4 Ways to Monitor Employees Working from Home

It is well known that productivity is essential for the growth of a business. No matter the type of industry you are in or the products or services you provide your customers, if your workers aren’t productive in their jobs, there is a great chance that your business will experience negative consequences.

This is especially true if your employees are working remotely, outside of the office setting where it is more difficult to track their productivity. The reality is when people are working from home, they are more prone to distractions due to the increased flexibility that comes along. They may get too comfortable, not following the official working hours and slacking off at completing their work tasks within a given time frame. 

Luckily, company managers can now rely on various employee tracking software, tools and strategies to monitor their remote workforce and ensure they are productive when working outside of the office. Here are four common ways they do that effectively.

Employee monitoring software

The advancements in Internet technology have made many things possible, including the development of employee tracking software which allows company managers to monitor their workers when working remotely. These tools are designed to track and supervise the activity of employees, including how much time they spend on a task, their monthly attendance and their assigned roles and responsibilities.

Besides monitoring your employees’ overall performance, implementing work hours tracking software can also provide your business with plenty of benefits. Some of the most prominent ones include increased profitability, enhanced employee efficiency and productivity, improved communication, easier billing of clients and better insight into task analytics. 

Plus, the greatest thing about this type of tool is that you can access it at any time on your desktop, web or mobile app, which makes employee monitoring much easier.

Workplace collaboration tools

Another efficient way company managers can monitor their employees working remotely is by using workplace collaboration tools. These tools are actually programs and applications through which team members can communicate with each other online, share files and revise documents digitally at any time. Some of the most commonly used tools are Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

In addition to improving communication and interaction between employees, the work collaboration tools offer businesses other great benefits. 

One of the greatest is that admin-type work tasks can be completed much faster and with less amount of resources used. This further increases productivity as the automation of the tools makes work processes more straightforward while freeing up employees’ time to complete other important activities.

360-degree feedback

Providing regular feedback to your employees is essential for pointing out their strengths and weaknesses in the workplace. Whether it is after the end of each week or month, having a frequent feedback culture allows your team members to understand where they are lacking and what they need to do to improve their productivity, efficiency and overall work performance.

A management tool that can help you with this is the 360-degree feedback tool. This is an evaluation system which allows you to give confidential and honest feedback to your employees through a series of questions. The answers will provide you with all the important information you need to assist employees with developing and improving their work skills and overall behavior while working from home.   

Individual task lists 

Creating individual task lists is another great way to keep track of your employees’ productivity and efficiency when working remotely. This method involves assigning individual tasks and projects to specific employees rather than an entire project. 

The biggest benefit of this strategy is that you will be able to break down an extensive project into smaller tasks which you can assign to different team members so they will be completed faster and more efficiently. It will also give you the opportunity to see how equally you have allocated the project and monitor how productive each worker is in completing it.

To make supervision easier, you can ask each employee to submit reports at the end of each day, week or month so you can keep track of their overall work performance.

 

Final thoughts

Working outside of the office setting is becoming the norm in many business establishments. Because the flexibility that comes along with remote work can affect employee productivity and efficiency, it is up to the company managers to find other ways to track and supervise their remote workforce. This is where the implementation of employee monitoring software, programs and tools can come in handy to evaluate the overall performance of employees.