Today, businesses are increasingly embracing remote and hybrid teams to cut costs and adhere to Covid-19 recommendations. A study done by PwC indicates that more than 83% of workers admit that working from home has been effective for their business. This indicates that not only did many companies rapidly adopt remote workspaces due to the pandemic outbreak, but workers have also embraced this aspect.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to know for sure if your remote workers are actually working. Fortunately, you can easily keep track of employees working remotely using the right strategies and tools. Below are six effective ways to keep track of your company’s remote workers.
1. Develop with Measurable Work Objectives
Usually, these are two categories of workers you can have in your remote workspace, the committed ones who complete assignments on time. The other category includes those who complete tasks for their sake without any dedication whatsoever!
To handle the laxity attitude of some workers, ensure you allocate jobs among the remote employees working on a project with clear timelines. Also, ensure you outline measurable goals that you can use to determine the productivity of your remote team members. The approach will be effective because if remote workers have ownership of their jobs, they’ll work hard and complete the tasks on time.
However, you need to communicate your objectives and expectations to remote workers and receive their feedback regularly. Doing so will strengthen your team’s trust and keep them engaged and dedicated to achieving organizational goals.
2. Use Time Tracking Software
Another way you can keep track of your remote workers is by using a time clock app that monitors how they’re spending time during working hours. A time tracking app prompts workers to switch on and off, as necessary, anytime they embark on a new assignment. After that, you can log in and check how team members spend their time, assessing those committed to productive work.
However, this approach has its limitations, including the incapability to track aspects like ad hoc meetings and phone calls. Therefore, remote workers are likely to fabricate how they are spending their time. That means you should select the best time tracking app to give you a clear picture of how workers are spending time at work.
3. Track Productivity
Alongside the first two strategies, tracking your remote workers’ productivity is an effective way to track how they spend time. Ensure you check if your remote workers are handling assignments as they should and ask them to update reports of their progress. Here, you can leverage a remote employee monitoring tool, like EmpMonitor. It’s an efficient way of tracking employee productivity in a remote workspace setting.
4. Track Employee Email Activity
On average, a contemporary worker uses 28-50% of the working time accessing and replying to emails. That’s a lot of time, especially if it’s not used for business-related emailing! Therefore, you’ll have to find out who your workers are emailing and how many business emails they send and receive in a day. Besides, you should know how fast they reply to client emails.
You can use the Email Analytics tool that synchronizes your remote workers’ email accounts to allow you to view all their email activities. Ultimately, this will give you full access to monitor what workers spend time doing with the email accounts.
5. Leverage Project and Task Management Tools
Project and task management apps can come in handy to help you keep track of employees working remotely. With these apps, you can manage, sort out and allocate jobs related to different projects. Good examples of these tools include Podio, Harvest, and Asana.
6. Tack Employee Logs
Your remote workers’ logs can help you get a general picture of what time they start and finish working for the day. EmpMonitor is an excellent tool that can help you get a picture of your workers’ login and logout times. In addition, you’ll know they are or not productive during the working hours of the day and a week.
Final Thoughts
Tacking remote employees using these six strategies is the most effective way to ensure high productivity in your business. If your employees are aware that they’re being watched, they will strive to remain dedicated to realizing the company goals.
