Work Tracking and Report System

A flexible system for tracking work performed by people in your roleplay area or business. (Touch image to enlarge.)

It was designed to be used to monitor "chores" or "work" that are part of your roleplay area and ensure that workers have variety in their assignments.

But it can also be used just to track the presence of staff or customers in areas of your store if you just want to know where people are spending the most time.

However using it to determine hours worked for the purpose of paying workers in Lindens is not really what is is designed for. The level of accuracy and data protection/backup required for such a system has not been a consideration in it's design. There are time clock systems available for that purpose.

As each work task has a defined "product" associated with it, so you can think of it as a supervisor's logbook where production quanities are recorded.

The in-world part of the system consists of one or more Work Tracker objects and a single Work Reporting object. Work history (up to a week), is kept on an external database and work reports are presented on a webpage.

The "Work Tracker" object detects the presence of someone in a task area and then times how long they spend there. The tracker determines when the work task is being performed by:

1. Detecting a person in a specific area (you specifiy opposite x,y,z corners of a 3D box)
2. Determining if that person is allowed to credited for performing that work task.
3. Optionally checking if the person is 'sitting' in that area.
4. Optionally checking if a second person is also 'sitting' in that area.
5. Optionally checking if the person must have a specific object attached.

The tracker can be used with any work task animation object that you own, or just detect the presence of someone in a specific area. Here are some examples:

• You want to have someone near your parcel landing point to greet and help visitors. You can define a fairly large area near the landing point and allow that a person to move about so they do not have to 'sit' at a desk all the time. Workers can attach an employee "keycard" that identifies them as a worker so the system will ignore visitors and non-working residents.
• You might have a garden with work tasks for picking grapes, weeding vegetables, picking fruit, and harvesting wheat. You can have the whole garden defined as a single work area (their work would be reported as "Gardening"), but this would also count people that are just visiting and not considered workers. Your workers can be issued a "worker keycard" that they attach. This allows the tracker to tell who is actually a worker and ignore other visitors to the garden.

  In addition, you can specify a smaller areas for each work task in the garden, and also require that workers be 'sitting' on that work task object. This allows you to track production of specific items.

• You have a Spa with a massage table. You could define the Spa building as a work area and credit a worker with one "unit" of work for each four minutes they spend in the building. But if they are in the smaller area defined for the massage table, and 'sitting' in a pose, and a second person is also setting, then they are credited for 2 or 3 units of work for each 4 minutes as they as with a 'customer'. The worker keycard is used here as well to know which of the two people 'sitting' on the table is the worker.

This system allows you to adjust where your workers are spending their time.

• You can declare a shortage of food and insist that more time be spent on farming work tasks.
• If you have wheat fields and a mill for grinding flour, you want balanced production for both.
• Or send workers to the mines when your kingdom needs more gold.

From a roleplay enjoyment viewpoint, you can ensure that workers are not being directed to do the same work task everytime they visit; and are instead moving around to different work tasks in different parts of your roleplay area.

Objects

Work Tracker Object

A single Work Tracker can monitor all work areas in a region or parcel and periodically report work completed to the Work Reporting object. Note that if you have a large number of tasks, you may need to use more than one for script performance.

Work Reporting Object

The Work Reporting object (looks like a bulletin board as shipped), accumulates all work that is detected by the Work Tracker(s), and every few minutes uploads this information to an external database. Anyone can touch the Work Reporting object to be given a URL to a web page to view the report.

Also included is a Remote Work Reporting object that you can copy and place in several locations that are convenient for workers and managers to touch and view work status.

Work Report Webpage

Work is collected and reported for 24 hour periods starting with midnight Second Life Time (Pacific time zone). When a worker view the report they will see details about each task they have worked on during the current 24 hour period. Also shown is the total amount of production, by all workers, for each of the tasks

About that 24 hour work period --- Initially the length of the Work Period was configurable from 4 hours (an SL Day) up to 24 hours. However during play testing, we found that periods shorter than 24 hours did not produce useful results. This is because your 'work force' in SL is not consistantly present. Some hours of the day have very light traffic and at other times you have a region full of people. Using a 24 hour work day, smooths out this sporatic coming and going and results in more a useful report.

The system does not record times worked directly. Instead after a configured number of minutes of work, a specified number of "units" of production are recorded. What these 'units' mean is up to you. And you can vary the units produced for a given amount of time for individual work tasks. (The Spa example above was an example of this). Or you can make the "units" of product produced the same as the number of minutes to produce them and interpret the production as minutes worked.) You may find this is the most useful as minutes spent in your sim is the only real thing of value.

For individual work tasks you can specify a daily (24 hour day) target amount for production, or view the current day's production in relation to the average for the prior 7 days.

You can choose to display reports for individual workers, (and see all the work tasks they did for the past 7 days), or just see summary values for work tasks without regard to who performed the work task.

NOTE: Some people really don't like the idea that they are tracked individually. So exposing this information depends on the nature of your roleplay area.

If you choose to make work performed by individuals viewable there are additional choices.

• Only "Admin" users can see work performed by all individuals
• Workers touching the Report Board can only see details of the work tasks they performed.
• Anyone touching the Report Board can see work performed by everyone.

Please see the Configuration Help page for much more detailed information.

Design Notes

• Every effort has been made to reduce the amount of time and memory used by this system.
  • The Work Reporting object has a single script and the Tracker object only two.
  • The Tracker polls for workers slowly and slows down polling when no one is working. This does mean that it may take a minute or two to start recording work when no one has been working at any work task for some time.
  • You can tell the tracker to look for workers on the whole region or only a a single parcel.
  • All work history is kept on an external server and all code for report presentation is run on an external server.
• You can upgrade the Tracker object while people are working and only risk losing a few minutes of work. An upgrade or reset of the Work Reporting object will download the data it needs from the external server.
• You can move the scripts and configuration notecards of the Work Reporting object into other objects that fit in with the theme of your roleplay area.
• Object permissions are: Copy, Modify, No Transfer;

I want to thank Kate Riddler for her original version of this system and the time she has spent in testing.

Please contact Santo Hancroft for any support questions.