Optimizing Work-From-Home Productivity with Smart Monitoring
Keeping work-from-home employees motivated may not always be practical in the same way that it is for in-office employees. That’s why it’s important to implement smart monitoring to ensure that they are being productive.
An employee monitoring software like WolfEye can provide you with insight into which employees are productive so you can intervene where needed. It can also help you understand workload and allocate resources more effectively.
Keep reading below to learn more about how you can optimize your remote team’s productivity with smart monitoring.
How to Monitor Your Remote Employees
Employee monitoring software is a sort of program that gives businesses the ability to monitor and record the activities and interactions of their employees while they are working, whether in an in-office or remote setting.
With this software, you can gain insights into how your team spends their work hours and the projects they are working on.
It has features including the ability to log which apps or websites users visit, capture periodic screenshots, or observe live feeds of employee screens, as well as the ability to measure activity levels through mouse movements and keyboard strokes.
Employee Monitoring vs. Employee Surveillance
There is a common misconception that employee productivity monitoring software functions as a method of surveillance employed by authoritarian managers. But this is in no way an accurate depiction.
Monitoring employee productivity involves conducting regular analyses of metrics in order to gain insights into employee productivity. On the contrary, surveillance involves keeping a close eye on your employees’ behavior and performance.
There are two main ways in which corporate surveillance differs from employee productivity monitoring:
Boundaries
There are defined boundaries established for productivity monitoring, and employees are only monitored within those boundaries. On the other hand, surveillance has the potential to cross worker boundaries and invade their privacy.
Productivity
Monitoring has the potential to influence employee productivity positively, but surveillance has the potential to undermine trust and demotivate workers.
Surveillance and monitoring may appear to be overlapping concepts at first glance. But there are major differences between the two.
How Employee Monitoring Can Improve Productivity
Implementing an employee monitoring system to monitor productivity has several important advantages:
Analyze Workflow
Are you interested in finding out when your entire team was most productive? Or do you want to know which tools your remote workers use the most?
Employee productivity monitoring software provides unparalleled insight into the work activities of your employees. With the help of detailed reports, you can measure the efficiency of your team in addition to obtaining information on key performance indicators.
Stay Ahead in Productivity
A productivity rate is simply the ratio of the amount of work completed to the amount of time that was invested. It is important for managers to keep track of their employees’ and teams’ productivity.
But it’s hard to measure these rates, and guessing isn’t the best way to go in the long run.
An employee monitoring system generates daily and weekly reports that detail the total number of hours worked during a given period as well as the amount of time spent on each task.
This makes it easy for managers to evaluate productivity on an individual, team, and company level, which helps them make better decisions.
You can even give each employee, whether they work from home or in the office, a productivity score to incentivize them through healthy competition. Furthermore, employees would refrain from wasting company time if they become aware that their time is being monitored.
Effective Resource Management
As a manager, you may have determined that it will take a total of seven hours per week for two employees to finish a task. However, it is possible that this activity truly requires only three hours each week from the same employees. So, how can you make accurate project estimates?
Employee tracking software generates daily and monthly reports. Using these reports, you can gain insight into the actual level of activity among your employees, which will allow you to manage better and utilize your resources.
Identify and Incentivize
Monitoring the productivity of employees provides a level of transparency that makes it easier to identify those employees who are performing above average in terms of productivity metrics.
Recognizing and rewarding hard work pays off. Not only does it act as a source of encouragement for the high-performers, but it also acts as a source of motivation for other employees, who may gain inspiration from the individuals being incentivized.
This not only helps with staff retention but also works as a terrific morale booster for the workforce.
Managers can also see which workers aren’t meeting productivity targets and intervene to help them overcome their obstacles.
Tips to Incorporate Productivity Tracking
If you are concerned about how to track employee productivity while protecting their privacy, consider the following three tips.
Be Completely Transparent
Employees may be more receptive to policies and productivity software if they are fully informed about them.
The findings of a survey conducted in 2019 regarding the future of employee monitoring revealed that only thirty percent of workers were content with their employers monitoring their email conversations.
However, after employers disclosed the nature of the monitoring they were conducting and the reasons behind it, more than half of the workforce expressed that they were at ease with the practice.
Secure Employee Data
You must establish adequate security measures in order to safeguard the information of your employees against misuse, threats from within the organization, and unauthorized access. Employees will be more likely to trust you if you make sure that their information is only used for business purposes.
This can improve your company’s overall productivity and employee retention.
Avoid Selective Monitoring
When you use software to monitor employee productivity, you have a responsibility to ensure that every one of your employees is tracked in the same manner without exception.
Conclusion
Having a remote workforce can come with its own unique challenges. However, the majority of these challenges can be minimized with effective employee monitoring software. This software enables employers to monitor their employees as if they were in the same room.