How can you monitor remote work from your employees?

8 of February, 2021

Implementing remote working is fast becoming an essential step for any budding company. Part of the challenge is knowing how to monitor remote work from your employees. Having several teams in several locations including their home offices can be a problem when it comes to managing the company, and many believe it leads to a drop in productivity. Luckily, with the right tools to monitor remote work from your employees we will have you set up in no time.

Luckily we are here to help with a guide to managing remote work from your employees. We will take you through the instruments, best practices and what is required to make sure your enterprise can be managed successfully. All while having work from home as one of its core pillars. Whether you are a manager or in HR we will show you how to tackle the problems that can arise from remote working and having your team in several locations. Your home offices will no longer seem so distant with strong monitoring and communication in your business.

Practices to monitor remote work from your employees?

Your office culture is going to play a major part in defining what practices to use for remote working. Your company could be anything from a small business to a major corporation, with either a complete culture of freedom or a necessity to put in raw hours to create output. Specialist consultants will have different practices to web and app developers who have to deliver lines of code. Your working hours are going to be inevitably different.

Nevertheless, some of the basic task management systems apply to remote working.  It is as if you were all present in the work place. One way to facilitate knowing what everyone is doing at the present moment is having a system where each employee indicates what they are working on in each moment. With a simple task-tracking system the managers in your company will have a strong idea about who is doing what at what time.

Lastly, you need to decide whether you will allow your remote work to be done within fixed schedules or whether your employees will be given freedom to work the hours allocated for their working day across the working day. With this you need to tackle the thorny issue of extra hours too. While extra-hours are easy to  count with in office working, it might be difficult to calculate them in a remote working context. That’s why you need to establish whether you allow extra hours and if so how you take them into account.

What materials do I need to monitor remote work?

Increasingly employers are relying on apps to monitor output. A time clocking app that also monitors your work is important to calculate to the amount of hours you are working per week in case of a labor dispute, or if, for example you state or country’s laws dictate that you must submit a full audit of the amount of hours your employee must work per week.  Having options like holiday requests are also added bonuses. As is a program saying what task an employee is currently working on, and for how long.

An integrated chat app and office suite is important to maintain a strong relationship with the team on a professional level. Using an instant messaging system that is compatible with all devices, easy to use, and depending on your line of work, private, is a good way to maintain contact with directs and ask them for updates on their work. Similarly a decent office suite can help you all have the same compatibility of programs, e-mail server and general formatting to improve the company.

Some final tips…

Here are some final tips to sum up what you need to remember when you want to monitor remote work :

• Fix schedules and make their rules clear. Say you want to make sure your employees are available when you need them. You need to demarcate what hours they are supposed to be online so you can contact them. This way you can make sure a whole team is available at the same time. Its important in the on-boarding process to let new employees know what these rules are.
• Calculate what output in terms of hours and content your employees are delivering. Just because your team are working from home doesn’t mean that you can’t keep a record of what is required. Their rights and obligations remain the same. It also helps them as it avoids their own problems with administration later on.
• Use technology to your advantage rather than seeing it as a burden. With Sesame you have a simple app to do several tasks with a clear UI. Over-complicating your monitoring system is a one way ticket to losing functionality with each tool.