Offering a wide range of benefits to all manner of businesses, remote working isn’t just good for employees, but it does give managers a good deal of challenges, especially when it comes to time and attendance.
It’s all well and good to have your workforce doing their job from home, but how can you check that they’re putting in the hours, and actually fulfilling their role in the same way that they would if they were in the office? With your employees on site, checking that they’re arriving on time and not leaving early, is easy, as well as checking productivity and monitoring their activities during working time, but it’s a different matter when you can’t see your staff.
Fortunately, such is the speed of technological advancements nowadays, remote working has become easier to monitor, and managers have a number of ways to check on the time and attendance of their employees, as seen below:
Tracking employee time commitments remotely
For many companies, their employees are required to work within a certain time frame or at set hours of the day, and a tracking system can help in these cases. While important for productivity, time tracking can also help Payroll departments make sure that employees are paid accurately for their time.
Choose from time tracking software, in which remote workers enter their start and finish times, or a cloud timesheet for recording hours and real-time data, enabling managers to approve the hours. For wider project management systems, time trackers can help keep everything on schedule.
Alternatively, a much simpler solution is to outsource your remote working time tracking to a payroll provider, who can take care of all of the above on your behalf.
Time and attendance on the move
Mobile applications for all manner of systems are becoming increasingly popular and are undeniably helpful. A mobile time and attendance system can be especially beneficial for managing employees who work on the road, due to its convenience, and its software can come with a ‘clock in and out’ feature, enabling employees to manage holiday requests from their mobile devices.
GPS tracking for remote workers on the road
If workers spend a lot of time travelling to meetings or are frequently on the road, GPS tracking can help managers know exactly where their employees are, which means that they can be assigned jobs according to their location, and have confidence that they’re where they’re supposed to be!
As with any aspect of managing a workforce, whether remote or in-house, having specialized outsourced agencies help can save managers both time and money, and with a team of professionals rather than one single, full-time in-house employee, you get access to a wealth of expertise and new technology for getting the work done in half the time.