4 Telecommuting Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them

4 Telecommuting Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them If correctly structured, telecommuting allows employers to offer flexibility to a minimum of some employees, while sustaining sufficient control to ensure acceptable productivity. But one consideration could elude some employers: you can inadvertently violate wage and hour legal guidelines â€" both federal or state â€" when dealing with non-exempt telecommuters. Telecommuters who are exempt are much less problematic. (Click right here to tweet this thought.) Here are 4 common wage-hour pitfalls to look out for, together with methods of avoiding them: Pitfall #1 â€" Losing Control of Overtime Smart employers have already got a written coverage requiring employees to examine with management earlier than working additional hours. That’s a smart method to reduce the risk of unapproved overtime. But such policies may be more durable to implement when employees aren’t bodily current. It’s straightforward to inform an worker to go home when you observe her or him toiling away after 5 pm. But it’s tougher to maintain control over the hours of somebody you see, say, solely as soon as each couple of weeks. Best follow: Make positive your telecommuters sign a written agreement masking hours and extra time. Pitfall #2 â€" Work Before/After Hours This is a subset of Pitfall #1. A telecommuting worker could perceive that they’re not supposed to work further hours without permission. But when workers work out of their homes, they’re never really away from the workplace, and the traces between work and non-work can get blurred irrespective of how nicely they perceive firm coverage. Think about this situation: A non-exempt telecommuting worker wakes up at three a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. She walks downstairs to her residence office and, extra to have one thing to do than anything, places in several hours of labor earlier than her day is supposed to start. If she works a normal forty-hour week on prime of this further session, the problem of extra time might arise. (And if it doesn’t, it’s because hours aren’t being properly tracked. See Pitfall #three.) Best practice: Set particular occasions of day before and after which the distant worker should not be doing any work. Pitfall #3 â€" Losing Track of Hours Even if your non-exempt telecommuters aren’t piling up unauthorized additional time, they'll still trigger wage-hour issues when you don’t monitor their hours properly. The thing is, your legacy techniques for maintaining observe of hours worked may not function very properly for individuals who don’t come to the workplace daily. Punch clocks, time cards and the like have been created for a era of workers who came in, labored the morning, had lunch, labored the afternoon and went residence. But how to track the hours of someone who’s working at residence in a distant suburb, or even one other state? Best practice: Consider having distant staff log out and in of office pc techniques to report hours. And have IT spot-examine to ensure they’re logging in during accredited hours. Pitfall #4 â€" Travel Issues Paradoxically enough, staff who don’t commute within the regular sense of the word may create questions of whether or not their occasional travel to and from the workplace is compensable time or not. Normally, employee commutes don’t need to be paid, but remote staff may get into particular conditions the place they do. For occasion, a telecommuter who works from house in the course of the morning after which drives to the workplace for a required assembly most likely can claim the journey time as compensable. Best follow: When possible, structure a telecommuter’s required appearances at the workplace so that they take a full working day. That method, the commute is unpaid, the identical means odd worker commutes are unpaid. How have you ever managed your working hours as a telecommuter (or as someone who works with one)? Share in the comments! Image: Flickr