How To Monitor Employees Working From Home ?

However, employers might be encouraging their employees to work from home, but one nagging feeling is always lurking in their mind - how to know if remote employees are working or not.

It is becoming a significant challenge for businesses to employee monitoring system of their team. There are plenty of critical questions constantly disturbing the business owners –

* Is the remote team working during office hours?

* How to measure work from home productivity?

* How to monitor employees working from home?

* How many employees are following the schedule? Etc.

There are so many questions related to the monitoring of remote team activities present in front of the business owners. However, the solution is also in front of the business owners' eyes, which they haven’t yet recognized.

How to Measure Work From Home Productivity? – A Perfect Solution

To monitor work from home productivity, business owners have a perfect solution in the form of the TrackOlap dashboard. One platform with all the features of work from home monitoring tools can prepare you for the remote working setup. The perfect work can easily handle the biggest problem of how to know if remote employees are working or lazing around from home monitoring tools in multiple ways.
1. Time Tracking

When you are worrying about how to monitor employees working from home, you have to switch on your monitoring tool's real-time tracking feature. The time tracking tool enables your employees to record their work starting and stopping time. With an inbuilt timer, you can track the time of the employees when they start working.

According to your desire, you can ask your employees to track their work throughout the day or only use it for a particular task. Both ways, you can see the login and logout time of your employees to evaluate which one of your employees most productive during office hours. You can track the time spent by your employees on phone calls or impromptu meetings so that you can evaluate whether your employees are wasting time on-call or doing something productive.

2. Setting Project Timelines

The work from home monitoring tools won’t only let you track the activities of your employees. No, they will facilitate you to assign projects to your employees with the preset timeline. You can set a timeline for the project and attach it to your employees. The software will automatically monitor whether the employee will meet the deadline or running behind schedule.

When you find one of your employees running behind the given timeline, you can send reminders to complete the job on time. On the task assigning dashboard, you can quickly review which employee is on the schedule. This way, you can focus on one singular outcome instead of guiding your entire team to collaborate their way towards their mutual goal. Assigning tasks with deadlines helps in monitoring the productivity of your employees effectively.

3. Implement Self Assessment

If you have a small team or fully trust your team, you can implement a self-assessment system. Under this monitor productivity work from the home structure, you can send a brief productivity report to your employees at the end of the day. You can share a screenshot of their screen showing – how busy they were, on which project they have been working, how many hours they took to complete a specific task, and so on.

When employees have proof of their productivity in front of their eyes, they can work on themselves and try to improve their productivity. In work from home setup, the self-assessment is the perfect way to show your employees that you trust them, and you believe that they will improve their productivity without your intervention. It is an ideal way to make an employee reliable for his or her own productivity instead of monitoring their every move, which is quite tricky remotely.

4. Automatic Monitoring

When you have a large number of people working remotely, you cannot independently call or commute with your employees to know how productive they have been throughout the day. Thus, the automatic report preparation feature of the monitoring tool comes useful. The software will automatically generate numerous types of productivity reports that you can see in Excel or graphical format to determine which employees have been underperforming.

Moreover, when you share an automatic report created with the help of real-time tracking and monitoring data, your employees can’t deny it. This way, you take a correct disciplinary action against the low performing employees. It will reduce the workload of a manager or supervisor also. Automatic reporting can help in effectively implementing the work from home system.

5. Application Monitoring

When your employees are working online without your physical monitoring, they have thousands of different websites and applications available today to distract them. Your employees might keep on browsing on shopping sites or wasting work time on social media platforms; you might don’t get a clue about their leisure activities remotely. This thought has been haunting most of the business owners.

But, when you use the application usage feature of your monitoring tool, you can check the name of all the application and their usage details in the graphical analysis. With the help of automated application usage timesheet, you can check whether the apps used by your employees are relevant to their job or not. And, if you find your employees using irrelevant apps during office hours, you can warn them about their inappropriate behavior.

6. Leave Management

To monitor the productivity of working from home employees, you need to closely monitor their leaves also. Your employees might be working from home, but they indeed take leaves for their personal purposes. Whenever an employee applies for a leave, you can check the leave log of an employee and see how many paid leaves are available in the account. It will help HR in quickly deciding whether a particular employee should be granted a leave or not.

When you see that one employee has been taking a lot more leaves than other employees, you can ask why they take so many leaves. With proper leave management, you can improve the productivity of your remote employees.

7. Draw a Comparison

If you want to measure a shift in your employees' productivity and performance with a new setup of work from home, you have to compare the data of both periods. You can use productivity data for the period when employees are working from the office and the current WFH data. If you see a low productivity curve in an employee's productivity, you can work with the employee and help him in adjusting towards the new setup.

Moreover, the comparison data will help companies in formulating future work policies also. Now, if a company observe a positive impact on the performance of their employees due to the work from setup, why would they go back to the office system because WFH is highly profitable than the office system.

8. Expenses Management

Some companies are reimbursing their employees for the operational work cost that they have to bear while working at home, including internet usage bills, electricity bills, and other infrastructure. With the effective tracking and monitoring system, you can determine whether the expenses raised by the employee are appropriate or not. With knowledge of working hours, the employer can pay for the exact period of internet usage and the employee's electricity unit.

9. Smooth and Secure Communication

While working from home, employers need to have a secure and smooth communication channel to instantly interact with their team. However, you also need to make sure that employees don’t leisurely communicate without any purpose. Thus, the employee monitoring software comes with the call recording feature that helps managers in knowing how much time their team has to spend talking and what was the purpose of the talk.

With call recording and centralized communication channel, you can minimize the idle chitchat among your employees. This way, you can easily monitor your team's communication so that future conflicts can be quickly addressed.

Remote Monitoring Is Effective

Yep, if you are worried that you cannot effectively monitor your remorse team's activities and WFH will take your business towards loss, you are highly mistaken. If you have the right work from a home monitoring tool to evaluate your team's performance and productivity, you can smoothly run your operations remotely.

You just have to find a capable remote work monitoring software, and your WFH team is ready. Just give a call to the TrackOlap team for a demo and establish control over your remote team.