Monitoring Attendance for Remote Workers

The recent government advice is for everyone to work from home if possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many employers will be struggling to figure out how to make this happen for their workforce.

Some jobs and industries are unable to work away from their premises, and different precautions and decisions will need to be made there.

However, many office-based companies have historically avoided remote working due to anxiety over lack of remote oversight.

There are many products available to help with this concern, from collaborative online workspaces, where every edit to a document is timestamped, to business chat apps to allow instant communication and web conferencing software for ‘face-to-face’ requirements.

At Tensor, we can help put your mind at rest regarding physical attendance with our easy-to-use Self-Service Module (SSM).

This allows employees to clock themselves in and out, and to book on and off individual production jobs. Employees working a formal flexitime system can also view their current flexi-balance in real time and request adjustments to it.

As well as being available in the browser, this product is also available as a mobile app, for iOS and Android.

If your staff use the mobile app, this enables you to verify their location.

GPS position data is used to ascertain the mobile device’s location at the time of clocking. Employee movements can then be displayed & plotted on a map to be viewed in Tensor.NET.

This is useful not only from a workplace perspective, but will also help to reassure you that your staff are not undergoing needless travel which could spread COVID-19.

With so many people working from home, network connectivity may start to become patchier than expected. The SSM app adapts to a sudden loss of connectivity by caching (temporarily storing) offline requests on the mobile device. Once a network connection is restored, any cached information is transferred immediately.

Team supervisors and system admins can also have access to employee clock-ins and information. This means that they can perform actions such as:

• Authorise or deny any requested periods of absence made by their team members.
• Authorise or deny any requested flexitime adjustments.
• Authorise or deny any requested shift swaps or shift changes.
• Make changes to the assigned shifts of their team.
• Run clocking reports of their immediate or wider team members.

Role-based security allows you to easily choose which combination of features different employees will have access to.

The SSM can be used with any number of employees, from solo entrepreneurs all the way up to huge multi-national companies. If you do have employees from multiple different countries, particularly within the COVID-19-stricken EU, it may be helpful to know that the SSM can provide its information in English, French, German, Czech, Polish and Welsh.

This easy-to-use module can be added to our larger Tensor.NET time and attendance software, but cannot be purchased as a free-standing product.

If you are interested in our simple, user-friendly app which increases confidence in employees who are working from home, please contact us on +44 (01480 215530, email enquiries@tensor.co.uk or email your existing account manager.