Remote work has become the norm, especially in tech. For teams spread across time zones, maintaining productivity and transparency is a real challenge—particularly when it comes to tracking time.
In this article, Mark Wormgoor, CEO of Tairi, a company that empowers businesses to drive revenue growth by integrating advanced technology and AI into their core strategies, explains how his company handles time tracking for remote workers.
Timewriting is critical for business
At Tairi, we specialize in building high-performance, remote software teams that integrate seamlessly with our clients’ organizations. While our clients often use ticketing systems like Jira or ClickUp to track the work that gets done, it’s equally essential to provide transparency regarding hours worked: timewriting.
Tracking hours might feel outdated, reminiscent of the old punch-in, punch-out days. However, in a remote-first world, it’s absolutely critical.
Our approach to tracking time
Trust is the cornerstone of our business. Our developers do not sit in our clients’ office, and without face-to-face interactions, clear communication and transparency are critical to establishing and maintaining trust. Some businesses take an extreme approach to remote work control, using intrusive monitoring tools that continuously track what a developer is doing, sometimes even taking periodic screenshots.
At Tairi, we’ve taken a more balanced (and human) approach. We ask our developers to track their time daily – logging the tasks they’ve completed in a way that makes sense to each client. Developers can refer to specific Jira tickets, tasks or software modules they’ve worked on. Completing a daily update typically takes just a couple of minutes, ensuring accurate and timely records without invading their privacy or autonomy.
How do we use the time tracking data?
Every Tuesday, we share a detailed weekly report with each client, showing the hours logged by each developer over the past week. This serves multiple purposes. First, it builds trust. Clients gain clear visibility into precisely how developers spend their time and what tasks they complete. This data also helps clients evaluate developer skill progression and assists in more accurately planning future features or sprints.
Additionally, we use recorded time for invoicing purposes. At the end of each month, we generate invoices directly from our time records. Since clients have already reviewed this data weekly, disputes or confusion during invoicing are rare.
Enforcing time writing discipline
Ensuring consistent, disciplined time tracking is challenging. For disciplined developers, updating their time on a daily basis takes only about 1-2 minutes at the end of each workday. For less disciplined team members, it can be harder.
We’ve implemented three strategies to help our developers maintain consistent timewriting practices::
- Initial daily reviews: In the first couple of weeks after onboarding, we review new developers’ timesheets daily. This early-stage monitoring ensures accuracy and helps build good habits from day one.
- Weekly client reviews: Since we send weekly reports to our clients, they can quickly spot omissions or discrepancies and raise concerns immediately, rather than waiting until month-end invoicing.
- Invoice validation: Most of our developers are freelancers who invoice us twice a month. Before paying these invoices, we verify the time entries against recorded logs. Payments are approved only after confirming the time records match.
Final Thoughts
In a remote-first world, effective time tracking isn’t merely administrative overhead – it’s a cornerstone of trust, accountability, and transparency. At Tairi, we’ve embraced a balanced approach to timewriting that respects developers’ autonomy and privacy while providing clients clear insights into productivity and progress. Our structured but non-intrusive practices help enforce discipline without the need for constant intervention or correction. Ultimately, careful time tracking is critical for remote, client-facing teams such as ours.
While our approach might not fit every organization, sharing our rationale and practices may provide valuable insights that your team can adapt and learn from.
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