Strategies Companies Can Use to Keep Track of Mobile Workers in 2023

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2023 promises to see a continuation of the ongoing tension between employers who want physically present workers and hybrid, remote, and mobile employees who are reluctant to give up the freedom and flexibility of the last few years. While the back and forth concerning these issues is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, there are several effective ways to verify where employees are and what activities they are carrying out. Consider whether your business could benefit from these strategies companies can use to keep track of mobile workers in 2023. 

Consider Whether Time and Attendance Tracking or Geotracking is Best 

Regardless of whether you need to keep track of a team distributed across multiple time zones or want to verify the location of your fleet of work vehicles, your business deserves a reliable mobile worker tracking service that delivers accurate results. This is especially true if your business requires you and your supervisors to spend unnecessary time and expense traveling between multiple physical locations, keeping track of numerous limited-time projects across your workforce, coordinating shifts, etc. The two best means of tracking mobile employees are apps for recording time and attendance or geotracking services. However, which mobile employee tracking method is best will depend mainly on the size and type of your business. 

Depending on whether your business engages in work that requires hourly billing, both options give you access to automatic services to keep track of hours worked. Not only does this allow you to catch any workers attempting to pad out their timesheets without putting in the actual hours, but you can also provide records to confirm the total hours worked for billing purposes. These apps can also provide your business with much-needed information and insight into the overall efficiency of both group projects and individual employees.  

Once you have definitive data on how your team handles everything from daily responsibilities to personal performance, you can start to make strategic business decisions from a place of knowledge. From being able to identify and correct inefficiencies to incorporating the typical time to complete standard activities into your worker's schedules, both types of apps can significantly improve your business. 

Tracking/Attendance Apps Have Many Benefits Beyond Just Being Timeclocks 

If your business still uses an old-fashioned physical time clock for employees to punch in and out of work, you will likely appreciate having an impartial arbiter to determine whether someone worked overtime or is repeatedly coming in late, and that makes payroll easier to calculate. You could settle for keeping track on paper or using web browser monitoring services, but apps for tracking mobile employees and their attendance also offer a wide range of valuable features not provided by traditional business tools. In addition to being able to issue assignments with built-in timers and include tags for information relevant to the tasks, tracking and attendance apps can also be used to organize shift schedules. Many have features for billing and invoicing clients and the option to incorporate a host of third-party apps for added convenience. 

Depending on what kind of information you are interested in keeping track of, a more advanced tracking and attendance app may be best for your business. Such apps offer features such as the ability to detect workers taking unauthorized or unpaid breaks, prevent people from being able to clock in ahead of schedule, and send notifications whether an employee has seen their shift schedule, schedule requirements, and payment rules. Other examples include being able to review hours worked versus hours scheduled, tools for managing PTO (paid time off), requiring facial recognition for logins as an additional security option, and being able to generate custom reports for comparison and review. 

For Keeping Track of Mobile Employees at Worksites, Geotracking is Essential 

In an ideal world, your employees would show up to work on time and in the correct location without needing to be checked on, but real life and business are rarely that neat and tidy. If you have scheduled several workers to arrive at a worksite and want a reliable means of tracking their physical locations in real-time, you should strongly consider implementing geotracking apps across your employee's PC and smartphones. These apps can also be incredibly useful in helping your business determine whether any transportation is being used efficiently so that more time is spent working than driving or commuting.  

If you are a supervisor whose responsibility involves routine travel between multiple job sites which are located significant distances from each other, you can easily rack up the hours just going from site to site. By incorporating geotracking apps on your employees' smartphones, you can tell at a glance whether everyone is where they are supposed to be and whether they arrived in a timely fashion. On top of using GPS technology to track mobile workers' locations, geotracking apps can also utilize fleet tracking to monitor the location of work vehicles. In addition, they can provide software for tracking mouse and keyboard usage on installed PCs, automatically generate reports for minimizing mileage traveled, issue traveling directions to workers, and include geofencing services to ensure employees are not inclined to wander off. 

Before deciding which type of mobile employee tracking strategy is right for you, consider the size and scope of your business and review apps carefully before making a decision. Check out our other business articles to learn more about different strategies for making technology work for you. 

About Dan Martin: Daniel Martin is a technology researcher and writer with more than a decade of experience. He is a professional librarian and an experienced tech teacher, writer and blogger. Specializing in technology, Dan has taught courses in technology and writing at the college level, developed web pages for businesses and higher educational institutions, written on tech topics for leading national publications and created numerous how-to guides.