Do you know where all of your employees are working from? It seems like a straightforward question at first, but if you have people away on business trips or working remotely, keeping track can be a huge challenge. With greater work location flexibility than ever before, many companies lack visibility into where work is actually happening on a day-to-day basis. This uncertainty creates risks related to immigration, tax, duty of care and more.

The growing challenge of tracking employee locations

According to our recent research, 58% of employees work away from the office more often post-pandemic. Employees are regularly crossing state and international borders for work. In fact, our study revealed that 78% of employees worked outside their state or country during the course of a year. In many organizations, employees from various teams may be away on business trips, working remotely on variable schedules, or transitioning in and out of long-term relocations. Depending on the size of your organization and your work location policies, this could mean a significant number of employees whose exact location on any given day is unclear.

Can’t you just rely on your employees to tell you where they are?

You can, and many organizations do put the burden on employees to self-report where they are working from and update HR if and when they start working somewhere new. However, we know from our research that employees often fail to inform HR when they change work location. According to our research, 67% of employees who worked outside of their state or country did not report all their days working remotely to HR. This contrasts with the belief among 86% of HR professionals that their employees will accurately self-report all locations they are moving between. With such a big discrepancy between HR confidence and the reality, it’s not surprising that we found that nearly half of HR professionals say they have discovered employees working where they shouldn’t be.

However, this confusion could be avoided with the right tools and processes in place. Employees are generally pragmatic and most accept that if they want work location flexibility, their employers are entitled to know where they are working from. Our survey showed that the vast majority of employees were comfortable sharing their location with their employer at the country and state level (94%), city level (92%) and even street level (79%) for compliance purposes. 

Why does knowing where your employees are really matter?

So you don’t know exactly where every employee is working from every day. Surely, as long as work gets done, it doesn’t really matter? Unfortunately, this is not the case. Not knowing where your employees are can expose businesses to very serious risks, including:

• Compliance risks relating to both tax and immigration, such as triggering permanent establishment in unintended jurisdictions, failing to comply with Schengen Area travel restrictions, and making payroll withholding errors that could result in fines or penalties.
• Security and data protection concerns such as the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive company data and inadequate security measures based on employee location and risk level.

Not to mention that without knowing where your employees are, it is almost impossible to: 

• Provide effective duty of care - particularly in emergency situations
• Gain insights into work patterns
• Optimize office space usage based on actual employee work locations
• Plan collaborative in-office days efficiently

How Topia’s work travel and work location tracking solution can help

Managing a mobile, distributed workforce requires real-time visibility and that’s where Topia comes in.

Topia’s travel and work location tracking solution allows you to:

• Identify where all of your employees are working from when they’re not in the office.
• Track employee work locations at a jurisdictional level, ensuring compliance while respecting privacy.
• Receive early compliance alerts for tax and immigration risks.
• Maintain an audit-ready system of record to avoid fines, penalties, and legal complications.

Companies using our travel and work location tracking solution can pull location data from a range of sources, including travel and expense systems or on-device apps which employees can easily install themselves. 

Find out more about how Topia can help your organization stay compliant in an era of employee work location flexibility here.