Survey shows why you & Payroll should track remote workers’ hours carefully

Are you making sure you and Payroll are accounting for all the time your people spend working, especially for your remote workers?

You may think you know how many hours employees are working each day in the office and at home based on the hours they’re typically scheduled to work. However, you might want to take a second look, based on the results of the most recent BLS American Time Use Survey.

In 2021, on the days they worked, 38% of employed people surveyed did all or some of their work at home, while 68% did some or all of their work at the workplace.

As you can imagine, these stats are a little different than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

BLS data from 2019 shows that workers were less likely to work at home and more likely to spend their workday at their workplace. Then, 24% of workers did some or all of their work at home when they worked, compared to 82% of workers who did some of all of their work on days they worked at their place of employment.

Currently, those who worked at their workplace put in an average of 7.8 hours per day of work on workdays, compared to 5.6 hours per day for those who worked at home.

Hidden dangers with remote workers’ schedules

While this may give you pause at first, making you question how productive your remote workers are, the average for teleworkers includes all hours they worked at home – whether they fell on a scheduled workday or not.

That means remote workers could be putting in even more hours than your office workers, since they may be working those hours during nights and weekends. And that could have compliance implications for you and your Payroll team.

For your nonexempt employees, you’ll need to have accurate records of their time worked so Payroll can pay any overtime owed correctly and your company can avoid wage and hour issues.

And even with exempt employees, you’ll want to know if they’re working extra hours off the clock at home, as this could lead to burnout that negatively impacts productivity. It can also contribute to turnover costs if employees become so frustrated and overwhelmed that they resign.

The first step here is to check in with employees’ direct managers and supervisors, as they may have direct or indirect knowledge that people are putting in extra work time after hours (e.g., if they’re sending or receiving emails and texts on evenings and weekends).

On the off chance a worker sues for back overtime pay for working extra hours, logs of work computer access and email messages sent outside of scheduled work time can be evidence that supports their claim. Courts use this type of data as proof managers were aware the employee was working outside of their scheduled hours. So it’s key to nip this behavior in the bud once you find out it’s happening.

Whether it involves tweaking an employee’s schedule or workload, making sure people are working reasonable hours – and that you and their managers are aware of how many hours they’re putting in each week – is important to your bottom line.