Recently, productivity has taken the drivers seat when it comes to playing a crucial role in the growth of an enterprise. Regardless of your business industry and the kind of services or products you deliver, if your employees are not productive in their positions, your company can and will face adverse outcomes.
Thus, it becomes imperative for business administrators to track the productivity of their workforce seamlessly. Along the same lines, to overcome productivity issues, it is better to use effective time tracking tools that will help you monitor the time spent on remote work and each employee’s productivity.
Furthermore, these time tracking tools and online applications come with different features such as attendance tracking, deadline setting, invoicing, reporting, and app integration. In this way, you will not have to deal with plenty of paperwork when monitoring remote employees. Instead, you can track employee productivity online with enhanced transparency. Keep reading to learn more about effective ways to track employee productivity while working remotely.
How to Monitor Remote Teams While Working From Home?
Remote managers should not always micromanage their employees or analyze them at every step during job hours. By doing so, leaders are obliterating every trace of confidence between them and their workforce.
Instead, business administrators and supervisors should find a suitable method for tracking the time employees spend completing their tasks remotely. Below are some effective ways managers can monitor their remote teams while working remotely.
1. Set explicit expectations and deadlines for remote employees
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Your workforce should understand how and when the work should be submitted. By specifying explicit expectations and deadlines, your remote employees will be able to manage their time accurately.
In addition, many supervisors fail to establish a specific deadline for various tasks. It creates a lot of mess and annoyance for both managers and remote employees. The workplace administration expects the work to get timely submissions, but the remote workers cannot accomplish so because they did not plan out their time appropriately from the beginning.
Thus, your employees must understand when they should be submitting their projects, specifically if the task is time-bound. Furthermore, you can manage employee tasks seamlessly with the help of different employee monitoring online tools.
For example, employee productivity monitoring tools allow employers to assign a task, set details and allocate work to employees remotely. With these employee productivity monitoring applications, you can remain in touch with your workforce throughout the workflow and obtain timely updates regarding their progress.
You can use project management software with a time tracker feature or in addition to your time card app to monitor projects and employee performance. With the number of project management software and time tracking apps available, choose the right tools you need for your remote team. Consider the features, benefits, customer support, and price.
This way, you would not have to wait for the work to run in. Instead, you can interact with your team effortlessly, notify them regarding the deadline, and track your workers’ productivity.
2. Deliver periodic feedback to your employees
Instead of waiting for the months end, deliver frequent feedback to your remote workforce so that they can comprehend their shortcomings and strengths. Your employees will be able to enhance their job and boost their productivity.
In addition, conducting a monthly or quarterly feedback culture is integral to allowing your remote workforce to function efficiently. Your employees can even comprehend where they are lacking and what they should do to enhance their performance. Thus, the business management should deliver productive feedback to your workers and accept their feedback on the organizational workflow and culture.
You can conduct an online feedback survey for your remote employees to boost productivity. This activity can help you obtain immediate, valuable insights into a team member’s performance. Such surveys can also help identify areas of improvement, promote transparency, and improve talent retention.
Conduct employee satisfaction and feedback surveys for traditional office settings at least once a year. For remote work, the ideal frequency to attain optimal results is four to five times a year. Creating survey forms for this purpose is easy by using free online templates and tools.
Feedback will assist in determining any bottlenecks in the job and fixing any disputes. Moreover, different online time tracking apps offer integrations with other tools to foster better communication within your team. Such integrations can make the workflow more efficient and effective.
3. Track absences and attendance with employee monitoring tools
Instead of having your workforce compose tons of emails to the HR manager for leaves, you can employ employee monitoring tools to track absences and attendance. In addition, it can sometimes become challenging for HR managers to keep track of every employees attendance daily.
Likewise, it can be complicated to handle a data cluster, especially if you have a giant team with a majority of employees working remotely. You require monitoring software if your workforce often complains of discrepancies in their attendance.
If HR finds it complicated to manage all the data, the time tracking tool can simplify that too. And even if you have a small remote workforce, electronic time tracking software is essential to improve efficiency and team productivity. Also, when looking for monitoring software for employee attendance, there are specific characteristics that businesses must look for.
