When building a remote team, tracking productivity is an important part of your leadership skills. You can keep track of who is thriving in the remote environment, who needs support, and which teams are building a strong, productive bond.
As many experienced managers know, it is essential to find the right balance between monitoring and trust. This is true whether you are checking on your office workers or keeping track of a remote team. How do you know if your remote team is working efficiently? The new environment has led to new challenges, and the answer lies on finding the right combination of metrics and remote worker monitoring software.
The Importance of Remote Worker Monitoring
What is the best way to determine whether someone is working efficiently? The methods have evolved time, but for centuries, productivity was monitored in an in-person context. Managers could feel confident that employees were being productive because they could see them hard at work.
Remote work changed all this. Simply by removing the employees from the workplace, many managers began to feel adrift. Unable to physically see employees focusing, it has become necessary to devise new ways to measure productivity. It is vital to track the productivity of your remote workers, but doing so requires a new approach to monitoring and metrics.
Remote employee monitoring software is often the answer, but how much monitoring is appropriate? With the help of useful tools like remote employee time tracking software, it becomes possible to track what matters without the downsides of micro-managing.
Key Features of Effective Remote Worker Monitoring Software
The right software can help you track the most important aspects of productivity with your remote teams. You can keep tabs on how long your team spends on each task, the hours they work, and project completion while otherwise respecting the personal privacy of each employee’s home office and workflow style. A good manager knows what to track and how to keep close tabs on the things that matter while showing employees the trust they need to do their best work.
The key features of great remote worker monitoring software include time tracking, activity tracking, project management (tasks and timelines), and well-constructed business reports using the collected data.
Time Tracking
Time tracking allows you to keep track of how long employees focus on each individual task, task list, or project. Time tracking reflects individual task time and the total hours each remote employee is working per week. This data can help you streamline workflows, address bottlenecks, and even take good care of your remote team by spotting overwork in real-time.
Activity Monitoring
Activity monitoring tells you what your remote employees are focusing on. It identifies which programs and websites are open to help you get a clearer view of the tools and time allocation going into each task or project. This also helps you identify lost time, bottlenecks, opportunities for improvement, or workflows that are particularly efficient.
Project Management – Task Completion and Timelines
Projects are made up of many cumulative tasks arranged in a timeline. Your remote worker monitoring software should allow you to build projects, assign tasks, and keep track of how quickly those tasks are building up toward final project completion on a planned schedule or timeline.
Transparent Dashboard Reporting
Any time you are collecting productivity data, you will get the best insights from well-designed business reports. Look for reports and dashboards that automatically generate graphs, alerts, and leaderboards to get a clear view of your team’s individual and overall productivity.
Addressing Privacy Concerns
It is normal for employees to be concerned about the depth of productivity monitoring, and whether it is invading their privacy. Sharing data and reports with your team can show them that your remote worker monitoring software is only collecting project-relevant data and that their privacy is safe.
Best Practices for Remote Worker Monitoring
To lead your remote team effectively, it’s important to implement monitoring using positive best practices. Monitoring should help your team meet shared goals, achieve realistic performance metrics, and build trust by respecting personal privacy.
Setting Metrics
Setting the right metrics is an ideal way to determine the productivity of your remote workers. Here are some of the best metrics to track depending on the purpose and tasks of your remote team.
- Tasks Completed
- One of the best ways to identify a productive remote person or team is by the tasks they complete. Using Kanban boards and remote project management tools, it becomes possible to watch as employees claim a task and turn in complete tasks as part of the team workflow. Task completion shows that employees are achieving productive goals without needing to track their every keystroke.
- This method works best if daily productivity can be measured in the completion of multiple tasks each day. You can assess how much time each task would typically take and determine if an employee is moving at the expected pace as they complete one task after another.
- Time Spent on Each Task
- If you want to judge how fast an employee is working, you can measure one task at a time. Consider each task’s internal steps and the amount of time that is reasonable to complete the task based on previous metrics. Then, measure whether employees are completing tasks faster or slower than the same tasks or similar have been completed in the past.
- The time spent on each task can be used to determine the total productivity rate, especially if employees take their daily breaks in a timely manner. Time tracker software can make it easy for employees to clock not only their shift times but also specific tasks from start to finish.
- Achieving Deadlines
- Some workflows do not lend to individual task tracking as easily, but instead rely on longer work sessions and deadlines. Give your team deadlines and track their time to see how progress relates to completion. If your remote workers are achieving their deadlines with good quality work, then you can devise that they are being productive in the time between setting and completing those deadline-framed tasks.
- Collaboration Progress
- For productivity that is measured in teamwork, remote working makes it easier to track productivity as a team. Time tracking and task completion can both tell you how effectively a remote team is working together.
- Managers often have the ability to track the conversations and collaborative steps taken by remote team members, monitoring who is the most engaged, who turns in the most work sections, and how quickly the team is producing or generating ideas together.
