Time and attendance control for remote teams: supervise or stimulate?

Controlling someone's time is boring for those who charge and for those who are accountable. In addition, it is an unproductive activity, so the ideal is to integrate accountability with the operation activity itself. The less friction the better. The less the person feels that he is stopping his work to be accountable, the better.

And if you can integrate accountability with a kind of satisfaction for having completed a task, this is also something very desirable to keep your team together and productive.

Creating a culture of accountability

Here comes the title of the text and its dilemma between inspecting or stimulating: timetracking (or preparation of timesheet) is the activity of generating reports for billing services provided by professionals who work by the hour; while the worklog is a simpler activity, whose purpose is to give visibility to the work done. Another name that this activity takes, in its most simplified variation, is status report. The emphasis on these activities varies between monitoring and encouraging participation in accountability.

Especially for people who are not used to working by the hour, the social satisfaction of sharing a completed task may be what was missing to adhere to a way of working that is essential to remote teams.

By this I mean that, in order to create a culture of accountability (by inspecting), perhaps the gateway is a simplified worklog, as a means by which people simply feel that their work is seen and their progress celebrated (by stimulating). If this objective is met, you will be able to improve the workflow and gather more information about the team's productivity, improving the workflow.

This data can inform a better decision when deciding who stays and who has to leave the team. In other words, monitoring the team's progress based on data is not merely bureaucratic. Collecting this information is essential to manage the team itself and know who is doing well and who is not.

The right tool

If we are dealing with time control, we are talking about paid work, which also means that the application will hardly be free.

Overall, a good app for this purpose costs USD 4.00/month/user. It may even be free, as is the Workingon , in which case integrations with your preferred work platform, chat, etc. will not be available. A competitor that promotes itself because it is free is the Supdate . A more mature alternative - and one that goes beyond the motivational worklog - is the Idonethis . As you might expect, Idonethis doesn't have a free version.

If you need a more hourly billing-oriented solution, consider Toggl or the Harvest . Particularly, I really like the selection promoted by the Zapier , in which these two applications are listed as the most suitable.

From my point of view, one of the advantages of investing in a remote time and attendance tool is getting rid of a lot of emails. That's why I don't see the point in investing in a solution that works around email, as is the case with TeamColony or the StatusHero . In fact, it is possible to notice that all the most modern applications are leaving email aside and building their operation based on platforms, such as the Jibble or the Jell and its integration with Slack.

Despite the great usefulness of these applications, when I deepened the research to write the post, I found it very curious that the tools are not very popular among startups. Be that as it may, for a complete list, see the ranking of recommendations from Stacklist . I got the impression that the person who works within the startup should not work by the hour. Hourly work tends to be more of an established business trait, which seems to me to be the reason for the low popularity of this class of apps in lists of recommendation tools for startups.

Conclusion

As you can see, it is quite difficult to distinguish the applications that only intend to keep the team motivated (by sharing each task completed) from more complex applications, whose mission is to generate reports for charging hours. There are many options on the market for whatever point in the journey you are in: sharing status, clock-in and clock-out (check-in) or even the preparation of billing reports.

The maturity of your team and your point in this journey (whether you need to improve how to work or how to charge) will be the most decisive in choosing the software. There is no shortage of options. The hardest thing is to realize what the real problem is that you need to solve.