If you compare time card apps, you realize there’s no one-size-fits-all solution suitable for a remote work setup. Some trackers focus more on employee accountability, promoting reliability and transparency when team members clock in and out. On the one hand, others focus on streamlining payroll. They’re used to schedule and handle employee timesheets, eliminating spreadsheets and manual payroll data entry and calculations.
The time tracking online application you choose should also let your remote team apply for leaves and absenteeism in a few clicks. In this way, you can reduce expenses on paperwork and lower the requirement to track emails. Once your workforce applies for leave and HR managers accept it, the application will revamp the documents. Excellent employee monitoring tools further track how much additional time your employees have performed.
You can then comprise these working hours at the time of calculating salaries and appraisals. You can then determine who is taking constant leaves or working extra time when tracking your remote team productivity. Most essentially, you can determine how much time an employee requires to perform a specific task, which can then assist you in creating feedback about that employee.
4. App and web usage monitoring with effective monitoring software
Sometimes a business must understand how much time their workforce is spending on other online applications apart from work. Nevertheless, instead of asking your team directly about it, you can integrate effective applications to track employee online activity precisely. Also, you must know that numerous employee monitoring tools offer constant reporting analyzing your employees’ time on documents, apps, and websites.
You can even determine the idle time for better clarity. And you know the best part? Your workforce can even turn off the time tracking application or switch on a private mode if they want to take a break or spend their time on personal stuff. This way, they will rest assured that their managers never intrude on their private space.
Furthermore, by evaluating how much time remote employees spend on various activities, you can determine why they cannot fulfill the deadlines. Possibly, the employees can finish their work despite spending their time on other work. In such circumstances, it’s a good sign that you won’t have to stress about their productivity.
Benefits of Time Tracking Tools for Employee Monitoring
Below are some advantages of using time tracking tools for employee monitoring:
1. Improved remote workplace trust
How can managers understand that their remote employees are earnestly working? The most vital element here is trust and mutual belief and respect between employees and supervisors or administrators. Time-tracking applications play an integral part in developing trust in a remote workplace.
Moreover, you can also think of time tracking tools as a glue that binds employees and managers. Employees have the accountability to log their hours every day and prove they’re dependable. On the other hand, managers and employers need to be counted on and accept worker timesheet data as evidence of their remote job.
2. Better collaboration and communication
A time tracker can facilitate collaboration and communication in a remote workforce. With the help of these time tracking tools, supervisors can set employee schedules at the beginning of their workday to understand how many employees are working for the day. It is exceptionally functional for a workforce whose teams come from diverse continents or even different time zones.
When employees are aware of the present and absent count, they can reach out only to the employees present if they have a concern or require help. Furthermore, having prior knowledge of employee availability enhances both remote collaboration and communication.
3. Enhanced employee productivity and performance
Remotely working teams usually do not share the same physical location. Thus, estimating how effective employees are can be a challenging part. The most realistic way administrators and supervisors can examine employee performance, and productivity is by checking the employees’ work hours and other information, like task reports and time they spent working on a business project.
Therefore, time-tracking applications, even online ones, can help ensure that everything runs seamlessly and that remote teams remain competent in completing tasks on time. Apart from managers, time-tracking applications are even convenient for employees. Employees can determine how they spend their time during work hours, what apps they use considerably, and how productive they are.
4. Better accountability
How do online time tracking tools help employees hold themselves responsible for their performance? Well, understanding that they need to log their hours makes employees conscious that there is a timer to track their activities.
Thus, it’s more likely that your team will perform their best to finish their jobs before the deadline. As a result, employees will demonstrate how reliable and accountable they are. Once your workforce proves their responsibility, building a trusting association between employees will follow, too.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, productivity monitoring and time tracking are paramount for the success of any company. If you don’t understand why your workforce cannot finish their job and submit their tasks, you won’t be able to accomplish efficiency in the industry.
While sometimes the workplace atmosphere impacts their performance, oftentimes the relationship with the managers affects how they function. However, for myriad other reasons, remote workers are also incompetent to operate to their full capabilities if they can’t handle their time perfectly.
Hence, you must integrate time tracking and productivity technology to assist remote employees, and managers track productivity and time. Moreover, using these time tracking tools ensures that everything falls into the right place to help employees manage their time more effectively.