No one has ever thought that working from home would be a norm one day, but the Coronavirus pandemic has changed everything.
After the pandemic, most employees want to work remotely or in a hybrid model, and so do the companies. And to support this, we have a recent survey of PwC that shows 54% of the employees think they can work remotely.
But the practical challenge while doing so is to monitor the productivity of your remote employees. Productivity acts as fuel for a growing business. Regardless of your company, if your workers are not productive, your business can experience a negative outcome. To guard themselves against this adverse situation, employers must track the productivity of their teams.
So, If you are here, you have come up with the same problem, and we are here with the solution. Don’t worry! You’re all covered up. Now, without further due, let’s jump straight to the topic.
How Can You Track the Productivity of Remote Employees?
Working from home results in fewer touchpoints between managers and remote employees. Managers have less insight into the issues around tracking time and productivity of their teams. It can be solved if you follow the right solution for your business.
Here are the top 5 practical solutions to monitor remote employees.
1. Use Time Tracking Software
Finding the right software for your business is the easiest way to track remote employees.
This software will help you monitor the total time spent on the project so that you can evaluate their employees’ involvement.
To encourage your employees, you can always allow them to see the activities of others. It will give them a clear insight into their performance so they can improve it without the involvement of others.
Built-in Timer
Having a built-in timer will help. The employer can monitor the working and non-working hours of their employee. The timer will start during the working cycle and gets stopped when it breaks.
Timesheet Management
Fix the working hours for your project and maintain a timesheet for each employee. Doing so will get the time tracked and recorded for each day.
Timeoff Management
One of the reasons for unproductive hours is not getting the office-like feel. Trying to mimic the official environment by implementing a timeoff routine task can add a positive impact. It may feel like an old-school thing, but self-reporting helped most industries handling work-from-home employees.
Email Activity
One of the user tracking systems is email tracking. It measures the frequency of mail received and mail sent which shows employees’ involvement in the project. It notifies if the mail sent or received is relevant to the project or not. It collects the data for whom the mail is being sent or received.
2. Activity Monitoring
Monitoring employees’ activity is essential to get an idea of their pace. You can look into the attributes and decide to use one of the mentioned applications to keep track of them.
Depending on your monitoring settings, these time trackers can take several screenshots and read mouse movements and keyboard activity. All these monitoring activities get done on variable time stamps. So that the data recorded get accurate values.
Using these tools, you can encourage your employees by showing them how much time they have spent on a particular task.
Seeing the recorded information, you’ll be able to measure your employees’ productivity. You may check the busiest and help the opposite ones because there may be a case they are facing some issues and not discussing them with the team.
You can always log in to turn on or off the tracking feature for your team. The authorities may transfer to other team members, or you can keep it to yourself.
3. Use a Project / Task Management App
Using Software
We know that there are so many applications that can manage projects and tasks easily. They make our remote employees monitoring work easy. The project Manager uploads the complete details for the new project.
Then they will assign each employee an individual task assignment on the application with a time constraint. As soon as a new project is assigned, the supervisor will create new tasks for the employees in the application. One can add tasks or remove them for any employee once logged in.
Self-Reporting
Asking your employees to present reports of the task they are working on gives a notion of how the project is moving. It can show how much of the work is being done by the individuals.
This report will help the workers to analyze the quantity and quality of work. If they find themselves out of balance, they can discuss with the supervisor or manager to add or remove a few tasks. End of the day, every company wants productive work, not unproductive one.
4. Managerial Supervision
We already talk about the self-reporting system and now let’s focus on one more effective way of tracking remote employees. It comes under a communication ritual method.
Rather than asking employees, the managers or supervisors can maintain a report daily. By doing so, they can find the underworked employees and provide them with a balanced workload or help them with their obstacles.
Apart from all these, make them feel your presence. You can’t just hand over the workload and walk out of it. You can always mimic the regular physical interaction that can help you understand your team more, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Doing this will support your monitoring and maintaining of the daily task lists.
5. Sources of Inefficiency
We have seen most measures to track employee hours, specifically working from home. Now let’s see some other essential things that favor our objective.
When managers monitor underworked employees, they must communicate with them and find the actual reason behind it.
Is it because of workload or the environment during office hours? Is it some mental burden? It might be anything but the objective is to find and sort it out because good listening can establish an emphatical working environment.
Communication rituals can come in different forms. So it would help if you found a few that collaborate the best with your company.
Inefficiency or unproductivity can come from different sources:
- They might not have a proper setup at home.
- They might be working from bed.
- There may be some distractions around.
- There may be some regional festivals going on.
There can be other reasons, and to find them, you have to communicate. There is a high chance that you may find the solution and improve their productivity.
5 Work From Home Tips
Here are some work-from-home tips that will help you to increase your efficiency –
- Don’t visit sites that are affecting your productivity.
- Make an official environment during office hours.
- Try to focus on quality rather than quantity.
- Use your weekends and set your mind free.
- If the work is more or you are struggling with something, never hesitate to communicate with your supervisor.
Conclusion
As the work-from-home culture is rising, the rise of employee surveillance software is increasing. There is nothing wrong with it because it’s a requirement of today’s world.
But entirely relying on these applications is not correct. We must learn to measure employees’ output. One of the biggest reasons why monitoring remote employees become slightly uncomfortable for workers is that businesses haven’t learned to quantify employee output. Instead, they measure work by hours put in.
We all know that hours put in don’t necessarily equal productivity. One can sit at the computer for long hours and be super unproductive. We all should learn to shift our focus more to work done rather than hours put in. In the end, balancing the two aspects of work and the hours involved is essential. It would help if you mixed both worlds according to your business for better productivity.