Tracking Time of your Employees Working from Home

These are unprecedented times that we are living in at the moment, with a majority of the world’s workforce compelled to work from home.

In such a scenario, how do companies effectively monitor the time spent by their employees working, when they do so from home? Does an online time tracker prove effective in this situation?

In this article, we provide a well-rounded perspective on home time tracking, viz. intuitive ways and means by which employees can easily be tracked for the time they spend working from home, in a safe and non-invasive manner.

Facial Recognition Capabilities

A major concern spurring the need for employees to work from home is the possible contamination that can come with too many individuals being close to one another. At the same time, how does one ensure effective employee time tracking?

Enter time tracking tools like XmartClock with powerful facial recognition capabilities.

In the absence of such capabilities, businesses are often concerned about “buddy punches” wherein others punch-in on behalf of the concerned employee. In this instance – and given the robust and potent nature of the tool, there is no way that anyone else can clock-in, in place of the authorized personnel. This includes remote scenarios such as when employees work from home.

Avoiding Fingerprint Readers

A primary source of possible contamination happens to be physical employee time tracking clock-in devices which multiple personnel have to scan manually to gain access into their workplaces. While working from home, how does one ensure authorized access to work files (for example) without any such devices, while ensuring that employee safety is not compromised?

Again, it is online time tracker tools like XmartClock which do the trick. How, do you ask?

Well, thanks to the fact that employees can conveniently and easily clock in and clock out remotely from their smartphones or desktop computers, all from the safe environs of their homes.

Home office time tracking authorization, in this case, comes by way of various means, including:

• Facial recognition as mentioned in the previous section
• Task monitoring
• Geofencing alerts

GPS Location Tagging

While employers do not want to function as nannies, it is also true that they would like to maximally ensure their employees are really working when they claim to be.

An example of home office time tracking would be when employees claim to be home and working while they are in fact at the movies or perhaps out shopping.

Such behavior not only does zero justice to the “social distancing” which is being expected in these unprecedentedly tough times, but it also robs employers of the tasks that should have been performed by their personnel when the latter was supposed to be working from home.
So, how can this “policing”, if you will, be done effectively, in these circumstances?

Again, thanks to XmartClock’s intuitive GPS location tagging capability, employers can accurately determine where their personnel are punching in and out from.

This XmartClock competence also provides unique insights to employers on the integrity of their employees. For instance, when you have personnel trying to pull a fast one on their actual whereabouts as opposed to where they claim to be, it is a pointer towards a possible compromise on ethics and integrity in other ways as well.

Simplicity

Amidst all the brouhaha about employees having to work from home, a major challenge for managers managing these personnel is the complications that many employee time tracking tools bring along.

For instance, there are all kinds of software to be downloaded. In still other cases, there are hardware compulsions that make home time tracking and management even more complex, expensive, and cumbersome.

Against this backdrop, XmartClock comes up trumps with no additional software required to be downloaded or installed; there are no special hardware requirements either.

Mere access to the Internet is sufficient. Given the way XmartClock operates, entirely on the Cloud, it becomes very easy for managers to access the work details of personnel, including all their attendance data.

As would be obvious, all this takes place completely remotely with no physical contact between managers and personnel, or even among managers themselves! Therefore, at every stage, the risk of contamination is practically non-existent.

HR Obligations

Amidst a scenario where you have a large proportion of your workforce working from home – in some cases, pretty much all personnel doing so, HR obligations increase incrementally. For instance, they need to ensure that tasks expected of these personnel, are being fulfilled – for which HR will ensure that commensurate remuneration as predefined is provided.

To fulfill these obligations, HR requires suitable home time tracking reports which provide details such as attendance and geo-positioning. The criticality of these reports takes on vital hues when we have employees working from home en masse.

Besides the creation of reports, it becomes important that the reports are easily understood and also integrated into Payroll systems for HR to process remunerations. Further, evaluating performance and determining bonuses/increments/promotions as deemed appropriate and necessary, is also entirely dependent on appropriate reports gathered from managers.

At every juncture, online time tracker XmartClock with its intuitive home office time tracking ability provides immense value, making it easy for HR to fulfill all its obligations.

Employees Working from Home in Shifts

The nightmare for managers – if we may refer to it as such intensifies when employees are working from home in shifts. How do we ensure that sanity prevails when employee sign-ins need to be monitored round the clock – that too quite likely across multiple time zones, all in a remote scenario?

Again, it is time tracking tools like XmartClock which are taking stock of the situation, ensuring that employee sign-ins and timestamps are suitably recorded, all in a very easy to manage and process manner.

Further, things go way beyond mere monitoring to actual scheduling as well. Therefore, when employee shifts need to be chalked out in the most feasible manner possible, XmartClock proves invaluable.

Conclusion

As we mentioned right at the outset, these are unprecedented times – which could last for a reasonable amount of time now.

For the foreseeable future, working from home is quite likely to become the norm for a lot of personnel across companies and industries.

Such a scenario only intensifies the need to monitor and schedule employee clock-ins in the most effective way possible.

Most importantly – everything needs to be done, keeping in mind the very reason we are isolating and social distancing – that we avoid contaminating one another.

Clearly, time tracking tools like XmartClock are contributing emphatically towards this end objective.