- Sales Commissions
- If your remote team is in sales, you can measure their productivity based on the number of daily contacts or their total commission earned through facilitated sales. You can measure productivity by the total number of sales that a remote worker achieves or by the total value of their sales which gives greater weight to high-value or large-quantity sales.
Respecting Privacy and Avoiding Micro-management
The one thing that was quickly learned after the remote work migration is that micro-management doesn’t work. Managers used to keep their thumb on the pulse of the office created spectacularly negative examples for how to judge remote work productivity by insisting that at-home employees always be visible and/or demonstrably active.
Mouse trackers, key loggers, and endless video meetings were all tried, and all failed with prejudice. Micro-management methods remove the benefits of remote work, like improved focus, self-managed work environments, and better time usage. Fortunately, there are a lot of productivity tracking methods that do work to monitor remote employee productivity, including time tracking, activity monitoring, and dashboard reporting.
Balancing Monitoring and Trust-Building
The key to building a strong team and keeping close tabs on productivity is trust-building. Clarify exactly what data is being tracked and help your team understand that only task-related details are included. Activity monitoring, time tracking, and other techniques are used to ensure effective teamwork, help team members meet their professional goals, and set realistic deadlines.
Maintaining transparency and respecting employee privacy is paramount. Tools that support both monitoring and trust-building allow the team to see their own stats and even strive to beat their “high scores” while also seeing that personal data is not being collected.
How to Track Remote Employee Time Effectively
Accurate time tracking is very important when leading remote workers. Remote worker can lead to incredible productivity or lost focus depending on everyone’s home environment and personal workflow. Remote workers are more likely to work outside of traditional hours but may also be called away in the middle of the workday. By tracking time instead of time-clock hours, you can get a realistic view of both your workers’ total hours and productivity compared to the time they spend on each project.
Using these strategies, you can effectively track remote employee time to gain valuable insights and lead your team to greater success.
Assign Tasks and Deadlines
Time tracking is not just raw data. You will get the best data when you pair tasks, projects, and deadlines with your time tracking data. Start by building a structure of assigned tasks and deadlines. Break projects up into individual tasks and break long deadlines into shorter checkpoints and milestones. This will give you a detailed view of how time spent on a project translates to progress and how much time each individual aspect or phase of a project can be completed by your team.
Track Time on Individual Tasks
Use remote worker monitoring software to allow your team to clock time on specific tasks. For example, there is a big difference between graphic design and data entry, even if employees complete both tasks at some point during their day. Tracking time for individual tasks allows you to see which tasks your employees do the most efficiently and how they build their daily workflows. You can identify those who are extremely efficient at one task or slow at another task, learning the productivity strengths and weaknesses of your team.
By building individual task data into a timeline, you may also identify what times of day tasks are completed more efficiently, differences between remote employee workflows, and identify optimization opportunities.
Measure Individual and Team Productivity
Measure productivity for each individual remote employee and their productivity as a team. Remote employees are self-directed, and their personal productivity can be influenced by their unique personal talents, focus levels, and home office environments. At the same time, remote teamwork has never been easier with the collaboration software available, and you may notice an increase or decrease in productivity when your team works together.
Don’t Focus on Breaks and Decompress Time
One of the tricks you learn when managing a remote team is to focus less on breaks and decompress time (idle time) and focus more on the total tracked time. By not focusing on breaks, you can respect remote employees’ privacy if they are hitting deadlines and completing tasks in a reasonable amount of time.
Consider Off-Hours Time
Lastly, remote worker monitoring software and time tracking allows you to properly track remote work that happens outside office hours. Remote workers are more likely to be night owls, early risers, or split their workday, and all their working time should be tracked in terms of both compensation and productivity.
Why Time Tracker by eBillity is the Perfect Solution
When you are looking for the ideal remote worker monitoring software to help lead your team, explore Time Tracker by eBillity. We have designed Time Tracker with the needs of modern remote team management in mind. The feature set and navigation flow make it easy for remote teams to track productivity, credit every working hour, and gain valuable insights without invading the privacy of your talented remote employees.
Time Tracker by eBillity offers:
- Comprehensive Monitoring
- Track projects, timelines, and activities, and time spent on individual tasks for a full scope view of your remote team’s productivity.
- Ease of Use
- Time Tracker is simple and easy to use for both your remote employees and team leaders.
- Cost-Effective
- With an efficient seat/month billing structure, you can easily scale Time Tracker’s affordable pricing to meet your business needs.
- Advanced Reporting
- Transform the data collected into insightful dashboards and useful business reports including expense reports, cashflow management, and more.
- Transparent Monitoring
- Provide your employees with the transparency they need to feel confident and safe using your remote worker monitoring software.
- Integrations
- Time Tracker is designed to integrate with dozens of popular industry software builds to smoothly become part of your solutions stack.
Conclusion
Remote team productivity and leadership rely on the right software that brings everyone together. It is essential to find the right tools to maintain a balanced approach between keeping track of your team, empowering their productivity, and respecting their personal privacy. Consider your unique business and team needs when selecting remote worker monitoring software. To try a free trial of Time Tracker by eBillity today.