"I want to see where my people are right now" is one of the most common requests we hear from service business owners. The logic is straightforward: you pay for time, you want to know the time went into work.
We hear it regularly and still say no. Not on principle — we ran the numbers. Here is why buying attendance control is an expensive way to measure the wrong thing.
1. The request is almost always hiding a different problem
When an owner says "I want to see where my people are," they rarely mean distrust. They mean "I don't know what's happening on my sites." Tracking is a solution they invented themselves, because nobody showed them another one.
Easy to test. Think of the last time a crew let you down. What exactly did you find out too late? Almost certainly the answer is about outcome: the work had to be redone, the client complained, you sent someone back, there was no report. GPS tracking prevents none of those.
2. Monitoring corrupts the very data it was bought to produce
This is the core argument, and it isn't about feelings. The data goes into the system from the same person the data is used to judge. They won't stop stretching the job — they'll stop pressing the button honestly.
There is research on this. In work published by Harvard Business Review in 2022, the authors ran two studies: a survey of over a hundred employees and an experiment with two hundred participants. The result: monitored employees were more likely to break rules — taking unapproved breaks, ignoring instructions, deliberately working slower, cheating on tasks. The mechanism the authors describe: monitoring reduces a person's sense of personal responsibility for their own conduct. If the system is watching me, the system is accountable for me.
The practical takeaway for an owner: you are paying for a tool that produces plausible but unreliable numbers. That is worse than having no data — before, at least you knew you didn't know.
3. The arithmetic: you catch pennies and pay salaries
Run it on your own figures.
What you catch: an hour or two per person per week. A field worker's hour in the UAE is a matter of tens of dirhams.
What you pay: replacing one worker. Visa, medical, Emirates ID, agency fees, accommodation, training, a month or more at reduced output, plus the extra rework a new hire produces.
Two additional resignations a year out of a crew of twenty is enough to burn the entire saving with room to spare. And that is before the hours you personally spend reviewing "anomalies" in reports.
4. It isn't the worst people who leave
The worst ones stay. They have nowhere to go, and they are the fastest to learn how to work around the system — the phone stays on site, the person walks off.
The best ones leave. They have options, and they are the first to feel that trust has been withdrawn. Attendance control functions as adverse selection built into your process: a year later you have a team that genuinely needs monitoring, because monitoring is what selected them.
5. It shuts off your cheapest information channel
The most valuable thing a crew gives you is voluntary reporting. "That pipe will go within a month." "Wrong equipment on site." "The client is behaving oddly." These are early warnings worth tens of thousands of dirhams in prevented damage, and they cost you nothing.
They only arrive when reporting is safe. The moment any report can turn into an investigation, the channel closes — and you start hearing about problems from the client instead.
6. You're measuring the wrong variable
GPS says: "the phone was on site." Not "worked." Not "worked well." Not "won't need redoing."
Your client pays you for an outcome, not for your people's coordinates. Precise measurement of a variable nobody pays for is precision spent for nothing.
What works instead
- Was the work actually done — before and after photos with a timestamp, tied to the job.
- What the job cost — time per job, not per person: costing and norms.
- Where quality slips — repeat visits, overdue jobs, jobs closed without a report.
- What to show the client — a photo report the same day the work is done.
One line of difference: show what was done, not where the person is.
Note that none of those four can be gamed in the worker's favour. The photo either exists or it doesn't. The repeat visit either happened or it didn't. That is exactly why you can trust them — unlike a button pressed by someone who knows an investigation follows.
Where Fixty stands
Fixty does not track employee location, and we are not planning to add it. The map in the app shows properties, not people.
This is architecture, not a limitation. Fixty only works when the crew enters the data: photos, statuses, completion marks. A feature that makes a worker sabotage that input switches the whole product off — and the owner is left with no reports, no site history and no case to make when a client disputes an invoice.
We would rather build a tool people use willingly, because it protects them too: a job confirmed with photos is evidence for the client and for the worker alike.
Source: Monitoring Employees Makes Them More Likely to Break Rules, Harvard Business Review, 2022