What does your construction site look like?
If it's anything like the typical site, it will be unpredictable, noisy, and chaotic. And today, when you add the mobile nature of construction sites, you get a challenging, messy picture. But there is hope for order in this chaos.
Despite the fact that deskless construction teams make traditional tracking a huge challenge, there are ways to ensure that tracking is completed effectively for safety, payroll, and compliance.
This article presents nine of the best tips to ensure that deskless employee time in construction is ordered, safe, and staff love it, so projects are always completed on time, wherever staff base themselves.
1. Choose Mobile-Friendly Time Tracking
Workers in construction can quickly lose track of time when completing tasks, so it’s essential to equip them with the tools they need to work directly from their phones and record their task completion time via apps.
The benefits of these apps? They simplify clock-ins without the necessity for office access, which makes them perfect for deskless workers, and mobile access always reduces the reliance on paper timesheets, which are inconvenient and easily lost.
2. Use GPS-Enabled Clock-ins
It’s impossible to track construction even on one site, let alone across sites, right? The solution is to ensure you invest in a clock-in app with GPS functionality, so you can track not only when employees are on shift but where they are at all times.
GPS-enabled clock-ins reduce time theft, help verify records for audits and billing, and support safety checks by validating employee presence on a site, meaning these apps will always achieve ROI.
3. Automate Break and Overtime Calculations
It can be a messy process to work out all the breaks and overtime calculations manually, especially when one site has hundreds of workers on any given week.
Streamline the process using break and overtime automation. It will ensure you comply with labor laws, eliminate manual math errors, and support fair and consistent payroll calculations for all employees, eliminating disagreements and conflict. Supervisors love it too as it reduces monotonous administrative time for them, too.
4. Integrate With Payroll Systems
Integration is key to success with your time-tracking app, so ensure your new app integrates with all associated tools, especially payroll tools.
You’ll notice the benefits of this integration immediately, such as no more double entry and duplicated work records, hours will flow directly into payroll without manual correction, and fewer disputes will occur due to accurate records.
Construction employees will be happier and more likely to stay with your organization, too, as their pay will be faster and more reliable.
5. Offer Offline Functionality
A time-tracking app is heaven-sent for many sites, because several sites can have weak or nonexistent internet signals, and apps can work offline.
These apps prevent missing hours that would otherwise be lost due to intermittent tech issues by ensuring that the tracking process continues during outages, thanks to mobile offline functionalities. Apps also sync automatically when the connection returns, ensuring seamless and reliable shift-tracking without errors.
6. Enable Supervisor Approvals
Supervisors can only manage employees as much as their tools allow. Ensure that time tracking apps enable supervisor approvals so that there is some level of accountability from employees, and they are not misusing the apps to record false job codes and daily hours.
Supervisor approval ensures accuracy before apps export tracking data to payroll, ensuring fair pay for accurate hours, which immediately reduces the number of disputes that can occur over hours worked. On top of all that, this function also helps catch errors early, as long as supervisors are diligent with approvals.
7. Track Tasks and Job Codes
When you choose a time tracking app that tracks tasks and job codes, you are helping to allocate labor costs to the correct project, ensuring they are completed on time, which keeps clients satisfied, leading to repeat work.
These two features also improve accuracy for client billing, reducing disputes and ensuring due diligence for tax records.
Project managers always need support, and these features ensure they receive the support they need to evaluate productivity accurately.
8. Educate Workers on Proper Use
Employees can only use tools they have successfully adopted. They can only complete this process with organizational support.
Onboard employees to help them understand how to use and the importance of tracking tools. Offer brief, simple, accessible demonstrations for new hires to reduce technical confusion that can lead to serious errors and missed project completion deadlines.
Lastly, encourage all workers to report app issues early to ensure accuracy.
9. Choose the right Employee Attendance App
There are plenty of employee attendance apps out there, so it pays to take the time to choose the right one for your needs.
The right attendance app keeps workers accountable and sites organized because it is easy and accessible to use.
Look out for features like GPS, offline mode and payroll integration to ensure you get all the functionality you need.
Conclusion
Accurate tracking serves three main purposes: Improves trust, ensures accurate payroll calculations and guarantees financial safety.
These are the major reasons why every construction team should be provided with these apps and a robust digital adoption program for these mobile-first systems.
When construction organizations invest in time tracking tools, they enjoy several long-term benefits such as faster project delivery and legally and financially safer labor management, with fewer disputes.
