3 Software Solutions Perfect

for Flexible Work

Introduction

In 1967, the Hewlett-Packard plant in Boeblingen, Germany, decided to try something different.
Instead of making all workers come in at 9 a.m., leadership instituted a new policy that stated
employees could arrive to work anytime between 6:30 and 9:30 a.m. as long as they still worked
a full eight-hour day.

By 1972, “flex-time”—as it became known—had spread company-wide, popularizing flexible

work arrangements (FWA).

Fast forward to today and it’s clear that FWAs are no longer the exception, but the rule:

80% of North American companies offered flexible arrangements, such as job

sharing or telecommuting, to their workers last year.

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Introduction (continued)
These arrangements help attract talent and improve
employee retention, engagement and productivity. They
also present a number of administrative and
management challenges to organizations:

● How do you accurately track hours worked for

employees with irregular schedules?
● Can you maintain collaboration when team
members aren’t in the same room?
● Are your employees really working when they say
they are?

Because online meeting software and shared calendars

can do only so much, here’s how three types of software
Tim takes advantage of his company’s FWA to work with
can help managers and HR departments stay fully on
a giant glare on his screen
top of their organization’s flexible work arrangement.

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Ensure Remote Workers Stay On Task:
Project Management Software
Research has shown that remote workers are more productive than their in-office peers, but only half of managers
actually believe this to be true.

The reason is simple: without the ability to stop by someone’s desk, managers can never really know if their remote
workers are being as productive as they should be.

Or can they? Cloud-based project management (PM) platforms are getting better at tracking remote worker
productivity.

At a high level, these systems allow managers to assign tasks and set due dates. As workers complete tasks, they
can submit their work and mark the task as complete or assign it to the next worker in the project funnel.

Beyond due dates, platforms such as Workfront also allow managers to specify desired task durations (ex. three
days) and assign priority within an individual worker’s task list.

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Ensure Remote Workers Stay On Task:
Project Management Software (continued)
If any task goes beyond the set duration or due date,
automatic notifications are sent to managers so they can
reach out to their remote worker and see what’s going
on.

Some platforms go even further to ensure remote

workers stay productive. At the cost of privacy
(something you should keep in mind and run by your
team before implementing), systems such as HiveDesk
make workers check in and out of projects to track
precisely how long they’ve worked on something.

Such systems take automatic screenshots which are sent

directly to the employee’s manager, to ensure that

Project task list in Workfront (Source) workers aren’t browsing Facebook on company time.

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Ensure Remote Workers Stay On Task:
Project Management Software (continued)
With a cloud-based platform, workers outside of the office can access the software through a browser on any
web-enabled device, an advantage over on-premise systems.

If you aren’t using PM software to track your remote workforce (and chances are, that’s the case), these systems
can help you maintain accountability among members of a multi-location team.

Read more about remote work software systems: “5 Software Systems You Need for Effective
Remote Work.”

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Accurately Track Fluctuating Hours:
Time & Attendance Software
Project management tools are a great way to track project-based teams, but what about your hourly
workers—especially ones in a job share, part-time, flexible shift or compressed work week arrangement where
schedules vary?

If you fail to accurately track hours in these cases, you could be facing increased compensation costs for benefits
and overtime pay, or worse, a call from the Department of Labor.

Luckily, as options for workers’ hours have increased, so too have the options to track them with time and
attendance software. To prevent time theft, your organization may rely on biometric clocks, badge readers or
keypads on the wall to have shift workers punch in around the office with their unique ID or thumbprint.

Integrating time and attendance software with these hardware systems ensures that punches are tracked
accurately, and provides notifications if workers deviate from preset schedules or rules.

For example, you may set your system to disavow any punches outside of a scheduled shift.

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Accurately Track Fluctuating Hours:
Time & Attendance Software (continued)

For added flexibility, cloud-based time and attendance

systems also allow your employees to clock in and out
from their phone or computer if they work outside of the
office. Some platforms, like Tsheets, use GPS to track
where your workers are clocking in from—a great option
for field service companies that need to track their
mobile workforce.

Mobile time cards in Tsheets (Source)

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Correlate Flexible Work with Flexible Pay:
Integrated Payroll Software
Tracking flexible hours is one thing, but correlating it with an accurate paycheck is another feat entirely—one that
could require a ton of manual work and duplicate entries if your HR department has separate payroll and time and
attendance systems.

By linking the two systems together, or investing in a core HR suite with integrated payroll and time and
attendance applications, your flexible workers’ tracked hours can be automatically turned into accurate paychecks.

Depending on each employee’s work status—part-time or full, exempt or not—a system like Intuit Full Service
Payroll can withhold necessary taxes and automatically flag anything for review if it seems out of the ordinary (an
employee working 32 hours one week then 40 the next, for example).

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Correlate Flexible Work with Flexible Pay:
Integrated Payroll Software (continued)

These platforms also offer transparency, as payroll stubs

emailed out to workers automatically detail how their
compensation breaks down between income, benefits,
overtime, bonuses, taxes withheld and more to avoid
any confusion—a handy feature for workers whose
paychecks differ drastically from pay period to pay
period.

Flagged payroll entry in Intuit Full Service Payroll (Source)

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Next steps

Want to learn more about these software platforms? Check out pricing and functionality information for hundreds of
different HR and project management platforms today.

Explore HR categories:

● Time Clock Software

● Employee Scheduling Software
● Benefits Administration Software
● OKR software
● Employee Engagement Software

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