5 Easy Ways How to Improve Self-Discipline When Working Remotely

Work from home is now a new normal. It’s almost two years since most of the employees are working from home and most of them are now fully adjusted to it.

This new remote work might have offered work flexibility, safety, and efficiency to many Employees, but it has somehow taken discipline out of their lives.Employees no longer wake up on a fixed time, get ready properly and follow a set routine at work. Nowadays, employees wake up at noon, wear their PJs all day, and work whenever and however they please.

Now, there’s no harm in offering remote work flexibility to your employees. In fact, flexibility in work from home improves productivity, through,Employee Monitoring Software we always advocate work flexibility. But, the problem here is that employees have lost their years of set routine while working from home, which has drastically impacted their productivity and competency.

According to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, professionals perform better when they are well-dressed. Similarly, an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research stated that high-level noise disturbs productivity.

That means if you don’t discipline your remote working employees, it is going to impact your business productivity pretty badly. Therefore, this post will guide you on how to establish work from home discipline in your organization. So, let’s dig in.

How to Self-discipline your Remote Employees?

One thing that you should remember here is you can’t use your old discipline methodologies in a remote work environment. That’s because you have a virtual wall between your employees, and you can’t constantly monitor your remote team without a remote team management software .

Therefore, instead of just monitoring your remote employees’ activities, you have to work on self-disciplining your team. Yep, once your remotely working team knows how to set their own schedule, avoid distractions and maintain a good productivity level, you won’t have to worry about disciplining them any longer.
Knowing the importance of self-disciplining in work from home, we have already added a shareable report feature in the tracking software. This way, managers can share automated performance reports with individual employees and help them understand why their performance has gone down or up. And employees can effortlessly work on boosting their productivity metrics based on real-time.

Apart from the self-analytical reports, you can improve discipline in your team using various other methods also, such as:

Provide a preset schedule

Flexibility is the core of a successful remote business model. But, flexibility doesn’t mean that you should not give a proper structure and timeline to complete a certain task to your team. Plus, flexibility doesn’t work in all types of operations. For instance, if your sales rep can’t make cold calls in the middle of the night, simply because he or she wishes to work at night.
Importantly, if your employees earlier have no experience with work from home, they will feel extremely overwhelmed or might miss using this flexibility concept.
Therefore, you should give a basic work schedule to your workers so they can stay disciplined and won’t feel like they have lost their freedom. For example, using the TrackOlap dashboard, you can assign tasks to individual team members with timelines and other details. Here you can also mark priority tasks so that employees know which task they have to complete on priority.

This small scheduling trick can help you a lot in aligning your team’s performance and punctuality.

Offer frequent work breaks
Nowadays, many employees are exhausted from working from home and complain that they have to work for longer hours in this environment than before. Here if your employees are burned out, this will impact their productivity, and they might even consider quitting their job.

But there’s nothing to worry about. You can easily help your employees by setting a proper break schedule for them. Apart from a standard lunch break, also give them a 5 or 15 minutes break after an hour or two. That’s because sitting in front of a computer for long hours can mentally and physically exhaust your employees and impact their thinking capabilities.

Here if you are wondering that giving frequent breaks to your employees can reduce their working hours, you are wrong. In our time tracking software, we have added a broken button for this same reason. Employees can press this button before taking a break, and then, it will automatically record in their timesheet — when and for how long they took breaks.

So, managers, encourage your employees to take frequent but small breaks to maintain their sanity while working from home.

Record your employees' attendance
Attendance recording is one of the oldest and best ways to discipline your employees. When you start recording their clock in and clock out time, you can better understand their work patterns. You can know which employee works overtime and which one won’t even work for standard eight hours.

Simple attendance can help you find out overachievers and slackers in your organization. Using this information, you can help your employees who are working for longer hours and burning out themselves and can punish slackers for not working for the standard hours.

To empower the virtual attendance system, we have incorporated an automatic attendance feature in Employee Time Tracking Software . This feature will automatically record a person’s attendance when he or she logs into their work dashboard. So, all the hassle of manual attendance recording and managing will be gone.

Keep digital distractions away from your employees
Mostly, employers are so focused on physical distractions present around their employees that they forget to monitor digital distractions. Folks, your employees can still set up their workstations at their home and lock themselves in a room to avoid all home distractions, but avoiding all these digital distractions isn’t easy.

For example, while researching something work-related online, an ad for sale pops up on your employee's screen. Just clicking on this ad, your employees can waste hours on the shopping site when they were supposed to be working.

Here to control your employees from wasting their time on online distractions like shopping, chatting, or playing games, you will get an application/website usage tracker with our toolkit. This feature will tell you which applications or websites your employees have used and for how long.

This way, you can check whether your employees are using work-related online services or simply wasting their time. And, you can discipline those employees who are unnecessarily wasting their time.

General work from home discipline policy

Besides Employee monitoring Software, you should also create gen eral work from home discipline policy for your whole team. This way, your employees will know how you expect them to behave and maintain professional decorum while working remotely.
Some of the common points to include in work from home discipline policy are:

Dress up properly to feel and look professional while working from home.
Wake up and sleep on time like you used to do before WFH.
Establish a proper workstation in your home.
Keep your personal phone, and email turned off while working, etc.

Discipline is the Key to Success!

It doesn’t matter whether your team is working from home or office; you have to establish a proper discipline in the organization to maintain a certain level of productivity and efficiency. You don’t need to micromanage or fully control your employee's life; you simply need to layout a professional decorum that you expect your team to follow.

In a remote work environment, it might be challenging to discipline your team. But using automatic attendance, scheduling, and time tracking software, you can effortlessly self-discipline your team.

To know more about TrackOlap disciplinary capabilities, you can book a free demo with our team today!