Location, location, location resounds in our second installment on Managing Remote Employees. Yes, you can have confidence that your employees are really on the job site when they say they are. Location tracking is one of the many benefits that a telephone and app-based timekeeping solution like ours can give you that handwritten time sheets cannot. Johnny may write on his time sheet that he cleaned the building from 5-9pm, but he may have been in Bob’s Bar and Burgers an hour away by 6:30.
We work hard to provide the best tech-management tools to assist businesses with remote employees. So how can you use technology to create automated time cards and be sure that employees are really on the job site? We offer 6 smart tips:
- Require employees to use job site landline phones to clock in and out if possible. The caller IDs of the phones used to clock in and out are noted on each automated timecard. Question the employee about any phone number reported that’s not a job site phone. You can also prevent the use of any phone number that appears on your account that you don’t want employees to use.
- Link job site phones to the jobs to ensure timecards are created from calls on site. This essentially ties a phone number to a job preventing employees from clocking in with another phone.
- Use our smartphone app if landline phones are not available. The app is a great way for employees to clock in and out and it provides a very accurate GPS location track at the time of the punch in and out.
- Employees who don’t have smartphones can opt-in to GPS tracking that we get from their cell carriers. We can currently get location tracks from the following carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, US Cellular, Boost, (Canada) TELUS.
- Some customers want to retain the ability to use our Integrated Voice Messaging system, which is not available on the mobile app, but they want the benefit of the accurate GPS tracks provided by our app. So we have recently released our Dialer App. The Dialer App is essentially a speed dial into the normal toll-free that your employees already use. Once dialed in, your employee will still enter his employee code and job code, but the location track comes from the smartphone itself and not the cell carrier. The result is a very accurate location track. (Normal call charges apply).
- Enter addresses for all of your job sites and our Clock Locations screen reports if your employee was ‘on the job’ or ‘not on the job’. This information is based on the landline phone used, or the cell phone GPS track we received from the cell carrier or the track we received from the device itself if the Mobile App or Dialer App is used. For a great visual, the map link shows the location of the track compared to the job site location.
Managing remote employees is always a challenge, and while you can’t put it on autopilot, current technology does offer ways to simplify the task. Steve Jobs said, “It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.” We agree that technology is ever-changing. From our perspective the accountability that technology provides gives you faith in people as the honest employees stand out.
Stay tuned for our next installment in the ‘Managing Remote Employees’ series in which we offer advice on how to make sure employees aren’t spending too much or too little time on your jobs.