More businesses are offering flexible working schedules and the ability to work from home, which is great for safeguarding employee mental health but isn’t always the best course for productivity. When allowing your team to work remotely, you must have a level of trust in the reason you hired them, as part of the working-from-home deal needs to be letting them get on with it. However, it’s important to know that your trust isn’t being manipulated, so it’s wise to adopt the following monitoring strategies.
Shift Management Tools
When your team works remotely, you won’t be able to just pop by a computer to see what they’re up to. Therefore, businesses with remote teams use online time-tracking software, which accurately logs the amount of time each member has spent on any given task. That way, you can rest easy knowing that your team are getting on with their job.
Alongside the time-tracking tools, you should integrate staff scheduling software into your business, which will give employees access to online rotas and will make your life easier. The system will accurately work out how many hours your team has worked, as well as round instances of overtime. If any of your team is late, the scheduler can send you an alert, which you can keep track of.
Email Activity Tracking
The average professional spends 28% of their time engaging with emails, which is a significant amount of time they’re not focusing on work. However, knowing how much time is spent is only part of the puzzle; managers need to know what’s happening during this time.
The best way to do this is by using an email activity tracking tool, which records several metrics including the number of incoming emails, outgoing email count, and the average response time. Having access to this information allows managers to target people that aren’t pulling their weight.
Project Management Apps
There are countless project management tools online, each with a unique set of pros and cons, but they all strive to solve the same solution – making project management simple. These tools allow managers to break down tasks, assign workloads, and monitor progress. When the right project management tool is used, your team will find working collaboratively much easier. For a thorough overview of project management tools, explore this link.
Self-Reporting Processes
If you’ve got a small team or plenty of trust in them, you can implement a self-reporting policy. This means at the end of each shift, your employees will send an email detailing their progress for the day. However, keep in mind that some of your team may over-embellish when it comes to their achievements, so always have a way to accurately monitor progress.
Allowing your team to work from home is great for boosting morale and can work wonders on productivity, but you’ll need to put processes in place for keeping tabs because trust alone isn’t always enough. Fortunately, there are plenty of digital tools that will save you time while allowing for productivity tracking.
