What are The Do's and Don'ts of Remote Employee Monitoring
Allowing employees to work from home even for just one day a week increases employee loyalty and satisfaction, serves as a reward and motivation, and saves your business money on utilities and office space. However, to maximize the benefits of remote work, it’s important to monitor your remote employees' performance in order to establish productive and sustainable workplaces that benefit both employers and employees. Yet, there are wrong practices of employee monitoring that can significantly harm the business. In this article, we will discuss some do’s and don’ts that you have to pay attention to when you monitor your remote employees.
The Do's of Remote Employee Monitoring
- Be Clear & Transparent About Monitoring
Rather than an abrupt, out of nowhere execution, inform workers well early and clarify the significance of monitoring to them.
- Determine What Metrics You Want to Track
You can have a high level of detail, as in a set of data, however, it’s ideal to follow significant action that you can process, to begin with. Utilize that information to layout objectives for your outreach group and afterward begin keeping tabs on their development.
- Use the Data to Make Smart Business Decisions
Don’t simply survey the information that is accessible to you and set aside the effort to investigate it. Examining the information gathered helps you settle on more efficient business choices that will improve your group’s efficiency.
- Improve Team Performance & Reward Top Performers
Use monitoring to learn more about your employees’ strengths and weaknesses and then assign out work to maximize the former and minimize the latter.
- Encourage Employees to Improve Their Time Management Abilities
If you notice a team member or an employee struggling with time management, make an effort to assist him/her. Cost-effectiveness monitoring solutions allow you to determine ways your employees are costing you. With employee monitoring, you can discover when someone is wasting company time or even committing time theft.
The Don'ts of Remote Employee Monitoring
- Don't Fail to Address Your Employees’ Concerns
Make certain to clarify that you are not utilizing monitoring programming to keep an eye on them, but instead, to secure and protect the organization and discover approaches to make their job simpler. The employer should communicate how the utilization of programming mainly benefits employees, not only the organization.
- Don’t Neglect Personal Factors
There are a variety of personal reasons that might contribute to someone’s inability to focus at work. Perhaps the employee is dealing with a difficult situation at home or assisting a family member with a health condition.
- Don’t Get Blindsided by False Positives
Over-monitoring can be counterproductive. If you monitor too many events, it’s easy for you to get blindsided by false positives. To help reduce these false positives, ask yourself whether what you’re looking for is truly an event of concern or it’s a pattern that needs more examination before determining its significance.
- Don't Monitor Outside of Work Hours
The only way remote employees can feel truly comfortable is if they have complete control over their schedule. It can be hard for new leaders to let go of control of how work gets done, but it’s essential that you understand that if employees are not getting work done outside of work hours, it doesn’t mean they’re slacking off.
- Don't Micromanage
We’ve all had a micromanager as a boss. They double-checked every detail, kept track of every hour in our calendar, and asked for updates on a regular basis. Did you become more productive as a result of this? It’s likely that it made it more difficult for you to complete your tasks.
Conclusion
By adhering to the abovementioned do’s and don’ts, you can implement an employee monitoring program that drives your business forward and at the same time keeps your employees happy and productive. As remote work is becoming more popular, companies have to keep up with the best practices to stay on the top and not fall back as a result of this shift. We have included more information on how to maintain productivity in a remote working world in our white paper that we issued recently. We are also offering workforce analytics technology for productivity management which helps companies monitor workforce productivity and analyze their daily engagement and performance to find ways to enhance their capabilities and productivity.
