On October 4th, 1957, the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit. Two decades later on February 22nd, 1978, Navstar 1 was launched as the first Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite. Today, I used that same technology to figure out if I had time to get to the bathroom before my home-delivered pepperoni pizza would arrive (I did.)

Yet when I needed a plumber to sort out an imminently disastrous sewage situation (unrelated, to my knowledge, to my pepperoni consumption), the best time estimate I could get was a four-hour window, and in the end he missed it. Why?

Sure, when I’m frustrated by his lack of communication, I might be all for forcibly GPS tagging Bob the Plumber like he’s Australia’s most aquatic social media star, Neil the Seal , but the truth is I don’t actually need (or even want) to know his specific location. All I needed was a simple message to tell me that his current job is running long and not to expect him for a couple more hours so I could get on with my own day in the meantime.

There are better reasons for businesses to track their employees’ locations while on the job: for keeping payroll accurate, for example, or to know where various crews are across multiple sites. Some types of work must be done at particular locations or specific times, and recording the relevant data automatically creates consistent information with less effort. 

Time and location tracking technology is relatively cheap and accessible today, but there are many different ways to implement it. The companies who do it right will seek to balance their business needs with the impact on the people they are tracking.

That impact is real. Buddy Punch’s 2025 survey of over 500 non-managerial U.S. workers explored time tracking perceptions and how those perceptions are shaped, finding that most employees responding (75%) understood the value of outcomes like getting paid correctly and knowing they are meeting clear expectations. Most respondents, 82%, felt that their employer’s use of tracking was a support in their work, with around a third feeling some stress about systems that felt like unnecessary surveillance. 

That suggests that workers are often more concerned about how and why tracking is implemented, rather than being against the entire concept.

What differentiates good experiences with location and time tracking from poor ones? It’s typically not a technological difference but one of communication and trust. When people understand clearly why they are being tracked, who has access to that information, and how it is being used, they can see the purpose. You need to clock in using Buddy Punch so that the finance people can make sure you get paid correctly for your work? Absolutely. 

As one of the survey respondents put it:

“Time tracking makes it so that you get paid for the amount of time that you actually work.”

On the other hand, if you want to track how many times your workers need to go to the bathroom? That’s a less compelling argument, even if it’s intended to improve call wait times for customers. Unnecessary tracking, or tracking used as a cause for punishment, erodes trust on a team — and at least those staff knew they were being tracked. Invisible monitoring is even more destructive to morale.

What does it take to build up that trust? The survey results provide some practical tips:

• Make the system easy to use and understand: People should know how and when information is recorded (55% of respondents made this their number one request). Distributing a GPS tracking policy, for example, can be a useful way to inform employees that they’re being tracked — and what specifically is being tracked — while also getting the employee consent required by law in many U.S. states.
• Apply the same rules to everyone: It should feel fair and not targeted at particular groups.
• Give people access to their own records: Let them see and verify what is being recorded.
• Clearly communicate how the data will be used: And stick to those usages.

If you’re considering the use of GPS time tracking software in your own business, these are helpful guidelines both when picking tools and when measuring their effectiveness. What you think of as obvious and clear communications might not feel that way to the people on the frontline who are mostly just trying to do their work.

Before you roll out a new tool, take some time to talk to the team about why you’re doing it. Share with them the goals of the system, show them how it works, and ask for their feedback. Employees who are well informed about the reason for and the specifics of the tracking that is occurring will be much less concerned than those surprised by being recorded. 

For their part, managers should commit to recording only what tracking is truly necessary and reduce the effort required by their staff to provide it.

“Employees just need to be within a geofence to log in and punch in/punch out. They don’t have to jump through endless steps for something that should be straightforward.”

– Buddy Punch customer Bryan P., Hospital & Health Care

The design of the tools themselves can help allay some concerns. In Buddy Punch, for example, an employee’s location is only recorded after they clock-in, and tracking immediately stops when they clock-out. 

Simple, accessible tracking technology rolled out with clarity and transparency can build trust within the team if the data is put to good use. 

Maybe my pizza doesn’t need to be GPS tracked on its 10 minute journey to my house, but at least it seems to be using real tracking data, unlike Domino’s “pizza progress” system. Faking tracking data for a pizza is an excellent way to erode customer trust in 30 minutes or less.