Remote Employee Time Tracking Tools: What To Look For

Businesses everywhere are trying to adapt to the “new normal” of remote and hybrid work. One interesting effect of this change is that businesses that never had to worry about employees clocking in and out now find themselves in need of a solution for remote employee time tracking.

Companies looking for remote time tracking tools have no shortage of options. The massive surge in remote work since the events of 2020 has led to a huge number of new software tools for remote employee time tracking entering what was already a crowded market.

For managers trying to rapidly adjust to the realities of remote and hybrid work, we’ll explain the real advantages these tools offer over more traditional time tracking methods and offer advice on how to pick the best solution from the many that have proliferated.

Table Of Contents

• Advantages Of Remote Employee Time Tracking Tools
• Picking A Solution For Remote Employee Time Tracking

Advantages Of Remote Employee Time Tracking Tools

For many years, businesses with workers who were paid an hourly wage tracked the hours they worked by “punching in” with a time clock.

Today, businesses with partially or fully remote teams are increasingly finding it necessary to implement employee time tracking even for salaried employees.

Unfortunately, many of these businesses are relying on systems for remote employee time tracking that are actually much less accurate and useful than even the primitive mechanical time clocks that their employees’ grandparents used to punch in for shifts decades ago.

Some businesses use spreadsheets shared through platforms like Google Docs. Others simply ask employees to manually note the time spent working on particular projects.

Using a dedicated software tool for remote employee time tracking can offer businesses several important advantages.

Better Accuracy

One of the most important benefits of a robust software-based solution for remote employee time tracking is accuracy.

Even if you have a high degree of faith in your employees to be “on the clock” when they’re supposed to be and to report their hours worked accurately, systems like spreadsheets are highly susceptible to human error.

Employees might make typos when recording their hours worked, mistakenly enter data in the column of a shared spreadsheet for a co-worker’s hours instead of their own, or even accidentally delete information that must then be recovered.

A software-based time tracking tool can be accurate down to the second, the data it records can’t be altered or erased after the fact, and it keeps data safely siloed for each employee.

Increased Productivity

Remote employee time tracking tools can do more than just tell you when employees punched in and out. They can also help make your team more productive.

The best time tracking solutions can also allow you to gather data on just how much time your team is spending on certain tasks. You can then use this data to more accurately plan future projects or to develop strategies for improving workflows and efficiency.

For example, by reviewing data on how much time similar projects took in the past, you can forecast more precise project timelines for clients. You can also identify employees who may need extra training by seeing they take longer than their peers to complete the same tasks.

A Stronger Bottom Line

Using an effective remote time tracking tool can have practical financial benefits for your business.

Accurate time tracking prevents time theft (employees accepting wages for time they didn’t actually spend on the job), whether it’s occurring deliberately or accidentally.

Reliable, precise time tracking tools with robust reporting will save you time spent creating, reviewing, and correcting timesheets every week or month.

Finally, the productivity benefits of using an effective remote employee time tracking solution will translate into more work getting done and better overall production.

Picking A Solution For Remote Employee Time Tracking

Even if you’re fully sold on the benefits that a dedicated remote employee time tracking solution can offer your business, you might still not have implemented one because of the difficulty of picking one out.

Searches for “the best time tracking software” or similar terms might yield lists of 15 or 20 different options. It’s understandable why managers might feel overwhelmed by the choices, especially when they have so many other duties occupying their time.

Let’s try to make the process simpler by defining the most important criteria to consider.

Usability

Just like any other tool that you procure for your business, a remote employee time tracking solution has to be usable.

Any tool that’s too complicated, inaccessible, or failure-prone for your team to depend on it won’t do your business any good.

By usable, we mean the tool must be able to be utilized intuitively and confidently by the people who need it, where they need it.

For example, Inch allows employees to clock in and out from assigned tasks from their phones, and doesn’t require a high level of tech-savviness or extensive training to use. This makes it easier to implement for companies in any industry.

Reliability

By reliability, we don’t just mean that the tool needs to function reliably without bugs, crashes, or outages, although this is certainly important. We mean that the time tracking solution you choose needs features that give you confidence about the validity of the data it generates.

As an example: A frequent worry for managers is that remote employees are taking pay for working hours while they’re actually away from their desks. Good time tracking software can help to eliminate this concern.

Inch implements a geofencing feature that allows employees to clock in only when they’re in the right location. This gives managers confidence that the hours their employees log are actually spent on assigned tasks without time theft inflation.

Administration

Using an effective remote employee time tracking tool will save managers time and frustration. Gone will be the days of manually correcting erroneous or deleted timesheet data and manually entering employee hours to run payroll.

Inch eliminates human error in the clocking in/clocking out process, and you can be confident that its data is reliable. The software automatically compiles data to use for payroll or client invoicing.

Analytics

We’ve touched on this subject already: The best remote time tracking tools will do more than simply show the amount of time employees have spent on the clock. They’ll give managers access to detailed data reporting that can be used to analyze efficiency.

Inch records not only total time worked but also information like time per task and location coordinates.

All of the data can be compiled into interactive reports. Then, managers can group records by employee or location and export them to Excel for further analysis.

Next-Level Functionality

The best remote employee time tracking tools can help your team in ways that go beyond simply tracking hours worked or even the time spent on particular tasks.

Some time tracking tools are part of a fully integrated system for scheduling, task management, and team communication.

Getting all of these features out of one tool instead of having to choose, buy, and implement a separate system for each will save your business time and streamline your workflow.

Inch allows managers to create schedules and assign tasks for teams of any size. You can monitor the workloads of all employees and the progress they’re masking on their assignments from a single app.

Inch allows managers to “ping” staff about specific tasks, answer employee questions, lets everyone working on a particular project communicate to stay on the same page, and lets you attach files and photos to help get the job done right.

A Remote Time Tracking Tool For Any Job

The rise of remote work offers many benefits to businesses that are adaptable enough to embrace it but also presents challenges many managers may feel unprepared for, like how to handle remote employee time tracking.

Using a dedicated software tool for this purpose can boost your company’s productivity and bottom line, but you need to pick the right solution.

Inch offers ease of use, robust data tracking and reporting, and saves you time on administration. But Inch doesn’t just track hours; it’s also a powerful tool for scheduling, task management, and team communication.

That’s why Inch is being embraced by companies with teams of 10 or 100+ and in every type of industry. To learn more about how Inch can help you get the job done whatever the job may be, visit TryInch.com today.