Hybrid working is no longer an exception: it is the new normal for millions of Italian companies. According to data from the Smart Working Observatory of the Polytechnic University of Milan, in 2025 over 3.6 million Italian workers will work in agile mode at least part of the week. Yet, while companies have adapted spaces and tools to remote working, attendance management has often remained stuck with solutions designed for the office world: the physical time clock, the signature sheet, the start-of-shift email.
The result? A chaotic mix of shared Excel sheets, WhatsApp messages ("I'm working from 9 today"), and informal promises that can't stand up to either an audit by the employment consultant or a dispute. In this article we see what the real problems are, what the law requires and how to structure an attendance tracking system that really works for a hybrid team.
The concrete challenges of managing attendance in smart working
How do I know if the employee really worked 8 hours?
It's the question that almost no manager dares to ask out loud, but that everyone asks themselves. And the honest answer is: with most of the tools currently in use in Italian SMEs, you can't know for sure.
It's not about distrust in employees — most work properly. It's about having objective and traceable data for:
- Correctly calculate overtime, recovery and holidays
- Respond to any complaints from the worker
- Demonstrate compliance with smart working regulations in case of inspection
Shared Excel: A silent disaster
Shared Excel sheet on SharePoint or Google Sheets seems like a simple solution. In reality it accumulates problems:
- Different versions saved locally by different people
- No certified timestamps on who entered what and when
- Employees who "forget" to update it, especially on chaotic days
- Zero automation: someone still has to reprocess the data every month for the employment consultant
A study by the Society for Human Resource Management estimates that companies waste an average of 4.5 hours per employee per month in manually managing attendance data. For a team of 20 people, that's 90 hours a month of unproductive work.
Law 81/2017 on agile working: what it provides for time recording
Law 81/2017 ("Measures for the protection of non-entrepreneurial self-employment and measures aimed at encouraging flexible organization of the times and places of subordinate work") is the reference standard for smart working in Italy.
Article 18 establishes that the flexible worker carries out his/her activity without precise time constraints, but within the limits of the maximum duration of daily and weekly working hours established by law and collective bargaining. This means that the company must still be able to demonstrate that the worker does not exceed the established hourly limits — and to do this, tracked data is needed.
The wrong tools that many SMEs still use
Google Sheets, email, WhatsApp: the real risks
Let's talk clearly about what happens when you use a WhatsApp message as a "clock in":
Legal issue: A WhatsApp message does not have the value of a certified administrative document. In the event of a dispute over unpaid overtime, the judge will almost always find the employer who does not have a formal reporting system in the wrong.
GDPR Issue: Messages on employee personal messaging apps end up on servers outside of company control. Collecting working time data via WhatsApp may constitute processing of personal data that does not comply with EU Regulation 2016/679.
Operational problem: How do you generate the monthly hourly statement for the employment consultant starting from 200 WhatsApp messages? Someone has to do it by hand, with all the errors involved.
Emails are no better off: they are difficult to aggregate, have no standard format, and require a lot of manual work to extract useful data.
How a good remote attendance solution works
A modern solution for smart working attendance tracking must have some non-negotiable characteristics.
Stamping from app with certified timestamp
The employee opens the app on their smartphone and presses "Start shift". The system records:
- Exact date and time (timestamp certified by the server, not editable by the client)
- Type of day (smart working, on site, away)
- Any notes
The same operation closes the clocking at the end of the shift. The data is immutable, traceable and consultable at any time.
No mandatory GPS for home workers
This is a point that often causes confusion. Geofencing and GPS tracking are powerful tools, but for smart workers they are neither necessary nor appropriate:
- The worker has the right not to be geolocalized at home
- The Workers' Statute (art. 4, modified by the Jobs Act) places precise limits on remote control
- The GDPR requires that the data collected is proportionate to the purpose
A good remote attendance app allows clocking in without GPS (or with optional GPS and explicit consent), recording only the time — which is the only data needed for attendance management.
Automatic reports that can be consulted by the manager
The manager must be able to see the status of the team in real time: who has clocked in, who is on break, who has not yet started the shift. And at the end of the month, you need to be able to export a formatted report for the employment consultant with one click — not after three hours of work on Excel.
Management of holiday/permission requests in the app
Absence management is closely linked to presence: an integrated system allows the employee to request holidays or time off directly from the app, the manager to approve or reject with a notification, and the system to automatically update the calendar and time reports. Eliminate “Hi, can I pick up Friday?” emails. lost in mail folders.
Legal aspects: what you must put in the agile working contract
Individual agreement mandatory
Law 81/2017 (art. 19) requires that every agile working relationship be regulated by an individual written agreement between employer and employee. This agreement must specify:
- The methods of carrying out the off-site service
- Rest times and technical and organizational measures to ensure disconnection
- The forms of exercise of the employer's management and control power
- The work tools used
A generic agreement such as "the employee will be able to work from home when necessary" is not sufficient.
Right to disconnect
The art. 19 of Law 81/2017 explicitly provides that the individual agreement regulates the worker's rest times and the technical and organizational measures necessary to ensure disconnection. In practice, you must indicate the time slots in which the employee cannot be reached and has no obligation to respond.
This is not a formality: the Labor Inspectorate has started to verify this aspect in inspections.
How to track without violating privacy
The golden rule is data minimization: collect only what you need for the stated purpose. For smart working attendance management, you need:
- Shift start and end times ✓
- Type of day (smart working / on-site) ✓
- Absences and reasons ✓
You don't need:
- Continuous geolocation of the home worker ✗
- Screenshot of computer activity ✗
- Monitoring of open applications ✗
Any system that collects data in addition to this list must be justified by a specific purpose, documented in the Processing Register and communicated to the employee via privacy information (art. 13 GDPR).
Building a system that really works
Managing the attendance of a hybrid team is not technically difficult. The real obstacle is abandoning the makeshift solutions we have become accustomed to - the Excel sheet, the WhatsApp message, the start-of-shift email - and adopting a tool designed for this purpose.
The advantages are concrete: less time wasted in manual management, reliable data for the employment consultant, compliance with smart working regulations and a clear response to any disputes.
Pintime is the attendance tracking app designed for Italian SMEs that work in hybrid mode: clocking in from smartphones without hardware, integrated holiday and leave management, reports ready for the employment consultant. You can get started with a free trial and have your team up and running in less than 15 minutes.