Remote and hybrid schedules give employees more freedom over their day, and that freedom is exactly what makes a few stray minutes on a timesheet easy to lose track of. Most of it isn’t malicious: an extra ten minutes on a lunch break, a late clock-out logged as on time, a few personal errands run during a shift nobody’s watching closely. String enough of that together across a team, though, and it starts to look like stealing time at work, even when nobody set out to do it that way.
What the data actually shows
Time theft isn’t unique to remote work, but remote and hybrid setups remove the one thing that used to catch some of it: a manager physically seeing who’s at their desk. A 2026 survey of U.S. hourly workers conducted by research firm Centiment found that 43% have submitted a timesheet that didn’t match the hours they actually worked, and 17% say they do it weekly or more often. The same survey found 25% have clocked in or out for a coworker at least once in the past year.
None of that means your team is dishonest. It means that without a clear way to verify hours, honest people drift and dishonest people don’t get caught. Making the clock-in itself harder to fudge works better than watching people more closely.
What actually helps
The strategies that work tend to be boring and specific rather than sweeping:
- A clock-in method that can’t be faked for someone else, like a fingerprint time clock, removes buddy punching without anyone having to police it.
- GPS-stamped mobile clock-ins for field or multi-site employees confirm where a punch happened, not just when.
- A written policy on breaks, like how you handle unpaid lunch breaks, removes the ambiguity that lets “a few extra minutes” become a habit.
A clock-in that holds up to scrutiny and a policy people actually know about does most of the work here, no monitoring software required.
Hybrid teams need the same rules, applied consistently
As more companies settle into permanent hybrid schedules, the real problem is usually inconsistency: the same employee tracked differently depending on which day it is. We wrote more about matching your time clock setup to a hybrid schedule if that’s the gap you’re dealing with.
Get the clock-in method right, and the honesty problem mostly takes care of itself.
Try TimeTrakGO free for 14 days to see how fingerprint, mobile GPS, and web-based clock-in options work for your team. Setup assistance is included, and most accounts are up and running within minutes.
About the Author: Brian Zurawski
