Remote Working and Time-Tracking

Facial recognition makes remote work more seamless and less distributed. By 2025, 22 percent of the workforce will work remotely. On the whole, remote workers report being 22 percent happier at work and 30 percent more productive and engaged. Since the beginning of COVID-19, 47 percent of remote workers have experienced burnout, and 47 of businesses report remote work is here to stay. 

However, the loss of work and home boundaries and longer hours have created new challenges. Nearly 75 percent of remote workers experience stress at work, as 43 percent are more likely to work over 40 hours a week. Meanwhile, 37 percent of remote workers report working longer hours than they previously did in person, and 22 percent find it difficult to unplug from their jobs. Remote work can lead to disorganization, consequently lowering productivity and increasing this mounting stress. Lack of at-home work organization creates frustration and impacts workplace wellbeing. Teams can struggle with project management and experience project delays. Moreover, the lack of direction can lead to attention becoming scattered and a lower quality of work. As a result, employees may feel like nothing meaningful was accomplished, despite a long or busy day. Interruptions and distractions competing for your attention make it hard to get tasks done. In fact, 90 percent of Americans felt more refreshed after stepping away from their computer at lunch, creating a more enjoyable work experience and higher productivity. 

Automatic time tracking thus has many benefits in the workplace. Time tracking can help employees identify where their time is being spent, track their long-term progress, take breaks and time off appropriately, prioritize what’s most important, focus better while working, and organize their work day. For businesses, the benefits of time tracking include transparency into work processes, increased accountability in employees, an understanding of your billing and operational efficiency, knowledge of where resource demand is the highest, and tracking where the budget gets wasted. In the United States, filling timesheets wastes $7.4 billion a day in productivity—just from workers forgetting to log their hours. 

There are, however, typical time-tracking challenges. For instance, 82 percent of managers are concerned that remote working may reduce employee productivity and focus. Employees spend up to four hours a week on unproductive tasks. For example, 28 percent spend their time just checking and answering email, 53 percent spend three or more hours per day on non-work activities, and 34 percent waste two to five hours a week on calls and meetings that achieve little to nothing. In fact, 38 percent of employees still use traditional paper timesheets and punch cards in the United States, while 60 percent of companies with employees who work remotely are using monitoring software to track employee activity and productivity. 

Facial recognition allows seamless time tracking without distracting employees from their tasks or adding to anyone’s workload. Track anywhere and anytime as facial recognition is spoof-proof, works on most smartphone devices, works via web browser, and is backed by AI and ML. Facial recognition for time tracking allows a distributed workforce more time and less busy work.