Thinking Out Loud: Handling WFH and Hybrid-work

More controls and permissions, or keep it simple stupid…?

In an earlier post, we’d spoken about how features and complexity go hand in hand. Here’s an illustration…

FieldSense predates the Covid-19 pandemic, so like the rest of the world, we were caught flat-footed when the lockdowns began in early 2020 and Work-from-Home became the new normal for most. And while all of us punched-in and punched-out as usual, the location either showed an address or then if you’d pinned it as your home, it showed accordingly. And as the pandemic ebbed and raged again, WFH continued to evolve — and dare we say, mutate?

Some businesses didn’t care where you punched-in and punched-out from, whether you were in the office-city or your hometown, or in a seaside resort. Yet others required you to be in the same city as your office location. Some needed you to take a selfie standing at your home-door with lat-long coordinates and upload into their attendance monitoring system…. and all manner of variations in between.

When lockdowns eased, work became hybrid, office-centric hybrid, some-staff-always-WFH and it’s still evolving. Now, if you’re office-staff and not field-staff, FieldSense can be configured to let you only punch-in when you’re within 50-meters of your office address. But if you’re now hybrid, i.e. some days in office and some days from home, that setting becomes a problem. And then if your business only lets you punch-in from your ‘home address as per HR-records’, and you needed to work from your parents’ home, should that require separate submission and approval? What about field-staff in hybrid mode? Can they punch-in from their homes?

The point is, every additional permission or setting also introduces the parameters involved in configuring the setting, sometimes more than one, e.g. defining ‘parents’ home’, getting approved, allowing punch-in from home, parents’ home, and office. Our experience with ourselves and with a lot of FieldSense accounts was that most businesses were fine with allowing people to punch-in from anywhere — and still continue with the same.

So how would you like us to develop WFH and Hybrid-work support in FieldSense? Look forward to hearing from you…