No boss around, freedom to take frequent breaks, and comfort of being at home, what’s more, that employees can ask for? But maximum perks come with numerous responsibilities, and task supervisors or managers cannot afford to overlook the desired results and productivity from employees. So, how any potential loss like employees slacking off from the work desk during remote working hours can be compensated you ask? Here is the simple solution i.e. employee monitoring software that enterprises across the globe are demanding for streamlining their remote work-flows.
Be it finance, IT, healthcare or any industry; long-term remote work culture has necessitated businesses to realign their set policies. Pandemic induced remote working is here to stay for a while, so making everything seamless is crucial when you enable teams across locations.
Without beating around the bush, let’s find out vital aspects that businesses should consider while monitoring the remote workforce.
4 Things to consider in monitoring remote workforce
Time-tracking: Login activities, break hours, check-in schedules, everything has to be organized in a way that neither employee nor supervisor feels pressured to leave or ignore work. With employee monitoring software, positioning yourself as a good team leader and how you can bring supervision to your entire team becomes easy. An attendance management system that will enable each and every person on your team to validate and give feedback for every task. Through this, you can also encourage your employees to start or stop a built-in timer when needed. Having a dependency on how you manage this implementation, you could track all their work throughout the day and use it for certain types of projects. Both ways, you’ll be able to login and see how your employees are utilizing their time being productive and sitting idle.
Data and network security: There are several network monitoring tools and software to record user-activity on company-owned devices. Thus, by allowing workers to become a part of your system, you can record their activities when working remotely. Usually, the management has more access than workers where they can monitor each member of their team. For instance, notifications and updates are instantly shared with the management whenever a worker commits an action or on insider threat detection about potentially malicious activity and anomalous behavior. No matter what the work is, or which employee is taking advantage of being at remote work, the employee monitoring software will help to secure data and ban websites, links that may be hazardous to the company’s identity.
Employee monitoring: Employee productivity tracking is a key element in initiating remote workforce monitoring Through the capabilities of employee monitoring software, you can enable granular tracking of employee actions across their systems like laptops, PC and mobile devices. A good employee monitoring tool will have features that include, activity monitoring of websites and applications, with admin alerts for banned sites. Supervisors can get detailed reports on analytics dashboards that provide an overview of where time has been spent and whether it is productive or inactive. Regular screenshots within intervals or continuous video recordings, keystroke logging, and remote barge-ins to track every individual keystroke across any software or application.
Remote team collaboration: This sudden shift has brought many new challenges, and one of the major obstacles is to collaborate effectively and boost productivity. Enterprises across the globe are learning to collaborate virtually as per their company’s core value that needs to flow from the leaders to employees. During remote work, it is very easy to get deflected from the team as there could be many factors. For instance, a team member might lose morale and feel ignored by peers and this lack of appreciation could also affect their motive to reach out and maintain open communication with the team. Every company might need more time to get used to it and supporting each other is the key here to foster a productive, sustainable, and collaborative team.
Why is remote employee monitoring pivotal to boost productivity?
Delegation and balancing: Having the opportunity to balance your employee workloads, and most importantly, to delegate work to the appropriate people is the key. For instance, you have a team of 5 people working remotely who are working on the same types of tasks. If 2 people have 10 tasks assigned to them for a week, 3 other people have fewer tasks, this would lead to unbalance between the team. Understanding the core balance allows you to shift a few tasks from that overworked individual to the employees who can better accommodate them. In order to do this on time, employee monitoring software would be of great help.
Weak links management: Sometimes, some employees are not interested in pulling their weight. On the contrary, you will have those who are disciplined enough to work their full potential. Employee monitoring software helps you to pinpoint team members who aren’t working on enough tasks, or speaking up when they don’t have enough work on their plates. Workforce monitoring is a good way to notice when you’re running some inefficient or unproductive processes. If you notice that your employee workloads are constantly unbalanced, it could indicate that your task distribution system isn’t efficient.
Morale boosting: Never neglect the importance of employee morale. Employees who work remotely need a happier, less stressed, and more productive environment so that they can perform tasks on time and achieve goals set for the day. Employee monitoring software helps you find and detect when your employees are working on an unsustainable amount so that you can work with them to create balance.
Moreover, if they do not feel appreciated or do not feel included in the team, that won’t be favorable for employee or business growth leading to more frustration.
Maintain transparency: Working from home and maintaining transparency while doing that could be the biggest challenge for managers or team members. And if transparency is not there, it can lead to low employee morale, lack of trust, and enthusiasm among them. Any company cannot see growth or reach unless they share both internal and external needful information with all employees. So, to build a culture of trust and togetherness, make sure you don’t pass it through team leaders but rather conduct short video or chat sessions with the team.
Clear goals and objectives: Managers or supervisors must emphasize giving clear instructions to the team such as the goals and objectives must be clearly organized. As a result, remote workers would know what is expected from them and how they can work along to boost team productivity. Thus, it is essential to conduct regular virtual team meetings and update each other on the progress of tasks to run the processes smoothly. Also, team meetings are great for giving updates and keeping everyone on the same page.
Signing off
In the end, remote employees will be more focused on work if they know what is expected of them and you’ve got their back. Through employee monitoring software, it is feasible for you to personally check-in every few minutes to supervise them. The solution to not make it look like intrusion is to engage your employees in a transparent and open-minded manner. Hold them accountable for their tasks within the set time-frame.