruit does on day-one in the office? They log-in and register their attendance. This means that every recruit must be fully informed about the company’s time and attendance protocol, desktop/mobile interfaces, the leaves available to them, flexibility benefits right from the get-go. An attendance manager works with the L&D and onboarding teams to organize these training sessions.
6. Formulating attendance policies
This is particularly important for senior attendance management professionals, involving a strategic responsibility.
A company has expanded into a new country with different cultural and regulatory norms – how do you transform your attendance policy in response? Your company has onboarded a freelance team for a mission-critical project – if your time and attendance system ready? A global crisis like coronavirus has thrown traditional attendance practices into a tizzy – how fast can you adapt?
The attendance manager takes all these decisions.
7. Collaborating with stakeholders
To keep the time and attendance mechanism running smoothly, while also ensuring future resilience, an attendance manager must closely collaborate with:
- The payroll administration team
- New employee training teams
- The legal team to address disputes
- The C-suite (particularly the CHROOpens a new window )
- External policymakers and auditors
Broadly, these are the duties you could expect if you’re looking at a time and attendance manager’s role. Let’s now explore the qualifications and eligibility criteria for this job designation.
Learn More: Five Features to Look for in a Time and Attendance SystemOpens a new window
5 Skills Necessary for Success as an Attendance Manager
Candidates applying for this particular job should be:
1. Self-motivated and sincere
An attendance manager works with large volumes of data, generates insights, and ensures that every employee’s dataset is accurate to be processed by other departments (payroll, legal, etc.). In fact, attendance and time managers are on the front lines of payroll and HR and often work with limited supervision. This is mainly the reason why sincere execution is key to success, because fault lines eventually emerge when data is incorrect.
Self-motivated and sincere individuals can see the importance and impact of their work on the organization’s performance and well-being at large, and therefore understands and ensures proper compliance.
2. Sensitive to security needs
As an attendance manager, you will handle employee information, which is often confidential. Apart from this, there are employee data privacy rightsOpens a new window to remember – each employee’s attendance records will be governed by strict privacy rules. An attendance manager must be conversant with all applicable norms and be sensitive to individual privacy preferences when resolving any conflict.
3. Collaborative
As we already mentioned, collaboration is a massive part of the job’s daily responsibilities. You need excellent communication skills, adapting to a wide range of employee personality types, as most HR jobs require. The manager also needs to establish a line of communication with the company’s leadership as needed, making sure that there is absolute transparency regarding attendance strategies and decisions.
To achieve this, candidates should be able to view attendance management in the context of the broader spectrum, impacting payroll, employee experience, and HR complianceOpens a new window .
4. Digitally-savvy
Technology is the backbone of the modern attendance management function. Companies have gone far beyond paper processes, or even spreadsheets, embracing advanced suite solutions like Kronos, Workday, SAP, and Oracle. There are also several standalone tools available, like DeputyOpens a new window , EmployWiseOpens a new window , and even free time-tracking optionsOpens a new window .
Sometimes the biggest roadblock can be the lack of digital knowledge or learning eagerness of the manager, especially at a time when HR tech is rapidly growing and evolving. Therefore, these managers must be tech-savvy, eager to learn and adapt and can recommend and help implement better technologies by staying on top of the trends.
5. Open to multi-disciplinary learning
An open-minded personality will help you quickly learn new skills in previously unfamiliar areas. For instance, you might be transitioning to attendance management from an L&D role. By staying open-minded, you can obtain a working knowledge of payroll mechanisms that could prove beneficial in your new attendance manager job. Employers can support and augment this skill by providing cross-training sessionsOpens a new window .
Professional Qualifications to Boost a Career in Attendance Management
Companies usually seek a qualified professional for an attendance manager’s role, with at least a couple of years of HR experience. For candidates who are interested in a career in this field, here are the necessary qualifications:
1. A Bachelor’s degree in HR
This is a prerequisite for most senior-level HR positions, and attendance management is no different. You need a technical understanding of the various methodologies, tools, strategies, and concepts required to manage a large workforce. Some organizations might be open to hiring candidates without a formal bachelor’s degree if they have been in the industry for a long time.
2. Professional certifications
While this isn’t mandatory, the right certifications can give you an edge over other candidates applying for an attendance manager job. Certifications in program management, change management, data analysis, platform-specific skills (like this Kronos skill certification courseOpens a new window ), etc. might come in handy.
3. Training experience
Some companies may want prior experience in training new employees on time and attendance protocol; some might even ask for familiarity with specific training methodologies. Again, while this isn’t mandatory, we recommend that you explore the top learning and development certificationsOpens a new window out there to stay ahead of the competition.
4. Technical knowledge
This one is critical. Without a keen understanding of the HR technology landscape and the multiple tools at hand, it is impossible to keep a company’s time and attendance mechanism running smoothly. Today, every company relies on technology to manage employee attendance – you would need familiarity with ready-to-use tools (e.g., Kronos) and stay eager to learn/operate any homegrown platform.
5. Multilingual capabilities
This is becoming increasingly important for any HR professional working with large workforces. As companies become more diverse, onboarding recruits from a variety of geographic origins, a working knowledge of different languages can be useful. While fluency isn’t required, it is recommended that you brush up on the most common languages in the region (apart from the official norm).
Are you currently employed as an attendance manager? Or do you perform this job at your company? Tell us about your experience on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window ! We would love to hear about your views.