Hotel industry needs secure attendance management

A deal has been agreed to sell land overlooking Keel Square in Sunderland for the development of a new hotel has been agreed.

Developer Carin Group plans to build a four storey 120-bed Holiday Inn Hotel on the land. This final agreement from Sunderland city council means that they can begin the building work this summer.

When the hotel opens, which is currently hoped to be 2021, it should create 130 jobs for the area. The hotel will also have ground-floor commercial units for businesses to use.

Cairn Group’s Richard Warren said: “We’re delighted to be able to push forward with the development of an exciting new addition to the city’s leisure and hospitality portfolio. We are thrilled to be part of regenerating Sunderland and remain committed to investing within the region.”

Councillor Graeme Miller, leader of Sunderland City Council, added: “This has been a challenging time for the city, as it has for the UK at large, so it is good to be able to announce a really positive development for Sunderland, and one that demonstrates that we are ready to emerge from this crisis on the front foot and deliver the dynamic city centre our residents want and deserve.”

Creating a brand-new hotel is the perfect time to examine the intended attendance policy and management, before bad habits sink in and while it is simple to install technology during the build process.

Thanks to a profusion of temporary, agency and zero-hour staff in the hotel industry, many payroll departments are still struggling with paper timesheets and sign-in books, self-reported by staff.

These have many disadvantages, including employees losing or forgetting them. Fraud and mistaken information is also likely to occur with this format. Stories abound online about employees filling in timesheets for shifts they never attended, not to mention the lesser evil of falsifying timesheets to hide lateness.

Paper timesheets are also hugely inefficient for payroll staff – they need to be collected, filed, and then their information transferred manually into the payroll system.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance North East will solve these issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

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