Who anticipated that something that commenced as a strategic crisis management would soon transform into the most coveted workstyle for employees?
Since the 2019 pandemic blew the global population ruthlessly, ‘Work from Home’ became integral to employees. Employees utilized the technology and effortlessly delivered work on time. With time, it was realized that work-from-home is an ideal work style. From pragmatically defining the era of digital solutions and smart applications, it has tremendously transformed the old-styled, fatigue-inducing, and monotonous work life.
The sole purpose of technology is to enhance every facet of life, including work, right?
Nah! Employers don’t think this way!
However, during the pandemic, minimized distraction, less work anxiety, and saved commutes were liberally enjoyed by employees, a hand-cuffed situation emerged for employers when the consideration was mainly ‘monitoring employees and productivity.’
Although, the inability to view employees’ productivity from home is outfiright challenging, but, guess what? ‘The solution to this quandary lies in technology only!’
If you employ a remote team and are stressing over the question, of how to monitor employees working from home, you have stumbled upon the right page. This step-by-step guide helps employers keep a tireless eye on their employees without piercing their privacy sphere.
What Is Working from Home?
Work from home is a modern and flexible work approach that allows employees to work from their residing place home through technology. Working from home typically means working remotely, (anywhere in the world). Technologies and tools like project management, time management, conferences, and communication are vital in maintaining and ensuring employees have sufficient access to connect to their office and fellow team members.
The idea of working remotely came into existence with the publication of the book, Telecommunication Transportation and Tradeoffs, in 1973, authored by Jack Nillies. Jack is largely credited for the conception of modern telecommuting, with a recommendation saying, “Either the jobs of the employees must be redesigned so that they can still be self-contained at each location, or a sufficiently sophisticated telecommunications and information-storage system must be developed to allow the information transfer to occur as effectively as if the employees were centrally collocated.”
With the trend of telecommuting much more efficient during the 1980s, major companies like JCPenney, American Express, The Hartford, General Electric – GE, Levi Strauss & Co., and Sears Holdings rolled down and implemented programs supporting telecommuting. Some even follow it today!
That was a brief history of the origin of modern telecommuting aka remote work. Now let’s learn what its scope is in the future.
The Work-from-Home Trend Is Here to Stay!
An unmatched advantage of work-from-home is improved social interactions and enhanced work-life balance. With flexible working hours employees share proximity with their loved ones, significantly increasing their work productivity. Just by logging out from their systems, employees can step back into their personal lives with one click and no exhaustive commuting.
Although, working from home was popular even before the pandemic shock, from 2019 to even today, working from home has grown significantly over the past few years, increasing from 20% to 28% in 2023 worldwide. Among industries implementing the revolutionary work-from-home strategy, the technology sector excels with 67.75% of all the IT firms offering the workstyle to employees, followed by agencies and consultancies (50.6%) and finance & insurance (48.7%).
As 51% of employees prefer working from home to enhance their work-life balance, the trend of working from home is not plummeting, not at least for the next decade. With workers exhibiting resistance to return to the office, approximately 21% of companies have reviewed their policies, opening new scopes for experimentation. For instance, the ‘Hybrid Workstyle,’ allows employees to work remotely and from the office in a blended style. Affirming the estimation, a Gartner survey discloses that 74% of businesses plan to switch to the remote style as their post-COVID plans.
What Makes It Challenging for Employers to Track Their Activity?
With every benefit that is offered to an employee, work-from-home piles up stress on the employer’s shoulders. For managers, the distance, the inaccessibility to reach out to employees, and the absence of a performance tracker further disturb the employee monitoring ability, producing friction and incoherence in a team.
Inadequate communication and collaboration
The greatest disadvantage that creeps along with remote work is communication gaps and inefficient collaboration. With the lack of appropriate tools, the communication inadequacies escalate to unimaginable levels. Missed communication among team members or stakeholders further widens the gap and staggers collaboration. Employers need a robust solution and technology-powered tools like Zoom, Jira, and Google Workspace that facilitate seamless information flow, break silos, and bring team members together on a unified platform.
Lack of visibility
Employers often find it painstaking to monitor their employees due to the physical distance from the workplace. During the onsite model, the entire workplace is under the manager’s sight. gaining real-time activities and information about remote or hybrid teams is challenging. Employers need tools with features like screen tracking, frequent activities, engagement, idleness, and much more to outline their engagement with work at home.
Absence of detailed insights
Completing work hours is insufficient for employee monitoring as the lack of detailed assessment of how an employee spends their work hours creates a loophole. Ever since the ‘productivity’ concept has struck the corporate world, remote work often allows employees to escape critical duties and engage in time theft, avoiding the work responsibilities they must be doing. The lack of subjective analysis due to this seemingly objective situation provides a false representation of performance and productivity.
Inappropriate tools
The present times need agile, adept, and attentive tools with maximum efficiency and countless features. Tools with limited and selected features not only increase the operational cost of a business but also minimize the power to track employees through an inspective lens. Employers need a tool as a solution that encompasses maximum parameters to assess employees’s performance including not only the key performance indicators but also their work behavior and patterns. Such unveiled intelligence can assist a manager’s conscientiousness to plan and optimize the workload to achieve milestones faster and more efficiently.
The Step-by-Step Guide to Track Remote Employees Seamlessly
Monitoring employees can introduce hundreds of challenges for managers, from consistent tracking to accusing of micromanagement. Constant employee tracking often leads to dissatisfaction among employees, triggering feelings of annoyance, and lack of respect from their employers. To ensure an employee’s privacy stays unbreached, the correct way to utilize efficient time-tracking tools is essential.
