Employee Call-Off & Attendance Tracking Used by 260,000+ Employees

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Are you frustrated with your current employee call-off process?

  • Your HR team spends half of their day keeping up with employee callouts
  • Struggle to keep good records and documentation around employee absences
  • Seems like every department is handling employee call-outs differently
  • No insights or oversight on employee-specific and company absence data
  • Experiencing stoppages and operation interruptions due to employee absence
  • Employee absences aren’t getting communicated to the proper people
Warehouse manager looking at clipboard
Call center agent taking employee call-off hotline calls

An employee call-off line that captures every absence

An employee call-off hotline works by providing a dedicated telephone number and online application that your employees use to report deviations from their work schedule.

This system can utilize live operators or be fully automated and is configured to collect pertinent information on each call, including the employee name, shift, infraction, reason, and any additional details you desire.

  • Dedicated 24/7 Call-Off Hotline Number
  • Multi-Channel System Allows Employees to Log Absences by Call, Text, or Web
  • Calls Recorded and Time-Stamped
  • Customizable Call Flow — Collect All Pertinent Information with Consistency
  • Confirmation Numbers Provided for Clear Tracking and Recognition of a Successful Absence Report

Drastically reduce the time spent tracking employee call outs

It’s important to know when employees are arriving late or calling off work and why. When an employee is absent, it doesn’t just affect that individual. It affects the entire company.

An Employee Call-Off Hotline helps you track and stay on top of everything, from real-time call-offs to historical data by employee, department, location, and more.

  • Immediate/Real-time Notifications
  • Track Call-Offs by Individual Employees, Locations, and Departments
  • Historical Call Reports & Metrics
  • Online Dashboard with Reports by Infraction, Department, Reason, Day of Week, and More
  • Track Reasons for Call-Offs, Type of Infraction, Shift Date/Time, and More
  • Trend Analysis and Forecasting Daily Absence Rates
  • Export Capabilities (Dashboard Data Exports into PDF and Excel)
Manager wearing hard hat and looking at notifications on phone
HR person looking at data on computer

Streamline and automate absence management tasks

How much does employee attendance management cost your organization? Between recording and tracking absences, filling missed shifts, enforcing policies, and organizing data for compliance and reporting purposes — the costs can be staggering.

Employee call-off systems from CMS drastically reduce the time necessary to maintain your attendance policies. Our hotlines help eliminate data entry by automatically logging absences and generating routine notifications such as warning letters and other policy notices. We can even help you visualize patterns of abuse and analyze trends to spot areas in need of attention.

  • Eliminate Manual Data Entry – We Capture Everything
  • Automated Warnings and Point Tracking
  • Attendance Policy Enforcement (e.g., Notifications to Employees Reminding them of Policy Obligations Relative to their Call-Offs)
  • Automated Document Generation (e.g., Disciplinary Forms)
  • Visualize and Deter Pattern Abuse

Employee Call Out System & Attendance Tracking Features

24/7 Attendance Hotline

One centralized reporting hotline to accept employee call-offs and attendance notifications 24/7/365.

Multi-Channel Reporting

Our multi-channel call-off system simplifies the absence reporting process by accepting call offs by phone, text, or web.

Instant Notifications

Our call-off system can automatically trigger notifications to ensure the right people receive the information they need when they need it.

Analytics & Reporting

Attendance analytics and reporting from CMS can spot pattern abuse, run employee or department-specific reports, defend against disputes, and more.

Employer Dashboard

See and interact with all of your employee attendance data in real-time. Provide tiered access to supervisors, managers, and HR.

Employee Dashboard

Allow employees to log absences, review their attendance records and points, and see disciplinary actions.

Attendance Point Tracking

Simplify and automate your employee point tracking. Attendance records will be updated automatically when employees call off.

Shift Backfill

Reduce the impact of absenteeism by automating routine shift fill functions, including shift callouts and intelligent backfilling.

Automated Disciplinary Actions

Automate your disciplinary actions and policy enforcement with form fill and document delivery.

Language Translactions

Support your diverse team with a language wizard that supports translations in over 50 languages.

24/7/365

Availability

100%

Customizable

1000+

Clients

99.99%

Uptime Guarantee

Benefits of an Employee Call Out System

Drastically Reduce the HR Costs Associated with Employee Attendance

For example, take a 500-person facility. Generally, there are 8% who have attendance infractions each day, for a total of 1200 per month.

Normally, these infractions require data entry, point tracking, employee interactions, and more.

With CMS, these overhead costs are all but eliminated. This facility would save nearly $90K annually by utilizing an attendance hotline service.

