Remote work has become significantly more prevalent in recent years. What began as a necessity during the pandemic has evolved into a mainstream practice, with many organizations embracing hybrid or fully remote workforces to attract and retain talent. However, this trend also creates uncertainty for employers around wage-and-hour compliance, such as tracking hours worked and ensuring proper overtime compensation.
On September 4, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio issued a significant opinion directly related to this topic. Lott v. Recker Consulting, LLC involves a Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action brought by more than 130 remote Patient Care Associates (“PCAs”). Their employer required the remote PCAs to be in a “call-ready” state at the start of their shifts and at the end of their unpaid meal periods. However, getting to that call-ready state involved the PCAs first undertaking various preparatory activities, such as turning on their computer, logging in using a username and password, and opening various programs on their device. The PCAs also had to log back in after unpaid meal periods and were required to shut down their computers at the end of the workday. The issue before the court was whether these preliminary and postliminary activities constituted compensable work time.
The District Court succinctly presented the question of when the workday starts and ends for remote workers for purposes of compliance with the FLSA as follows:
Is it when [the employee] sits down where she plans to work? Is it when she turns on her computer? Or is it the first email she sends or first task she undertakes? Does it end when she shuts down her computer? Or is it when she walks out of the room? These issues present line-drawing problems, largely of first impression. In the physical-work world, by contrast, courts have defined those lines fairly well under interpretations of the FLSA and associated Department of Labor regulations. But for remote-work environments, courts are just starting to wrestle with these interpretive questions.
Siding (mostly) with the employer, Judge Douglas R. Cole held that the workday starts when a remote worker opens and begins operating a program or application they use as part of the principal work activities they are employed to perform, and the workday ends when the employee closes out of the last such program or application.
The Court reasoned that to be a principal activity, and therefore compensable, the activity must be both (1) integral (i.e., intrinsic to the function an employee is employed to perform) and (2) indispensable. Although the act of turning on a computer or entering a password may be “indispensable,” the Court was unconvinced it was an “integral” part of the productive work the employees were employed to perform. Specifically, the Court found the following activities to be preliminary or postliminary: turning on or “waking up” the computer; entering a username and password to access the computer; dual-authenticating through Duo; opening the timekeeping system; accessing a VPN, on the front end; and shutting down the computer, locking the screen, or putting it in sleep mode, on the back end. The Court reasoned that, although all of those activities may in some sense be indispensable, they are not integral to the employees’ principal duties of answering inbound calls.
By contrast, when PCAs open and begin operating any applications they primarily work in or use throughout the workday in connection with answering inbound calls, those activities are both integral and indispensable to their work. This is a fact-intensive analysis, but in this case, the Court found that accessing the employer’s phone system, workflow system, directory database, or a client’s EMR system were all compensable, and accessing email or Microsoft Teams could potentially be compensable as well depending on how often the PCAs used those programs and for what purposes. Overall, the Court determined that the PCAs’ workdays start when they access one of the integral-and-indispensable programs or applications just listed, and their workdays end when they close out of the last such program or application.
The Court’s approach diverges from earlier decisions issued by the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, which reason that computers and software are the integral tools employees use to perform their principal duties and thus find finding that “booting up” is their first principal activity of the day. The Lott Court disagreed and stressed that the FLSA examines activities, not tools, and thus employers are not automatically liable for every moment an employee spends on a work device.
Employers outside the Southern District of Ohio should exercise caution following the Lott decision’s reasoning, as it is non-binding outside the jurisdiction. Employers elsewhere, particularly within the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, must carefully consider authority from within their jurisdictions that adopt a broader approach to compensable working time. Nonetheless, the case may signal that courts faced with a growing number of lawsuits over pre- and post-shift computer activities may adopt an increasingly nuanced approach to the calculation of remote employees’ working time. Although a conservative approach would be to compensate remote workers for all time spent booting up and shutting down their computers, particularly when such tasks may be described as integral and indispensable to their principal duties, employers encouraged by the decision can mitigate their wage-and-hour risk in the work-from-home era by clearly defining compensable activities, clarifying “integral” tasks, and periodically auditing their timekeeping policies to ensure compliance with this evolving area of the law.