Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

The honest answer is that you cannot know whether someone is working by watching them, and remote work did not create that problem. It removed the illusion that solved it. In an office, presence stood in for productivity. Take the office away and the substitute disappears, leaving a question that was always there. Two things follow. The signals most monitoring tools sell are weak proxies that a determined employee defeats in minutes.

Your desktop is no longer the only place to log time – you can now do it straight from your phone with the new Scoro Time mobile app. We’ve also grown ELI’s capabilities – put ELI to work reading files, filtering list views for you, and running automations for you when certain trigger conditions are met. And that’s not it – there’s a lot more below!

The defining productivity story of 2026 is not that AI arrived. It is that AI arrived almost everywhere and the results have not shown up on the balance sheet. Adoption is close to universal. Behavioural data from ActivTrak covering 443 million work hours across 1,111 companies puts AI adoption at 80%. Yet a National Bureau of Economic Research survey of roughly 6,000 executives found that between 89% and 95% of firms saw no measurable impact on productivity or employment over the preceding three years.

Every guide to project planning describes the same sequence: define objectives, identify stakeholders, build a work breakdown structure, estimate, schedule, add a risk register. That sequence is correct and it is not where projects go wrong. Projects go wrong in the conversion between effort and time. A team agrees a piece of work is 30 days of effort, someone writes “six weeks” in the plan, and the project lands late without anyone doing anything wrong.

A daily schedule template does one of two things depending on who is using it. A manager uses it to put the right number of people on shift at the right hours. An individual uses it to block out a day by the hour. The template below covers both, in one Excel file. The manager version totals hours, calculates shift cost, and shows how many people are on shift during each hour of the day, which is the number most schedule templates never surface.

Wondering what AI in project management can actually do? This article breaks down what it is, what it looks like in practice, how to tell whether your firm is ready, and which tools to consider.

FTE stands for full-time equivalent. It is a unit of work capacity: 1.0 FTE is one person working a full-time schedule, and everything else is expressed as a fraction of that. Two people at 20 hours a week each come to 1.0 FTE in a company where full-time means 40. The formula is one line.

An attendance sheet records who worked, who was absent, and why, day by day. It sits underneath payroll, absence management and any dispute about hours, which is why the format matters more than it looks. The template below is free, works in Excel and Google Sheets, and totals itself. It also carries the part most attendance templates leave out: the FLSA requires employers to keep payroll records for three years and the underlying time records for two.