Content The role of employee monitoring in remote work Benefits of using employee monitoring in a remote or distributed team Streamlining the entire remote working process Ensuring timely deliveries Increasing work transparency Offering better time management Ways employees benefit from employee monitoring tools Improve productivity Implement a system of feedback. Set standards and work towards them Benefits of non-invasive employee monitoring WorkTime optimizes employee performance WorkTime creates transparency You save your team from potential burnout. FAQ The remote and distributed teams' work trend is here to stay. How do businesses adapt, and what role does employee monitoring play in this new landscape of geographical freedom? The role of employee monitoring in remote work Statistics show that 16% of companies worldwide are fully remote and hire only remote workers. At the same time, 44% of companies do not allow remote work. According to Global Workplace Analytics, the number of people who work remotely has increased by over 150% since 2015. The pandemic forced companies to move to remote working to stay profitable during lockdowns. The good news for businesses was that hiring remote workers and distributed teams was easier with the online job hr services. They could also use cloud-based technologies to facilitate remote collaboration and video conferencing tools. Remote work post-pandemic opened the doors for permanent hybrid and remote working possibilities. Among those - non-invasive employee monitoring gave managers an unparalleled account of what the teams are up to. 80% of remote workers that use non-invasive employee monitoring stated that they would recommend remote working to a friend, as it allows for both trust and transparency within the team, no matter where the members physically are, according to a survey performed by Gartner. The quality of life offered by remote work models increases employee satisfaction and productivity. According to GitLab, over 50% of the remote workforce started working remotely following 2020. Businesses had to adopt tools and technologies that facilitated remote work. If not for Covid-19, they might not have invested in these. Non-invasive employee monitoring by date is experiencing a drastic rise in demand. GitLab also found that flexible scheduling was one of the most attractive elements for employee retention. 50% of respondents in the survey stated that the flexible aspect of remote work drew them in. The productivity software market shifted to cloud-based employee monitoring tools, mostly because they provide real-time data insights to employees. Cloud-based productivity and employee monitoring software and tools are uniquely suitable for remote collaboration. And while 81% of employees expect their employer to continue using a remote working model, non-invasive employee monitoring is here to stay, with employers and employees enjoying the benefits. Benefits of using employee monitoring in a remote or distributed team Remote workers must set boundaries, create a schedule, and stick with it to maintain productivity. One way to manage this challenge is using employee monitoring software to track your time. Here are some benefits of using non-invasive employee monitoring, whether working remotely or not. Streamlining the entire remote working process It has taken you months to build a successful workflow to manage your team from a physical workplace, and now shifting to a remote work model is disrupting it. The dynamics of work-from-home routines are different, as many things can distract or render your team members unavailable for a couple of hours during the work shift. This is why flexibility is critical in remote work so people can work comfortably to deliver high-quality outputs on time. Adopting employee monitoring software helps you make the transition much smoother by allowing your team to record work hours on productive tasks vs. idle and unproductive activities. They can choose to work on a project in three different cycles, and employee monitoring software will compile the data, showing you the total time an employee has worked on it, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about. Ensuring timely deliveries Tracking progress and productivity is one of the biggest issues of remote work. You must gather all employee’s tasks and compile them in relevant projects to determine progress. Employee monitoring software makes it hassle-free and efficient by allowing employees to log project progress. You have a detailed report, which allows you to readjust resources for deadline-sensitive projects. Increasing work transparency Although your team loves working from home, they often feel they need help to report the full extent of how tiring their workday was and how much progress they made by the day-end. This happens because there are many activities like rolling out email, talking to a vendor on Skype, or attending meetings on Zoom that never make it to the progress report. This might have taken a good couple of hours from the workday, which will not reflect in their progress report. Remote team employee monitoring software doesn't leave these out; it captures the entire daily activity in the background and allows your team to share every second of their time on work-related tasks. Such transparency enables you to identify areas where your team spends the most or the least time. This can help you plan project timelines accordingly, offer accurate appraisals based on employee performance, and ensure that every bit of your team’s effort toward work is accounted for. Offering better time management Remote employees need help to track and manage working time due to the countless chores they have to take care of at home. This often leads to late submissions, delays in project timelines, and sometimes even the quality and effectiveness of work. Remote employee monitoring