Keeping a virtual eye on employees working remotely

New tools will help you keep a virtual eye on employees who work from home or otherwise away from the office.

New tools will help you keep a virtual eye on employees who work at remote locations away from your location.

By Bruce Wahl

Business success directly depends on employee productivity and teamwork. While teamwork is taught, productivity has to be monitored and improved where needed. This digital age allows us to have employees working from home or a remote location, which is convenient for both parties but can be difficult to monitor and analyze their work and progress.

How do you know that an employee is working to his or her full potential if you’re not there to see it yourself? To increase productivity and keep an eye on all of the processes that take place within your business, you need to implement strategies that will enable you to track productivity and make all necessary improvements.

Schedule meetings

It’s easy to lose track of what’s happening in your company without some face-to-face time with your employees once in a while. These meetings can be formal or in a coffee shop, they can be one-on-one or in the form of a video group chat.

Whichever option you choose, holding regular meetings with your employees will enable you to get in touch with the driving force behind your business and talk about progress, setbacks, and problems, as well as to plan improvements.

Regular briefs and reports

To monitor and boost employee productivity, you need to make clear, concise and straightforward plans, guidelines, and goals that need to be met. Employees’ achievement heavily depend on your orders, and productivity will stagnate if their tasks are not clearly outlined.

In addition, by asking for regular written reports from your employees, you can easily establish the strengths and the weaknesses in any process that need to be addressed. It will also give you an insight into how much work has been done so you can either adjust your business expectations or take a different approach in managing employee productivity if you believe the goals are perfectly achievable.

Get the right tools

Numerous automated tools are available to help you track and analyze employee productivity right from your computer screen. Software specifically designed for employee management will allow you to see when the employee checked in or out, how much time they spent on a certain task, and when and if they were idle. The software will also give you the opportunity to monitor teamwork and individual contributions made to the project, allowing you to engage with the employee who’s having a hard time contributing and to reward the one that is getting the most work done.

For instance, TimeDoctor provides real-time tracking of tasks and their progress, while its unique features prevent employees from wasting time. You can monitor productivity with the app’s Internet usage recordings and online surfing reports, including used applications. The management app takes screenshots of employees’ displays for authenticity.

It also removes multitasking and lets employees concentrate on the most important tasks dictated by the managers.

Get the right kind of help

When a business grows, so do the challenges and demands that you have to overcome. From the most renowned companies in the world, all the way down to the emerging startups, every business requires more or less help in a specific area of work. Whether that is brand creation, SEO, content creation, legal support or in the case of import and export, logistical guidance, a company needs to seek the help of professionals if it wants to thrive.

For example, just like there is an app for tracking employees in their offices, companies dealing with large shipments are able to track the transit process of their shipments with Sydney freight services that specialize in moving loads quickly through customs and keeping track of them.

Rarely is there a viable solution for tracking every single aspect of a business. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to hire a professional who is an expert for a specific branch of the business, and its laws and regulations. This way you will definitely increase both productivity and efficiency.

Motivate and lead

Finally, productivity can be encouraged and planned so as to avoid any hurdles on the road to success. This means you can create workshops, seminars, and guidelines for your employees to maximize their productivity. You can also organize team building sessions and hangouts where you can talk about plans, common passions and why the work you do matters. This effort will create a bond of trust and comradery between you and the employees, and they will feel inspired to do the best job they possibly can.

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Bruce Wahl is an IT expert with years of experience. He covers all aspects of IT like programming, photoshopping and other effects. He has spent some time in the field of security and is still helping other companies with the same. In his free time he loves to enjoy nature and his two German Shepherds.

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