Nearly two thirds of UK organisations use time and attendance registration

Just under two thirds (63%) of British organisations use mandatory time and attendance registration for their staff and an additional 13% practise this for just some of their staff. These are the results of a survey from SD Worx, leading provider of global payroll and HR services, and Protime, the division for time registration and workforce planning within SD Worx.

Mandatory tracking is most popular in the UK

UK organisations are most likely (63%) to use mandatory time and attendance registration for all employees compared to their European counterparts. However, UK organisations are also the least likely country to implement mandatory time and attendance registration for just some of its employees (13%). In contrast, Dutch organisations are the most selective when it comes to implementing tracking, with 23% of companies using mandatory time and attendance registrations for some employees.

Overall, time and attendance registration is less often used in companies with less than 50 employees: 60% don’t have time and attendance registration. In companies with more than 50 employees, 92% use time and attendance registration for at least some employees.

Why is time and attendance registration used?

For the UK, the most popular reasons for using time and attendance registration are for financial and monitoring purposes (38%), just like in Belgium and Germany. HR efficiency (36%) comes in at second, with demand for flexibility in third (32%). Other possible reasons include compliance and legal reasons (30%) and workforce capacity planning (29%).

Compliance and HR efficiency are more often mentioned in companies with 100 or more employees. Out of the countries surveyed, the UK scores above average when it comes to using tracking for financial and monitoring purposes, but scores below average when it comes to all other uses.

Tracking is not mandatory for all employees

Interestingly, some organisations just implement time and attendance registration for some of their staff, rather than as a standard practice for all. For the UK, where time and attendance registration is not mandatory for all employees, it generally depends on the job type of the employee (46%) or job level (31%). The UK scored the lowest out all the countries surveyed in terms of using time and attendance registration for blue collars only (8%), this is significantly lower compared to the highest scoring country, France (44%). Organisations in the UK did, however, score highest in Europe for time and attendance for only people in payroll (15%).

Peter s’Jongers, CEO of Protime: “More than half of European organisations already work with time registration. Almost a third (32%) do this, among other things, to facilitate flexible working. This will strongly increase in the future and the demand for online time registration systems will frequently come from the employees themselves. In today’s society, where work and private life increasingly intertwine, employees demand more flexibility to determine their own working time and location. In the war for talent, online registration tools therefore have an important role to play. “