This section uncovers the top 6 steps to monitor work-from-home employees without leaving gaps.
Step 1: Define projects
Defining project scope and objectives is crucial for effective employee monitoring. Besides providing a clear direction to workers, it allows them to stay focused and adhere to the tasks and responsibilities. With clear objectives in mind, employees know what to do, when to deliver, how to achieve, and whom to approach for extended guidance. Ambushing employees into ambiguity about the projects, expectations, and deliverables will not allow them to attain complete potential. Instead, create a project outline to facilitate a mindmap for employees and perform while working from home.
Step 2: Employ project management tools
Employing project management tools assists managers in assessing and evaluating employees’ productivity along with performance metrics, key performance indicators, and priority tasks. A project management tool comprises features such as task management, risk management, reporting and analytics, resource management, tool integration, dashboards, and project views. Indeed project management tools are increasingly replacing the traditional methods to keep tabs on all the comprehensive activities with unmatched accuracy. KonarkPro, Zoho projects, Jira, Trello, Asana, and Wrike are popular project management tools widely used by employers. However, as entrepreneurial needs vary, businesses need specific solutions that meet their needs.
Step 3: Prioritize reports and analytics
Reflecting on reports and insights is an infallible strategy to monitor employee performance and assess their productivity. Detailed reports offer a deep understanding of how well your employees are performing—energy sinks, productive hours, idle time, and websites and URLs visited. With data-backed information, managers can strategize and execute plans that will deliver results. Analytical reports hold the key to leveraging the best-performing resources, planning future goals, and optimizing workloads effectively.
Step 4: Consider objective and subjective analyses
However digging deep into objective analysis of employee performance is fine, being open to subjective analysis is equally significant. Where objective analysis is a quantitative aspect, telling whether an employee is working or not, subjective analysis, being a qualitative one, tells how the employee is working. That’s why data-driven insights are essential to account for employee monitoring. To run a business successfully, only working is not vital, but how the process takes place stands supreme. While monitoring remote or hybrid employees consider actionable insights like level of engagement, time taken, tasks completed, speed and accuracy, and overall productivity throughout the week/month instead of considering work hours to implement corrective actions.
Step 5: Implement the Feedback Culture
Asking for feedback is crucial when employee monitoring is imperative. Two-way feedback exchange helps managers understand the team dynamics and stabilize the uproar. Furthermore, opening channels for employees to freely express their concerns about crucial work-related issues can significantly improve the team’s performance. Apart from unlocking new avenues of productivity, a robust feedback framework cultivates efficient managerial competencies in employers, providing them insights about their performance and shortcomings as a team lead.
Step 6: Identify Weak Links
Detecting and identifying weak links in a team and project achievements allow businesses to improve their performance and enhance project delivery. Undetected sinks may drain productivity and waste employees’ potential. From unproductive employees and inefficient tools to internal project restructuring and unnecessary meetings, weak links can arise in various ways. A leader must identify the reasons for underperformance and stifled progress by employing a suitable employee tracking tool like KonarkPro that helps organizations optimize resources and align them to meet business objectives.
KonarkPro- Your One-Stop Solution for All Employee Monitoring Queries!
KonarkPro offers a comprehensive and competitive suite of features, allowing companies and employers to efficiently gain an overview of remote, hybrid, or onsite teams. With KonarkPro, managers can track employees’ work activity, performance, and productive behavior. Accurate timesheets, activity reports, productivity stats, payroll management, and overall efficiency analysis underscore KonarkPro as a go-to option for efficient employee tracking.
In the ever-competitive era of striving in the industry, time management is the secret to seamlessly improving productivity and fostering a perfect work-life balance. Additionally, its intuitive nature makes it an indispensable tool for everyone, including students, budding startups, freelancers, or flourishing large-scale establishments. Its flexible pricing models further enable businesses or individuals to select subscriptions that align highly with their budget and financial goals.
With KonarkPro comes unmatched streamlined organization, highly optimized resources, and seamless workforce management that uplift the business system and cultivate a productivity-driven environment. By leveraging a tool like KonarkPro, organizations can save costs spent on multiple tools for project management, time tracking, and invoicing & billing. Saving heftily, businesses can intelligently strategize and plan their future goals and allocate resources accordingly. Moreover, they can efficiently identify the most productive employees and invest in their training and skill development to leverage their organizational presence.
Conclusion
In the current era of time management and high productivity, every tick of the clock matters. Where work productivity measurement is crucial, a decent work-life balance is imperative for overall well-being.
Gone are the days when work hours were predominantly considered as the parameter for high productivity. Today, every aspect of an employee contributes to defining their productivity levels to some extent.
Although there are multiple ways to track employees such as self-reporting, checking punch-ins and punch-outs, task completion, work hours, etc., the ideal method is to encircle the most crucial and meaningful elements of performance tracking. Components like KPIs, performance metrics, deliverables, work quality, speed, and attentiveness define the actual statement for productivity and require competitive tools designed and developed to serve the purpose.
FAQs
Why is it important to constantly track employees?
Constant tracking helps managers understand employees’ performance, productivity patterns, and work engagement. Keeping a tab on such information helps managers optimize the team sync and structure and drive maximum productivity.
Which is the best tool to monitor remote and hybrid employees?
KonarkPro is the best tool for tracking employees. As it covers many varied features, this tool emerges as the most versatile and one-for-all solution for seamless employee monitoring for every type of work model—hybrid, remote, or onsite.