Office workers can benefit from attendance management
A new lab facility called Biosphere in the Newcastle Helix scheme is nearly completed.
The 90,000 square foot premises, worth £25m, will contain both commercial laboratory space and office space, and will also have an 80-people conference area for meetings and events.
The £350m Newcastle Helix development is being developed by Newcastle University, Newcastle City Council and Legal and General. The aim is “to create a global centre for urban innovation in the heart of the city.” Once it is finished, the scheme could create 4,000 jobs, 500,000 sq. ft. of office space and 450 new homes.
The Biosphere lab facility is funded through the European Regional Development Fund and North East Local Growth Fund programmes. It was designed by Ryder Architects and built by Kier with support from science park specialist Cam-Sci.
London-based creative agency Bandstand and Invest Newcastle will be responsible for raising the profile of the facility and in attracting new life sciences businesses to The Biosphere. Facilities management will be provided by building consultancy Aura North East.
Catherine Walker, inward investment director, Invest Newcastle, said: "This is such an exciting time for the life sciences sector. The Biosphere has already proven popular, not only because of its technical specification, but because of the community that surrounds its base. We are delighted to be part of the strategic team that is helping to drive this project forward."
Source: Insider Media North East
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When moving into a new building, it is important to take stock of your existing procedures and process. Now is the time to become more efficient and meaningful. Don’t drag your new start down into the dust with cumbersome paperwork, or with lack of oversight.
A common area which lacks oversight in an office environment is time and attendance management. Many businesses consider an attendance system to be necessary only for hourly-paid workers or those with manual jobs and/or quantifiable targets, but we believe that office workers should have some attendance management. It can stop time fraud, and make HR processes much more efficient.
Common occurrences of time fraud in a salaried office environment include stretching lunch breaks out for longer than they should be, and turning up and/or leaving five minutes outside accepted working times.
Taken in isolation, these things don’t seem very important and many managers will overlook them. However, if managers are able to look at the cumulative numbers they are likely to find that a lot of potentially productive time is being lost. For example, if the employee is five minutes late for every day of October (assuming Mon-Fri) they will have lost more than an hour and a half of working time!
Some employers will not mind this as long as the work is getting done to a high standard, while some will feel aggrieved that they have lost the potential of more work from that employee. Whichever the opinion, all management teams would benefit from having that data clearly available to them.
Our time and attendance system gives an easy answer to this, by providing clocking technology and a centralised WinTA.NET system which can display the timings in a clear and easy to understand way, with a detailed report wizard.