In an office, attendance takes care of itself. You can see who's in. Remote, the founder of a small team ends up with an uncomfortable question: is everyone actually working today, and how would I know?
The usual answers are either nothing ("we trust each other", until something goes wrong) or too much (screenshot software that sours the team within a month). There's a sensible middle, and it depends on what you actually need to know.
Decide what you're really tracking
"Attendance" covers three different questions. Be clear which ones matter to you.
| Question | Why it matters | What tracks it |
|---|---|---|
| Is this person working today? | Planning, client cover, knowing who to ask | Daily check-in |
| Are they reachable when needed? | Collaboration across time zones | Core hours |
| How many hours did they work? | Hourly pay, overtime law, billing | Time clock or timesheets |
Most small agencies, studios and dev shops on salaried staff need the first two. Only teams that pay by the hour, bill strictly by the hour, or have legal timekeeping obligations need the third.
That distinction saves a lot of grief. If you pay salaries and bill by project, you don't need to know that someone worked 7 hours 42 minutes on Tuesday. You need to know they were working, what they did, and that they were around when the client called.
The three building blocks
1. A daily check-in and check-out
The simplest attendance system is a message at the start of the day and one at the end. The start says "I'm on, here's what I'm doing". The end says "I'm off, here's what got done".
Check-in (9:05): On. Today: Northfield checkout fixes, Halden QA.
Check-out (17:40): Off. Done: checkout fixes merged. Halden QA 50%, finishing tomorrow.
This tells you who's working, roughly when, and what they did, which is more useful than a clock-in timestamp. It also doubles as your status update, so people aren't writing two things.
2. Core hours
Agree a window when everyone is reachable. For a team spread between, say, London and Lahore, that might be 10:00 to 13:00 London time (14:00 to 17:00 in Lahore). Outside core hours, people work when it suits them, as long as the work gets done.
Write it down:
Core hours are 10:00–13:00 UK time, Monday to Friday. During core hours, please be reachable on chat within 30 minutes. If you'll be away during core hours, say so in your check-in.
Core hours replace the impossible goal of "everyone online all day" with a narrow, fair expectation. They also make distributed teams across time zones workable.
3. A shared leave calendar
Half of remote "attendance problems" are actually leave nobody wrote down. Someone took a half day, mentioned it in a DM a week ago, and the founder spends the morning wondering where they are.
Put all leave, sick days and public holidays in one calendar the whole team can see. If your team spans countries, include each person's public holidays; Eid, Thanksgiving and the August bank holiday don't fall on the same days.
Setting it up by team size
Up to 6 people: a channel
Create an #attendance or #daily channel. People post a check-in and check-out. Leave goes in a shared calendar. Total cost: nothing. Total effort for you: a glance each morning.
6 to 20 people: a check-in tool
Past about six people, a channel becomes a scroll you won't read, and patterns (someone checking in late most Mondays) get lost. A tool that records each person's daily check-in and check-out and gives you a summary works better.
In Suprwork, Check-ins does this: people check in and out each day, typed or spoken, and the workspace owner gets a written summary of the whole team daily, with blockers and patterns over recent weeks called out. Time off handles leave requests and approvals, with a team calendar of who's away. To be clear about the limits: Check-ins isn't a payroll-grade time clock. It has no GPS and no export, and it won't chase someone who doesn't check in.
Hourly staff or legal timekeeping: a proper clock-in system
If you pay by the hour, have overtime obligations, or work in a sector where records of hours are required, use a dedicated time and attendance system with clock-in, approval and export to payroll. That's what those tools are built for, and a check-in summary isn't a substitute.
What to do with the data
Attendance tracking is only useful if you look at it, and only fair if you look at patterns rather than single days.
Daily: glance at who's checked in. If someone hasn't by an hour after their usual start and there's no leave booked, send one friendly message: "All good today?" Usually there's a simple answer.
Weekly: look for patterns. The same person late most Mondays. Someone who checks out increasingly early. A run of missed check-ins.
In 1:1s: raise patterns with specifics. "You've checked in after 11 on four of the last six Mondays. What's going on?" is a fair question. It might be childcare, a health issue, or a side job. You can't solve it until you know.
Handling the awkward cases
Someone works odd hours by choice. A developer who prefers 13:00 to 21:00 is fine, as long as core hours are covered and their check-in says when they're on. Write the arrangement down so nobody else wonders.
Someone checks in, then disappears. Being unreachable for most of core hours on a day they were checked in is worth a quiet question. Once is life. A pattern is a conversation.
Sick days without notice. Agree a simple rule: message your lead by a set time if you're off sick. Then log it in the leave calendar so it's not forgotten when you look back over the year.
Half days and appointments. Ask people to book them like leave, even if you don't deduct anything. The point is visibility, not accounting.
Contractors. They're not employees, so attendance rules apply differently, and in some countries treating them like staff has legal consequences. Agree availability and delivery dates in the contract instead of asking them to check in like everyone else.
What not to do
Don't install screenshot or keystroke software on a small salaried team. It measures activity, not work, and it tells the team you don't trust them. The people you most want to keep will leave first. If you do have a reason to monitor, check the law where your staff live first; rules vary a lot.
Don't require green dots. "Always show as active" teaches people to wiggle a mouse. It says nothing about whether work happened.
Don't track attendance without tracking output. Someone who checks in at 9:00 sharp and delivers half of what they planned is a bigger problem than someone who starts at 10:30 and delivers everything. Pair attendance with a measure of what got done; see measuring remote team productivity.
Don't make it different for different people. Same rules for everyone, including senior staff. Nothing kills a policy faster than visible exceptions.
A one-paragraph policy you can copy
We work remotely and trust each other to manage our time. Each working day, post a check-in when you start (what you're working on) and a check-out when you finish (what got done). Core hours are 10:00–13:00 UK time, when we expect you to be reachable. Book all leave in the shared calendar in advance, and let your lead know by 10:00 if you're off sick. If something's getting in the way of this, talk to your lead; we'd rather know.
This week
Write down your core hours and post the policy above, adjusted to your team. Start the daily check-in and check-out in a channel or tool on Monday. Check everyone has booked their upcoming leave in one calendar. Then resist the urge to look for problems for the first two weeks; let the habit settle before you read anything into it.