Maximize HR & Supervisor Productivity

Remove time-consuming error-prone tasks and allow your personnel to focus on core responsibilities.

Simplify and Standardize Your Call-in Process

Your employees can reach a live operator to assist them with every call-off at any time of day. There is never a question of who they need to call or speak with. It will always be the same number.

Know and Respond Faster

Many supervisors and managers are busy with their daily tasks and cannot take every phone call.

With a centralized attendance hotline, CMS can instantly inform any personnel or department of each call-off or reported tardy, including supervisors, managers, payroll, and HR. Instant notification keeps everyone up-to-date on who should be at work that day. This helps prevent any possible downtime or work stoppage by giving management enough time to rearrange staff or bring in a replacement.

What Does Absenteeism Cost Your Organization?

The costs associated with employee absenteeism, partial-shift absences, and misuse of organization-specific and federal leave policies are substantial. With the increased risk of employment disputes, lost productivity, drain on HR resources, and compliance concerns — the cost of inadequate attendance management can be staggering.

From the direct financial costs to the impact on productivity and overall performance, organizations without a centralized system for tracking employee attendance stand to lose.

Data from Kaiser Permanente reveals that employee absences, and the resultant loss in productivity, costs the average U.S. business roughly $1,685 per employee annually, an estimated 225.8 billion lost each year– about 60% of the total cost of worker illness.

Don’t Set Your Company Up for an Employment Dispute

The CMS employee call-off line allows your organization to track and record each employee call-off through one central location. Every call is recorded, time-stamped, databased, and issued a call-off number as each employee reports off, ensuring an accurate record of each call. These reports are completely customizable and can include any information that you require.

Avoid Work Stoppage and Keep Your Operation Moving

Just one employee calling off can cause a work stoppage or dangerous working conditions for a whole department or production line. Organizations can face substantial losses as a result of employee absenteeism, partial-shift absences, and the misuse of leave policies and allowances. An employee attendance system helps minimize lost productivity by immediately surfacing attendance changes that may impact production.

Work Assignment, Backfill, and Shift Fill

Our call-off system offers your organization the feature of delegating work assignments to temporary employees or those who work on different projects. Instead of interrupting your employees’ work, conveniently have them call in to find their work assignment. Our system can also assist with automatically initiating backfilling processes to replace absent workers as quickly as possible.

All-in-One Solution for Handling Call Ins

Our platform includes all the functionality and features you need to manage the employee call-off and attendance tracking function at your organization.

Employee Attendance Hotline

Our Employee Attendance Solutions start with a secure, 24/7 employee call-off hotline that enables organizations to acknowledge, document, and respond to absences, time-off requests, and family or medical leave (FMLA).

Employee Attendance Tracking

Keeping track of employee attendance is a key part of employee management and human resources. Attendance tracking ensures every detail of a company’s attendance is automatically recorded and available for reporting.

Absence Management

Managing employee absences is critical to making sure a business can operate efficiently. Workplaces with lower rates of absences tend to be more productive and have higher employee morale, and successfully covering for absent employees helps reduce downtime.

Automated Attendance System

Traditionally, attendance information has been taken manually: writing it on pieces of paper that can easily be lost, or tediously entering it on a spreadsheet where errors are more likely to be made. An automated employee attendance system and call-off hotline eliminate these and other problems associated with manual systems.

Attendance Reporting

Attendance reports put data at your fingertips without manual data entry. For example, see which employees are consistently absent, which departments or managers experience the most significant number of attendance issues, and more.

Attendance Point Tracking

With CMS, you can ditch complicated attendance tracking spreadsheets once and for all. Instead, our call-off hotline will keep track of every attendance occurrence and automatically record the correct number of points based on your attendance policy.

Workforce Analytics

Analyzing attendance data can help address current issues and ones that might show up in the future. Comparing past years to present metrics and extrapolating to predict future performance can also help plan and adjust workplace practices to improve outcomes.

Shift Fill and Backfill

Our automated shift callout system eliminates the need to have schedulers manually call replacements. Instead, employees can choose how they receive vacant shift notices — interactive voice calls, text messages, email, or a combination of the three — and have adequate time to respond to shift offers.

Integrate Your Existing Systems

We can integrate with the HR software you use daily to synchronize data, keep employee rosters up to date, and more.

HRIS software integrations include ADP, Kronos, Paycor, Bamboo HR, Workday, Rippling, and more

More than an Employee Attendance Hotline

Our call-off service is a complete system for recording absences, monitoring call-offs, analyzing data, streamlining notifications, and delivering enhanced business process optimization. With our centralized attendance tracking system, absences reported through your call-off hotline can automatically trigger notifications and workflow processes, such as contacting shift replacements and updating the employee’s attendance record in your HRIS system. A web-based dashboard provides both managers and employees with an easy-to-use tool for monitoring attendance data.

