According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12 of 21 major industries saw productivity gains in 2023. A lot of that comes down to how the schedule was planned in the first place.
Core working hours
Core hours are the stretch of the day when everyone on the team is expected to be working, usually somewhere in the middle of the day. Many companies set core hours from 10 AM to 3 PM, often with a 30-minute to one-hour lunch built in around noon.
The idea is straightforward: if everyone overlaps for a few hours a day, meetings and handoffs stop depending on catching people at the right moment. Whatever hours fall outside that window are usually left flexible. A time clock with a real-time dashboard makes it easy to confirm who was actually on the clock during core hours, without anyone having to ask around.
Flexible scheduling
Flexible schedules have become the norm for a lot of the workforce, especially for employees juggling school pickups or other fixed commitments outside of work. Instead of a fixed 9-to-5, the expectation is usually just that 40 hours get worked somewhere across the week. Research from Business News Daily backs this up: flexible scheduling tends to correlate with higher morale and motivation.
The tradeoff is tracking. If people are coming and going at different times, “did everyone hit 40 hours and show up for core hours” becomes a harder question to answer by memory. That’s really what a web-based time clock is for: graphical time cards show, day by day, whether hours and core-hour attendance actually lined up, regardless of when each person clocked in.
Overtime and PTO
Scheduling also has to account for the uneven parts of the year: busier stretches that push people into overtime, and the holidays and PTO that pull people out of the schedule entirely. An unplanned absence is disruptive mostly because nobody saw it coming. Tracking PTO as it accrues, rather than finding out about it after the fact, gives you enough lead time to actually plan around it.
Where TimeTrakGO comes in
None of this requires guesswork if the data is already being tracked. TimeTrakGO’s overtime tracking and PTO tracking tie directly into the same time clock data used for core hours and scheduling, so none of it lives in a separate spreadsheet. You can see how the scheduling and tracking features work on our product page, or call us at (888) 321-9922 if you’d rather talk through your specific setup.
About the Author: Jan Cankusic
