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More and more employees are doing home-based jobs, and more employers are using remote monitoring tools to keep an eye on them. These solutions may track keystrokes and measure employee active and idle time in critical applications and freelancing websites, among other things. Monitoring software can also be used to enforce data security standards and even snap images to determine if employees are working from home on their laptops.
However, there are several drawbacks to using tracking software. Employees have the right to privacy in the workplace, and they must be notified if and when they are being observed, according to a number of federal and state regulations.
From a legal standpoint, revealing monitoring is the best strategy. By informing employees that they would be monitored, they will no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is often the basis for invasion-of-privacy complaints under common law.
While being open about the usage of such surveillance techniques is critical for avoiding legal hazards, it's also critical for establishing trust among employees when it comes to privacy concerns.
According to a Gartner research released in June, 26% of HR leaders have employed software or technology to follow remote workers since the coronavirus outbreak began. This is up from 16% in April when the epidemic was just getting started. Work computer usage, employee emails or internal communications, work phone usage, and employee location or movement are all monitored.
Many executives are considering the usage of such technology because they recognize that remote work will continue to grow in popularity. According to Gartner, 47% of businesses expect to allow employees to work remote working jobs full-time in the future.
In addition, as they reopen closed businesses, 82 percent of business owners, especially temporary resource agencies across several industries expect to permit workers to work remotely at least some of the time.
When implementing employee monitoring technologies, it's critical for companies to be clear about their goals.
Track their email activity
Did you know that the average modern employee spends 28 to 50 percent of their workday in their inbox? That's a significant amount of time spent emailing.
On the other hand, managers don't need to know that their employees are spending time in their email inboxes. You must be aware of what is taking place at the time.
Who are they sending emails to? What was the total number of emails they sent and received today? What is their response time to new leads or customers?
Email is a reliable indicator of how much work someone is doing at any given time. The busier someone is, the more emails they are likely to send and receive.
It allows you to immediately discover who on your team is the busiest, who isn't contributing, and how you may re-balance responsibilities to improve team productivity and efficiency.
You will receive a daily or weekly email report from such tools that shows you each of your team members' email activities for the previous day or week, so you can keep track of workloads and email activity without ever leaving your inbox.
So your staff can go about their business as usual, and you'll have all the information you need to manage your team properly.
Implement a time tracking tool or app
The next step is to use an employee productivity tracking tool to keep track of how your employees use their time during the day.
When your employees start a new task, these tools normally urge them to start and stop a built-in timer as needed.
Depending on how you manage and imply this, you may require employees to log all of their work throughout the day or only utilize it for particular sorts of tasks.
In either case, you'll be able to log in and view how your gig workers are spending their time, allowing you to assess which of your employees are most productive and have free time.
Time monitoring, for example, isn't great for keeping track of things like phone calls and spontaneous meetings, and there's always the possibility that your staff is inventing their time usage.
Use a task managing app
Project and task management apps come in a variety of flavors, but they all serve the same purpose:
● Assisting your company in managing
● Organizing
● Assigning tasks for various projects
When you receive a new project, a project manager or supervisor will create it in the app and then assign people to work on it.
You can log in at any time to see which digital nomads are assigned to which projects and whether any employees require more duties to fill their days.
Because they leave so many things unresolved, these apps aren't ideal as an all-in-one employee task tracking tool. They don't usually address staff activities that aren't related to a certain project, for example (like, say, organizing their email inbox).
Furthermore, different initiatives may have varying degrees of responsibility or time commitment, making them difficult to measure.
Create task lists
Task lists can be used in project management systems. However, they are more focused on individual tasks assigned to employees than on large projects.
They have a few crucial advantages over traditional project monitoring; for example, you'll be able to detect whether a project is disproportionately dispersed, such as if one employee is assigned 70% of the project's work.
You can also keep a track of tasks that aren't related to a specific project, such as administrative responsibilities.
There are a couple of issues with using task lists to keep track of employees who work from home. For starters, you'll need a mechanism to assess the relative burden of each work; not all responsibilities will be distributed equally.
Creating and managing tasks is a full-time job in and of itself; supervisors and employees must create new tasks for everything they do and remember to check them off when they are completed.
As a result, even the most accurate task systems include inconsistencies that impair tracking accuracy.
Observe subjective factors
Because objective data is highly trustworthy and easy to assess, the majority of this article has covered systems that favor objective techniques of tracking employee workloads, particularly for tracking employees who work from home.
However, you may want to provide some subjective assessments, particularly when it comes to employee morale.
Pay close attention to how your employees act in the office and utilize those indications to determine their current workload.
Do you observe that one of your employees is more irritable or stressed out than usual and that they are working late to catch up on their work?
They may have an excessive amount of work to do. Is one of your employees flitting from cubicle to cubicle, hurriedly closing their computer browser if a supervisor passes by?
It's possible that they have less burden than they should.
Self-reporting
You might also establish some self-reporting policies if you trust your IT staff or if you have a small workforce.
For example, at the end of the day, have each of your employees make a quick email report to a manager or supervisor detailing which projects they're currently working on, how busy they're feeling, and whether they feel capable of taking on new duties.
This is beneficial because it allows for some subjective analysis; workers can assess if they are underworked, overworked, or have a balanced workload for themselves.
Of course, this leaves some possibility for misrepresentation of workloads.
Even if you have faith in your employees implicitly, it's a good idea to have some objective form of measurement that isn't tied to this system.