software lets your team see their daily and weekly progress, time spent on each task, and time slacking over their favorite YouTube videos. Employees can use this information to take relevant measures for reducing time wastage and improving work efficiencies. For example, employees who realize they're spending much time in meetings can reduce their time to focus more on their primary job. The advantages are clear when examining the benefits of employee monitoring software for managers, business owners, and C-suite executives. Ways employees benefit from employee monitoring tools Improve productivity It’s important to note that non-invasive employee monitoring and satisfaction are not at odds. The average employee is productive for only about 31% of their workday. But, of course, that’s not by design. Most of the problem is due to a lack of proper time management. Does this scenario sound familiar? You come into work with a prioritized list of tasks you want to accomplish. But as soon as you get into your seat, you’re met with a completely unrelated issue that you have to fix. Before you know it, you’re 5 hours into your workday and still haven’t made a dent in your to-do list. So, how does employee monitoring help? Well, first of all, understanding how you work and where you spend the bulk of your effort is the first step toward improving your productivity. Then, analyze reports from an employee monitoring software over a week or month, and you will see some common patterns emerge, and they might point toward issues you might not expect. For example, suppose the software shows you’re spending a solid hour on your work messaging app daily, and you know this time is spent providing feedback to the same employee. In that case, you’ve immediately identified a roadblock to your productivity. Now, think about shifting the individual to another team or changing their designated duties to reduce the burden of mentorship off your shoulders. Implement a system of feedback You can also think of employee monitoring reports as real-time feedback on your performance. Whether your manager is chiming in with their thoughts on your metrics, you can look at your task completion rates and overall project completion times and measure them against hours worked to identify where you’re underperforming and even uncover your greatest strengths. This type of self-awareness can only benefit your effectiveness over time. Set standards and work towards them Continuous improvement requires clear and achievable goals. With employee monitoring software, you have the metrics to achieve those benchmarks. If you’re a salesperson wanting to spend more prospecting, looking at the reporting will show you how long you’re currently spending. Let’s say your employee monitoring software reveals you spend 20% of the time on this activity on a good workday. Now you have a goal to achieve. Benefits of non-invasive employee monitoring Dealing with remote teams can be difficult at times. Let’s look at some challenges you might face while working with such teams. Working from home appeals to employees, but managers have always been skeptical and paranoid. Some managers believe employees slack while working from home and are partially right. In a physical workplace, your team doesn’t have to do the household chores, make coffee, or look after their little ones. Wfh routines unwillingly require them to do that, which can cause distractions and hinder work, leaving you with the following: Declining productivity levels as individuals find it difficult to focus on tasks at home. Communication gaps since there are no in-person meetings and interactions anymore Mounting deadlines as employees often begin slacking and, thus, miss deadlines. Dealing with remote teams has always been challenging for managers, but employee monitoring software has helped them streamline work and ensure effective outputs. Both employees and their managers benefit from employee monitoring in their life. WorkTime optimizes employee performance Performance management is another crucial area where employee monitoring software can reap big dividends. As a manager, it can be easy to give feedback to your employees based on intuition and experience, but adding accurate data to the picture adds real weight to these communications. Think about it. If you have analytics showing how your employee works and what they contribute to overall project timelines, then you can tailor your advice and possible incentives to match the data. That means you’re far more likely to find alignment with your employees - track task progress and deadlines. Remote team managers often need help monitoring individual and team progress since there are many discrepancies in reporting. You have to pull up report reports submitted by each employee, tally them with the project timelines and determine if you're on track to completion. This becomes more tedious when employees don't share progress reports. Modern managers avoid this concern using remote team employee monitoring software with built-in project management functionalities that provide an accurate view of individual and team progress through an intuitive visual dashboard. The tool captures employees’ time, maps it to the activities and apps used to complete tasks, and enables logging everything to respective projects. Once done, the data from these logs becomes visible on the manager’s dashboard for review. This entire process saves you several hours that you would otherwise spend extracting data from manual reports and progress reports. WorkTime creates transparency Employees' progress and overall performance should be visible to them and their managers as it creates a sense of accountability. You know precisely the work your employees are doing, the status of each project, and if everyone is meeting their goals. Having insights into each employee’s work habits and performance allows