Top 5 Challenges of Scheduling and Tracking a Mobile Workforce

The transition to a flexible mobile workforce now seems inevitable for many businesses. Working remotely is nothing new for consultants and other professionals that travel back and forth between client sites, but it is becoming increasingly common for workers of all kinds to work at home, in coffee shops, or anywhere else with an internet connection.

Increasing mobility empowers workers by giving them more control over their schedules, while enabling employers to make more efficient use of resources—a classic win-win scenario. Nonetheless, managing an increasingly diverse and decentralized workforce creates new challenges in scheduling, time and attendance tracking, and recordkeeping for compliance purposes.

1. Maintaining Transparency When You Can’t See Your Workforce

When your workers are spread across multiple locations or working outside the company’s offices day-to-day, it’s a constant challenge ensuring that everyone is where they’re supposed to be, when they’re scheduled to be there. Tracking time and attendance accurately has always been tricky. In the age of mechanical time clocks, employees coming in late would sometimes “forget” to punch in – leaving no record of their lateness after the fact.

Even in the digital age, maintaining transparency into remote employees’ schedules remains difficult. Supervisors must frequently depend on employees’ discretion and honesty when payroll is calculated based on time.

2. Ensuring Accountability Without Sacrificing Trust

Managers don’t want to have to interrogate their employees over their time and attendance record—and it isn’t necessary with the right tools in place to guarantee accountability. Today’s sophisticated mobile devices enable companies to deploy employee time clock applications with biometric verification measures such as fingerprint scanning or facial recognition.

In the event of a “buddy punch-in” situation, where one employee attempted to log hours for an absent worker, an exception code should be automatically sent to the supervisor. This system ensures accountability without forcing managers to treat their employees with suspicion.

3. Managing Complex Multi-location Scheduling

Scheduling employees at disparate sites is a challenge in many businesses. Mobile workers need to be able to track their time easily as they move from one job site to the next—not only for payroll and billing purposes but also to give internal decision makers real-time information about where the company’s resources are. It’s also important for managers at each site to know who should be reporting to them on any given day.

Visibility is essential to effective workforce management. Accordingly, managers should be able to use the company’s employee scheduling software to generate a scheduling report that makes it clear at-a-glance who’s clocked in (or should be) at any location.

4. Tracking Time When There’s No Physical Clock

In the mobile work environment, there’s usually no practical place for a centralized time clock, so employees typically have primary responsibility for tracking their own time. Paper records and manual recording processes are prone to error, vulnerable to abuse, and difficult to audit.

Cloud-based time and attendance tools can be much more convenient for employees—as long as the interface is designed with the user’s needs in mind. For today’s smartphone-equipped mobile worker, time clock software must be as fast, easy, and simple to use as familiar applications like Gmail or Facebook.

5. Accurate Recordkeeping for Compliance and Risk Management

In event of a labor dispute, a company’s time and attendance records may be subject to an audit by state or federal regulators. To protect themselves, employers need the ability to show what really happened when alleged infractions occurred. This includes not only when the worker(s) in question punched in at, but where they were, what they were assigned to do, and how the company verified the details.

With a smart mobile time clock, precise details of each employees punch-in can be captured—leaving no question about the accuracy of time and attendance records.