Construction workers. Landscapers. Couriers. Cleaners. Home contractors. These roles—and many more—are always on the move. And more workers are joining the mobile ranks as industries shift to remote collaboration and encourage working from home.
To ensure workers are on site, companies rely on geofencing. Geofencing requires a worker’s location to be tracked relative to a virtual boundary, and any time the perimeter is broken, an employer (usually the payroll admin) is notified.
It’s an attractive feature for employers—when it works.
Geofencing is supposed to give employers confidence that workers are where they say they are, but it often has errors. When these tools malfunction, payroll admins and managers are bombarded with notifications, frustrating leaders with little time and hurting the morale of workers who are just trying to clock in. If a company is using geofencing, it usually means a worker’s location must be tracked all the time. It’s a complex and unnecessary approach, and we want to change it.
How geotagging in Everee works
We know employers need to record worker locations to improve time tracking and prevent time fraud. Everee now offers geotagging that enables workers to clock in and out with their mobile devices, recording their location in the process.
We integrated geotagging to work with Everee’s manager time verification tool, which allows managers to approve hours worked and confirm the employee was in the right place when they used the timeclock. All of this means much faster and a more accurate payroll process.
Why we built geotagging now
Inaccurate geofencing frustrates managers. A top complaint about geofencing tools is inaccurate location recording. If workers are shown to be outside the perimeter, clocking in or out is prevented—even when the location is an error. Whether it’s software bugs or outages, issues with location accuracy cause headaches for workers trying to do their job and managers reconciling payroll.
Employers should see what they need to know. Geotagging creates less noise for employers. Instead of receiving constant notifications when workers move outside of geofences, employers can see the locations of time punches in an easy-to-read map view. In Everee, admins and managers can set date ranges, view individual employees or review groups of employees.
Traditional geofencing doesn’t work in a Covid world. The boundaries of a geofence must be pre-defined, but what happens when unknown forces, like a pandemic, disrupt the normal locations of work? When workers are performing their tasks remotely, suddenly new geofences must be built for each and every location. This is a cumbersome task that doesn’t allow for the agility companies need in changing conditions.
Worker privacy matters. Geotagging records the locations of workers when they clock in or out without tracking their location in between. This affords workers more privacy. Legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has forced many companies to reconcile their operations with data privacy law. As consumer protections grow, companies should focus on collecting the right balance of information; enough to accomplish the goal but not invade privacy.
Payroll admins and workers deserve better tools
In talking with customers about their time-tracking and payroll tools, we learned that many businesses end up turning off geofencing—even if it’s a feature they’re paying for—due to confusion, inaccuracy or worker pushback. Frustration is an all too common theme with payroll and time tracking apps, which is why we’re dedicated to building flexible solutions that employers and workers love.
Geotagging in Everee is easy-to-use functionality that allows admins to quickly ensure time punches are happening where and when they should and gives them the added confidence that payroll payments are accurate. It’s available now in Everee.
Check out our help docs for getting started. Want to see geotagging in action? Let’s talk.