managers to plan tasks intelligently, ensuring that a balanced workload is assigned. With all the puzzle pieces falling into place perfectly, you can maintain and even achieve higher productivity and customer satisfaction rates. For this purpose, an employee monitoring solution will be useful, as it keeps track of work-related activities and shows exactly how your team utilized the time to achieve their tasks. Here’s a fact: nobody likes to be micromanaged. Micromanagement may have worked in the past when our parents and grandparents weren’t aware of the best practices at work, but things are no longer the same. Employees today know exactly how micromanagement hurts performance, so they expect their managers to give them work autonomy. Remote team employee monitoring software, has made this easier for managers as these tools non-invasively record employees' progress, which means you don't have to constantly remind them to log reports or submit work progress reports. Employees can do that from the employee monitoring software with a few clicks at each day's end. They allow you to plan more effectively. As a manager, you want to know how your employees are performing, so you can reward top performers and work on slackers to improve their productivity. Non-invasive employee monitoring lets you track daily and weekly performance reports and measure outputs against capacities. For instance, if you see Jake struggling with certain tasks, you can revisit planning for future projects and assign Jake the tasks he completes more efficiently. This will allow you to increase the overall efficiency of your team by utilizing resources to their full potential. You save your team from potential burnout Work overload is one of the biggest causes of employee burnout, which can lead to significant declines in productivity. Non-invasive employee monitoring software allows you to ensure this doesn't happen. Once you hire an employee, you assign a weekly working capacity to that worker. Let's assume that the new person in your team is Mark, and you assign him a 40-hour per week capacity. If Mark begins to deliver more than 40 hours each week, you know he's overworking, which may jeopardize his work-life balance, eventually leading to burnout. You can monitor Mark's working hours through your employee monitoring software and assign projects that he could deliver within his assigned weekly capacity. This will keep Mark from experiencing burnout systems and, thus, remain productive all year round. See how customizable WorkTime reports help remote and distributed teams to streamline workflow and collaborate seamlessly. Check out the free 14-day trial to see for yourself! FAQ How does employee monitoring software help manage time? Remote team employee monitoring software has proven to be excellent for employee time management. They track your employees' time on different tasks and review the report to see where they were most or least productive. This can help employees improve their working habits and time management, enabling them to demonstrate higher productivity. As a manager, you can assign future projects based on your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Which problems did employee monitoring software help you solve? Employee monitoring software helps both employees and managers in different ways. For instance, employees can benefit from employee monitoring software by: Improving work productivity by identifying parts of the day when they were most productive and unproductive and then working on those areas accordingly Implementing a system of personal feedback by reviewing the time spent on tasks Set personal standards by reviewing metrics and then working to achieve them Increase work transparency by knowing precisely where and how much time was spent Better time management by using employee monitoring insights to remove potential slacking time For managers, employee monitoring software help by: Making payroll more efficient due to accurate employee monitoring insights improving project management by reviewing individual and team progress Optimizing employee performances by focusing on work delivered against estimated capacities monitoring task progress and deadlines through an intuitive dashboard to ensure timely work delivery Fostering accountability by trusting employees with work and the time they spend on tasks What's the most efficient way of monitoring employee hours? There are several ways to track employee hours at work, but when it comes to remote teams, non-invasive employee monitoring is the single-most reliable option for several reasons. Employees don’t have to manually log hours since these tools capture activity, allowing your team to share accurate logs with you. Why do companies need employee monitoring software? We live in an era of remote work, with some challenges, which is the new normal. How do you know if your employees work at home, watch tv, and play ps? How do you track the number of hours they’ve worked on a project to identify billable hours? Answering these and several other performance-related questions is essential in a remote work model, and a viable solution available today is employee monitoring software. These tools are equipped with all the basic functionalities you, as a manager, need to run a remote team. Does employee monitoring in an organization improve productivity? Employee monitoring may not directly impact productivity, but it provides you and your team with insights that can lead to a more productive workflow. For instance, your team can review its activity to identify lost hours and see where and how they allocate their 8-hour shift. This data can then be used to improve work consistency, reduce idle time, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of work altogether, all of which translates into improved productivity.
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