How a PEO Can Make Time and Attendance Management Easier
TLM solutions help businesses manage their workforce — and challenges such as employment law compliance — more effectively.
For many business owners, time and attendance management presents a considerable administrative burden. To make it easier to manage the entire employee life cycle, more businesses are turning to Professional Employer Organizations (PEO).
A PEO can help an organization tackle the challenges associated with managing employees, including the administration of employee benefits, regulatory compliance, time and labor management (TLM) and payroll.
With regard to TLM and payroll, a PEO can help automate and streamline processes, increasing accuracy and saving organizations a considerable amount of time. For the many businesses that rely on paper-based processes for time and labor management, PEO technology can deliver significant enhancements. For example, rather than spending time manually entering data, the hours collected through a TLM program automatically flow to the payroll batch.
TLM programs should provide built-in overtime rules which could remove the obligation of tracking overtime hours manually. Some may accommodate particular state overtime rule variations.
Reducing the Administrative Burden
A PEO can open the door for the introduction of best practices at every stage of the employee life cycle. For example, a TLM solution could incorporate biometrics.
For businesses that operate in more than one state, keeping track of the latest employee regulations presents a perennial challenge. Since a PEO's TLM solution continually evolves to reflect changes in employee laws and regulations, businesses that opt-in can use this technology to help ensure their compliance with ever-changing state and federal regulations.
And because TLM platforms capture when an employee comes into work and how many hours they work, they can enable businesses to automate compliance with demanding regulations such as the California meal penalty, which requires employers to provide a 30-minute meal break to employees for each five-hour increment worked.
Understanding the Bigger Picture
A TLM solution can also improve the accuracy and integrity of employee-related data to provide greater insight into how the labor force could be optimized. For example, instead of adding just hourly employees into the system, a time and attendance management solution could track salaried employees as well. This would provide an all-encompassing view of labor expenses, including hourly rates, overtime trends, and salary expenses including but not limited to bonuses. Such data could help drive business decisions such as whether to hire more employees, change shift schedules or to increase the prices of the organization's products and services.
A TLM system can also be used to track and pay mileage reimbursement for employees when they travel on business, which can be a particularly difficult task for organizations with large groups of mobile employees.
Regulatory Compliance
Given the number and complexity of wage and hour rules, businesses that don't take the proper precautions run the risk of noncompliance with regulations like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In fact, the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor recovered a record-breaking $304 million in wages owed to workers in 2018. Over the last five years, the division recovered amounts in excess of $1.3 billion.
The federal government remains highly active in policing compliance with the FLSA. Given the potential for regulatory oversight, the transparency that a single platform can provide allows for a proactive approach to compliance, as well as the ability to demonstrate adherence to wage and hour laws and regulations with robust overtime reporting capabilities.
Gone are the days when businesses could rely on paper-based processes to manage their employees. PEOs and the TLM solutions they offer deliver new ways for businesses to manage their workplaces – and stay on top of increasingly complex and exacting labor regulations at the state and federal levels.
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