A recurring question among business owners and HR management specialists is whether remote employees are working.
Will they be performing their tasks effectively? How do you know if workers require any tools, resources, or skills to meet all their assignments and deadlines? How can you contribute to enhancing their productivity?
We’ll explain to you how to know if your remote workers are really working.
How to Know If Your Employees Are Really Working?
Indeed, one of the advantages of remote work is balancing professional life and personal life. This means that remote employees have more leisure time, making them more efficient at work. However, it isn’t easy to know how remote workers spend their time at home since they have complete autonomy to carry out their tasks.
Some signs that your remote employees are not being fully efficient at work. Some of these signs are:
They cannot respond to you on time: if you realize that your remote employees are slow to respond to emails or direct messages, this is a red flag. If this is the case, we recommend you have a conversation with your employees to discover what is happening.
Poor quality of work: you can identify unresponsible remote employees by only checking the quality of their work.
If you discover that their work quality is decreasing, you may want to talk with them about what is affecting their performance. In addition, you can establish if your remote workers have a poor understanding of their assignments by conversating with them.
These events indicate that your remote worker is not actually working.
Stress, negativity, and overreacting: a deficient performance in your remote employees indicate that they are not working. However, you will see that many factors motivate inefficiency in the workplace.
For instance, stress and burnout, which manifests in excessive negativity, and even aggression, can influence your employees’ performance.
If you need to address occupational health in your company, you may want to hire a loss prevention manager, a human resources assistant, and a physician virtual assistant.
Tools for Monitoring Your Remote Workers
Technology will be your best resource for monitoring your remote workers’ performance at home. If you need help with monitoring employees’ work, you may want to hire a project engineering manager or a project manager coordinator.
Remoto Workforce shares a list of the best software to monitor employee’s productivity:
Time Doctor: Time Doctor is one of the most powerful tracking tools for monitoring weekly, daily, and hourly work. Currently, Time Doctor allows to monitor your remote team tasks, the amount of time they are spending on each one, the sites they visit, and their billable hours.
Harvest: This is another tracking application that will allow you to know how your employees are working. One of the most important features of Harvest is bills automation. This application can create invoices and generate payments through PayPal or Stripe. In addition, Harvest is integrated with videoconferencing tools and project management software.
Trello: Trello is a project management platform that allows you to promote collaborations between teams. Moreover, you can track work hours.
ClickUp: ClickUp is a project management software that incorporates task tracking and goals. In addition, this software has integrations with Google Drive and Dropbox. In ClickUp, you can assign tasks to employees, and they can inform you about their signs of progress. Moreover, ClickUp has a chat feature that will foster communications with remote teams.
In this video, you’ll learn more about how you can monitor employees remotely.
How to Choose Tools for Monitoring Your Employees?
For small companies with remote employees, it’s crucial to have the right tools in place to monitor productivity and ensure that work is getting done. But with so many remote work tools available, it can be tough to know which ones are worth investing in.
Here are five tips to help you choose the right remote work tools for your business.
Identify your needs
Before you shop for remote work tools, take a step back and assess what your company needs.
What kind of work will your remote employees be doing? Do you need to keep track of time spent on specific projects? Are there certain tasks that need to be completed by a certain deadline?
Answering these questions will help you narrow down your options and choose the right tools for your business.
Compare features
Once you know what your company needs, you can start comparison shopping. Make a list of the most important features to you and compare different remote work tools side-by-side. This will help you narrow down your options even further.
Read reviews
Don’t just take a company’s word for it when it comes to remote work tools. Be sure to read reviews from other users as well. This will give you a better idea of how easy the tool is to use and how well it actually works in practice.
Get a free trial
Many remote work tools offer free trials, so take advantage of this! This will allow you to test out the tool before making a commitment and ensure that it meets your needs.
Ask for recommendations
Finally, don’t forget to ask for recommendations from other business owners who have remote employees. They may have some great insights into which tools are worth investing in and which ones aren’t worth your time or money.
Are you still wanting to know how companies can monitor remote employees? Watch this video.
Takeaway
It can be difficult to manage a remote workforce, but with the right tools and communication, it can be done. By knowing what to look for in employees’ work performance, you can set up systems that will help you monitor their productivity.
If you are still struggling to keep track of your remote team, reach out to us for help. Our team is experienced in monitoring employee productivity and we can get your team back on track.
Have you had success using any of these methods to monitor your remote workers? Let us know!