An attendance policy for distributed teams that actually works
Most attendance policies were written for offices. Here is what to change for a team that lives across six time zones, including the parts you should not import from your old handbook.
Attendance policy in an office: did the person show up by 9 a.m.? Did they take longer than the allowed break? Were they at the desk for eight hours?
None of those questions work for a team distributed across six time zones with two parents on school runs, one engineer who works best at 6 a.m., and a designer who treats noon as the start of her day. The wrong policy fights all of them. The right policy uses three signals.
The three signals that matter
1. Was the planned work done in the planned window? If the engineer committed to "I'll review the PR by EOD Friday in my zone," did it happen by then? Attendance for async work is about commitments, not hours-at-desk.
2. Were the synchronous obligations honored? The standup, the customer call, the pairing block. These have a clock. Missing them needs a reason and a heads-up. Showing up to all of them is the floor, not the ceiling.
3. Is the person reachable during their stated hours? Every distributed team should have a "I am available between X and Y" expectation. If you're outside that window for a day, you say so. That's the entire attendance check.
What to drop from the old handbook
Drop the language of "lateness" for async work. A 9:32 start has no meaning if the team is in nine zones. Drop required hour windows for individual contributors who don't take customer calls. Drop "core hours" as a concept unless you can defend why a specific four-hour overlap is necessary for the role (sometimes it is — say so).
Keep, with adjustments: response-time expectations, on-call rotations, paid time off requests, and how to flag a sick day. Those still need policy. They just don't need a clock-in.
What attendance reporting should show
Three things, in order of usefulness: who missed a synchronous obligation this week, who took unplanned PTO without notice, and who has been consistently outside their stated hours for two weeks running. Anything beyond those is signal pollution.
Attendance is not surveillance. It's the floor that lets you trust the work happened. Build the policy from there.
Run attendance and time on one record.
Kordano Time keeps attendance, time tracked, exceptions, and edits all attached to the same source record. Payroll close gets calmer.
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