Tracking Remote Employee Hours Under the FLSA

Nothing in the FLSA distinguishes the kitchen table from the cubicle: non-exempt employees must be paid for all hours worked wherever they work them, on the same "suffer or permit" standard — and the employer keeps the same recordkeeping duty. What remote work changes is visibility. On-site, unrecorded work happens in front of supervisors; at home, it surfaces two years later as a spreadsheet of Slack timestamps attached to a collective-action complaint. The employer's protection isn't surveillance — it's process.

The DOL's Field Assistance Bulletin 2020-5 sets the workable rule: provide a reasonable process for reporting all work time — scheduled and unscheduled — pay everything reported, and you are not required to investigate further for time employees don't report through it. Two conditions keep the defense alive. First, the process must be genuinely usable: a one-tap correction beats a form requiring manager sign-off to admit working late. Second, you can't have constructive knowledge of unreported time — the manager replying to the 10pm message, the access logs reviewed for other reasons — and pay only the timesheet. And never discourage accurate reporting: a supervisor who signals that reporting overtime is a performance problem converts the process from defense to exhibit.

Decide the after-hours question deliberately: either non-exempt staff are genuinely offline after hours (and managers don't message them expecting answers), or after-hours minutes are recorded and paid — there is no lawful third option where the messages flow and the time vanishes. Meal and rest breaks keep their on-site rules: bona fide meal periods unpaid, short breaks paid, interruptions compensable — plus state-mandated break timing where it applies. Split schedules (school pickup, evening catch-up) are fine under federal law as long as every segment is recorded; the workday just has more pieces, and the overtime math runs on the weekly total.

Activity-monitoring software promises timekeeping and delivers complications: it misses offline work (calls, reading, thinking), so it systematically undercounts — dangerous when treated as the record — and several states (New York and Connecticut among them) require written notice of electronic monitoring, with consent regimes for anything touching private communications. The defensible architecture: employee-attested time records as the system of record, monitoring data used for corroboration and spot audits, written notice of whatever monitoring exists in the remote work policy, and audits that look for underreporting as energetically as overreporting — because the audit that only ever trims hours is the willfulness evidence that extends the FLSA lookback to three years.