Employee Call-Off Line Attendance Reporting Dashboard

Absence Management

Managing employee absences means accurately collecting and analyzing attendance data. Our comprehensive attendance tracking portal benefits both employers and employees by providing detailed historical data, robust reporting, and insights into performance issues.

Employee Portal

Provides employees a way to easily monitor their attendance and frees up Supervisor’s time from answering questions regarding infractions.

Employer Dashboard

Real-time access to employee attendance data including all call histories for the lifetime of the account, time-stamped records, and recordings of every call. Standard metrics also include comprehensive reports per employee, department, shift, and/or location.

Employee Recognition

Our system makes it possible to not only issue disciplinary documents and alerts but to also recognize employees for perfect attendance or improved attendance. This feature helps reward employees by showing that you appreciate and respect their positive attendance.

Personnel Specific Reports

All data is retained in our system from Day 1 and can be used to track personnel-specific metrics and create related reports. A complete history for each employee is available along with reports such as call-offs by day of the week and reasons to help recognize pattern abuse. Data is also exportable for unemployment compensation and grievance issues.

Workforce Attendance Analytics and Metrics

Within employee attendance data, there are often trends and insights that can be analyzed and reported. For example, daily infraction rates can help predict staffing needs. Attendance analytics and reporting from CMS can be used to spot pattern abuse, run employee or department-specific reports, defend against disputes, and more.

Complete Feature List

  • 24/7 attendance hotline

  • Online employer dashboard
  • Online employee portal
  • Historical attendance data
  • Attendance reporting & analytics
  • Automated warnings
  • Point tracking
  • FMLA processes
  • Custom call metric reports
  • Department-specific processes, including shift, location, and reason for absence
  • Access to call recordings
  • Email, SMS, and online notifications
  • Live & automated hotline solutions
  • Work assignment and shift backfill
  • Automated document generation (e.g., disciplinary forms)
  • Critical employee alerts
  • HRIS & personnel management software integration
  • Multilingual capabilities

Eliminate Costly Absence Intake and Attendance Tracking

Traditionally, employee call-offs have been taken manually, with someone in your office answering the phone and copying down the employee’s information by hand or tediously entering it into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, manual attendance tracking is an expensive and error-prone process that often results in incomplete records and inconsistent data capture. Not to mention the delays and other operational issues that arise from call-off data not reaching the right people promptly.

Automated employee call-off systems from CMS provide a better way.

Use IVR to Automate Your Employee Call-Off Hotline

Our automated attendance solutions begin by capturing your employee call-offs, also known as absence intake. CMS employee call-off hotlines can be automated using interactive voice response (IVR) technology that provides employees with a self-service experience. The call-off IVR is a pre-recorded voice system that asks questions and captures responses via the keypad.

When employees need to call in sick, notify you that they’re running late, or report any deviation from their schedule, they call the hotline, any time day or night. The IVR system can then capture their employee ID, location, shift, infraction type, reason, and other pertinent information.

Live Agents Optional

Call-off hotlines from CMS can utilize IVR or live operators. Our automated solutions can also work in conjunction with our live answering services, providing the option of speaking with a live agent upon request or under specific circumstances that you determine in advance.

With CMS, you always have the option of using automated IVR systems, live agents, or a combination of both.

Notify the Right People with Automated Call-Off Notifications

Beyond automating the intake process, our call-off system can automatically trigger notifications that ensure the right people receive the information they need when they need it. For example, our system can intelligently route attendance notifications to production line managers, department heads, or multiple contacts. Messages can be sent via email or SMS or retrieved via our online dashboard.

Fill Open Shifts Quickly and Correctly

CMS helps organizations limit the impact of absenteeism by automating routine shift fill functions, including shift callouts and intelligent backfilling.

The moment an unfilled shift gets recorded through your call-off hotline, our system gets to work identifying and contacting potential replacements per your personalized rules and contact procedures.

Learn more: Automated Shift Callouts, Shift Fill, and Shift Backfill Solutions

Automate Point System Tracking, Attendance Warnings, and Document Generation

If you use a point system to keep track of employee attendance, our system can automatically track it for you. Complicated tracking spreadsheets will become a thing of the past. CMS point system tracking can also streamline policy administration by automatically sending warnings and generating documents.

Learn more: Employee Attendance Point System Tracking

Employer Dashboard with Robust Call-Off Reporting and Attendance Analytics

The real power of our call-off system lies in the data. Our employer dashboard provides real-time access to employee attendance data, including all call histories for the account’s lifetime, time-stamped records, and every call recording. Standard metrics also include comprehensive reports per employee, department, shift, and location.

