Managing your workforce, particularly if it is a diverse one, can be especially complicated. You have to balance doing right by your business and by your employees while making sure that you aren’t overpaying or being taken advantage of.
Remote employee time tracking is a powerful tool, but only if you use it properly to meet your needs. There are a few things you can and should do to safeguard yourself against abuse, but you must also keep in mind what you are allowed to do under the scope of the law.
Knowing how to properly use a modern online employee time clock solution will save you time and money and give you more room to take care of other essential business matters.
DO: Track All Employee’s Time
It may be tempting to let remote workers log their own hours and report them back to you for payment since remote workers set their hours and are under a different set of circumstances. The truth is, you should still be logging their hours through an online employee time clock for a couple of particular reasons.
Firstly, you want accurate pay records, and having employees manually enter time is messy and can lead to errors. The online timecard system not only tracks wages and hours automatically, but it also records everything down to the minute. The timesheet management solution can be set to record from a schedule or the moment an employee clocks in to when they clock out. This is useful for remote workers since they don’t tend to keep standard schedules.
Secondly, remote workers must be paid for all the hours they work, whether they are authorized or not, or even overtime. This can cause labor costs to increase by a large margin if much of the workforce is remote.
With an online employee time clock, you can set boundaries by reminding even remote workers to clock out and take breaks. Limiting what employees can do will cut down on the excessive hours worked and overtime in the process. An added benefit is that you lower the risk of burnout by reminding remote workers to clock out.
DON’T: Try to Micromanage
The whole point of online time clock software is to give employees the space and freedom to do their jobs without constantly looking over their shoulders. This means that if you’re using the app, you shouldn’t be continually monitoring employees.
All the data you could ever need to monitor employee productivity, hours, and attendance is available at a glance to all managers. The ability to send notifications and alerts makes it easy to tell employees important news or send reminders about issues that may be present without spending hours out of the day trying to figure things out.
DO: Encourage Autonomy
Employees should be using the online timesheet software to make their job easier and get more work done. As a business owner or manager, it is part of your job to explain to employees the benefits of the software and how best to use it to make their jobs run smoother.
This can mean everything from taking their breaks during downtime so that they don’t lose productivity, requesting time off through the system so that it can be quickly approved, or even sending notes to managers about potential issues before they become a significant problem.
DON’T: Forget About the Features
One thing that’s easy to forget but that can hurt your business if you do, is that online employee time clock software does more than just track hours. All the different features and integrations make it possible to make business operations a breeze and provide better for your employees in the process.
Bio authentication makes clock in safer and more secure. GPS and Geofencing let you control where your employees work from and whether or not they can clock in. Productivity monitors make sure everyone is on task and doing their job. Payroll integrations make the process of getting your employees paid several times faster and more convenient, as well as cut down on the costs dramatically.
