Half your staff have no email address. Most HR software has not noticed.

Open the onboarding flow of almost any HR platform and the first required field is an email address. Everything downstream assumes it: the invitation to set a password, the reset link, the notification when leave is approved. It is a reasonable assumption for an office. It is wrong for a plant, a warehouse, a construction site, a hospital's support staff or a field service team.

What companies do instead, and why it is worse

• A supervisor's address is used for thirty people, so thirty accounts share one inbox and one recovery path. Any of them can reset any other's password.
• Fake addresses are invented — ramesh01@company.local — which means password reset silently fails forever and every reset becomes a support ticket.
• Everyone is given the same password, which is never changed, and attendance stops being attributable to an individual at all.
• Nobody is given an account and a supervisor marks everyone, which may be legitimate but is usually undeclared, so the record says the employee marked it themselves.

Each of these breaks the one property attendance data must have: that a record can be traced to a person. Once thirty accounts share a mailbox, an attendance dispute has no answer.

What the right design looks like

1. 01Email is optional on the employee record, not required with a workaround.
2. 02Sign-in accepts the employee ID, matched case-insensitively, because people type their ID the way it is printed on their card and that is not always how it was entered.
3. 03Where there is no email, HR issues a one-time temporary password, and the system forces a change at first sign-in. The backend refuses every other action until that change is made — not just the interface.
4. 04Password resets for those staff go through HR, as a deliberate, recorded action rather than a self-service link into a mailbox that does not exist.
5. 05Notifications that matter appear in the app, because an email notification to nobody is not a notification.

One exception worth keeping

Administrators should be required to have an email address. An admin account is the one that can change everybody else's access, and it needs a recovery path that does not depend on another admin being available. Making email optional for staff and mandatory for admins is not inconsistent — the two accounts carry different risk.

The question to ask a vendor

Not "do you support employees without email?" — every vendor says yes. Ask instead: what exactly happens when a worker with no email address forgets their password on a Monday morning? If the answer involves an administrator typing an address into a field, you have found the workaround rather than the feature.