Within employee attendance data, there are often trends and insights that can be analyzed and reported. For example, daily infraction rates can help predict staffing needs. In addition, you can use attendance analytics from CMS to spot pattern abuse, run employee or department-specific reports, defend against disputes, and more.

Learn more: Employee Attendance Reporting

Integrate with your Existing Software

Our employee call-off system can integrate directly with HRIS and personnel management software through an API or secure FTP connection. We can pull data into our service as well as push data back into other systems. This eliminates redundant data entry and ensures data consistency across your applications.

Benefits of an Automated Employee Call-Off System

Poor call-off processes can wreak havoc on your business, from downtime to disputes. An automated employee attendance system and call-off hotline eliminate these and other problems associated with manual systems, demonstrating a clear advantage with things like:

  • Saving Time & Money: Technology and 100% irrefutable metrics help eliminate frivolous employee disputes, lawsuits, and unemployment claims.
  • Increasing Productivity: By lowering the risk of errors in attendance records, automated systems make it possible for people to be more productive in other areas. When an employer doesn’t have to spend as much time simply making sure all their employees are where they’re supposed to be, they’re better able to focus on tasks only they can do.
  • Improving Accuracy: Standardizing the employee call-off process ensures you collect the correct information on every call: no more inconsistent data capture or incomplete records.
  • Achieving Compliance: The accurate, detailed records that an automated attendance record creates are vital when providing documentation as evidence of regulatory or policy compliance.
  • Limiting Downtime: Many supervisors and managers are busy with their daily tasks and cannot take every phone call. Just one employee calling off can cause a work stoppage or dangerous working conditions for a whole department or production line.
  • Standardizing Processes: Our system provides all of your stakeholders with a consistent process to follow, from the steps employees take to call off to the administration of your attendance policies and recordkeeping.

Automate Your Call-Off Processes Today

There’s no alternative to an automated employee attendance system from CMS. Having an easy-to-use, comprehensive, automated system for attendance takes necessary but time-consuming tasks and performs them quickly and accurately. Contact CMS to begin automating your employee call-off processes today.

Why CMS?

Employee Call-Off Hotlines from CMS provide organizations with a comprehensive suite of integrated tools and services designed to streamline employee attendance management, including 24-hour availability, real-time absence notifications, FMLA compliance, point tracking, attendance automation, and more. CMS attendance hotline solutions are 100% customizable and priced to work for any size organization. We serve companies with as few as 25 employees to Fortune 500 companies with over 10,000 unionized workers.

Continental Message Solution (CMS) is a leading provider of customizable contact center solutions, technology, and reporting solutions. In business for over 50 years and based solely in the United States with both Midwest and West Coast facilities, CMS delivers 24/7 live operator, IVR, and web-based communication services to organizations worldwide, helping them streamline contact channels, improve the flow of information, and gather valuable insights through analytics.

Employee Call-Off Service FAQ

What is an employee call-off hotline?

A call-off hotline is a telephone line that employees can use to report their absence from work. The employer or a third-party service may operate the call center. The most common information given by callers is their name, ID number, and reason for being absent. Employer attendance records are updated as a result of the data.

The purpose of an employee call-off hotline is to help employers track employee absences and ensure that adequate coverage is maintained. Hotlines can also help reduce the amount of time spent dealing with unplanned absences.

What is absence management?

Absence management is the process of tracking and managing employee absences. This can include absences for vacation, sick days, personal days, and other types of leave. The goal of absence management is to minimize the impact of absences on the workplace. This can be done by ensuring that employees have the proper coverage when they are away and that absences are managed in a way that is fair to both employees and the employer.

Employee call-off systems can play an important role in the absence management process.

An employee call-off hotline is one tool that can be used to help manage employee absences. A call-off hotline is a phone line that employees can call to report their absences. The hotline typically operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This allows employees to report their absences as soon as they know they will be absent, which can help reduce the impact of the absence.

Another benefit of using a call-off hotline is that it can help businesses track patterns of absenteeism. This information can be used to identify issues that may be causing employees to frequently miss work, such as scheduling conflicts or transportation issues. By addressing these issues, businesses can reduce the overall amount of absenteeism.

Related Resources

  • Reducing Workplace Absenteeism with an Employee Call Off Hotline
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    Reducing Workplace Absenteeism with a Call-Off Hotline

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    Absenteeism Rate: How to Calculate and Define Absence Rate

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    Managing Employee Attendance and Absenteeism

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