Time and Attendance Management Systems for Construction Workers

Attendance management systems are needed everywhere, but the most underlooked space seems to be construction and building sites. This observation is largely based on the number of contractual or freelance workers that are employed in such projects, where priority is given more to the daily work getting accomplished rather than tracking regular attendance. This blog gives you an idea of why time and attendance management systems are necessary for infrastructure development i.e., building and construction.

A Brief Overview of Technology and Construction

The construction sector has been comparatively slow in embracing technological advances that have almost doubled manufacturing productivity over the last two decades. Smart market players know that innovation is the answer to so many challenges the construction industry is facing. To give an idea, these challenges range from addressing safety concerns on site to helping plan for future changes with infrastructure. As with all the industries in existence, we have already seen robotics and VR (virtual reality) enter this space and revamp the rules of the game. Leaders in the construction field are recognizing the force and capacity of such systems and finding unique ways to adopt these technologies.

Millions have been invested in research and technology related to construction over the last 5-6 years. With such advanced-looking plans of action, investors also see the opportunity to boost the construction industry and supplement it with the necessary technology for a safer, more efficient operational structure.

The Need for Time and Attendance Management

Earlier, time and attendance management at construction sites was manually clocking your attendance card and signing a register while you enter and exit the site. For obvious reasons, manipulation was widespread in this practice giving the employers or the site supervisors an incorrect idea of the time and labour being invested in the building work. Also risky was the fact that safety records were not consistent; only major accidents or injuries used to come to light and most of the time, accountability was missing.

These are the reasons why an advanced time and attendance management system is required at construction sites, especially the ones that employ a contractual workforce. Contractors can easily keep a track of necessary processes that also help in payroll calculation, omitting the pain of consulting each worker or being painstakingly elaborate for calculation accuracy.

A Concrete Solution to HR and Operational Issues

From managing the daily work schedule of an employee or contract worker to keeping the track of working hours, it is essential for a contractor to ensure every need of the construction project is met and it gets completed on the deadline. Thus, it is necessary to schedule workarounds, vacation times, and log overtime of each contract worker with the tasks delegated.

It is also essential to ensure that all workers on the site have had adequate training, testing of skills, and proper certification. It is dangerous for an unskilled person to operate construction machinery or even be in the periphery of a construction site. Time and attendance management systems at Construction sites take care of these aspects that most people overlook or appoint extra manpower for at the risk of errors.

We should also consider contract workforce requirements for multiple construction sites for one head company. It may be that the construction site workers are interchangeable, constantly hopping from one location to another. In such cases, tracking who did what and where becomes impossible with a manual method or a method with a limited reach.

Why a Sophisticated Attendance Management System Will Benefit You More?

As established before, recording manual time and attendance is an old story. The companies are now moving towards automated solutions which streamline contract workers and control work and movement on the site.

Using biometric attendance software for recording the contractual workers’ time and attendance is the most accurate and cost-effective solution available, with fingerprint attendance system software and facial recognition devices currently being the most popular biometric attendance management systems for this purpose.

Besides the host of benefits a regular time and attendance management system would provide, biometric time and attendance software would reduce costs & burden on admins by preventing human error with accurate attendance data.

Being a contractor at location A, you can capture clocking data at location B or C – this diminishes extra mundane tasks further. Many biometric time and attendance software provide real-time location tracking to know that workers are clocking in where they should be and are within their assigned area. Contractors can also prevent ‘buddy clocking’ and other time theft with intelligent biometric attendance management systems.

Shift changes are common with contract workers. For the contractor or admin to keep an effortless track of which employee is working in which shift today, time and attendance management software can classify data and track the shift change.

A construction site has many jobs going on in different areas. Some involve the usage of heavy machinery that only qualified workers can operate. Having additional access control software integrated with your contract attendance management system can cordon off areas for unauthorized workers, thereby preventing accidents or any kind of theft. You can track if an employee is sincerely working in his assigned department or is loitering around.

Further Advantages of Biometric Attendance Management Systems

The benefit of a fingerprint attendance system software is that no contract worker can cheat his way into the site. Their everyday punches get recorded in the software that automatically calculates the pay for these workers for the days they scanned their fingers on the software. This prevents all those ‘end of the month’ accounting dilemmas.

Many portable fingerprint attendance devices are also available in the market that can be used by the admin or the supervisor in case someone forgot to punch their attendance on the device at the entry gate or if the admin needs to travel to another site and register any new contract worker onto the software.

Another attendance management method on construction sites is facial recognition. It is ideal for two reasons. One, because many times employees may have dirty, dusty, wet, or worn hands. It eliminates the time taken to register by identifying employees in less than a second – simply look at the camera and authenticate yourself. The second is that if a pandemic like Covid-19 threatens us again with a “no contact protocol”, facial recognition can get the job done.

Overall, all these systems establish a level of sophistication, style, and professionalism, positioning you as a serious global player in the building and construction space.

What Should Be Your Outlook Going Forward?

Attendance management systems for the construction industry are rapidly becoming a scalable concept that is adopting newer technology every day to make operations easier. At any point in time, having such a system at your construction site can prevent substantial losses and strengthen the administrative efforts, eventually maximizing profits.