Employees Monitoring Software and 100% Remote Teams: Benefits and Concerns

Working remotely is much more than a simple passing trend. It’s a concept that celebrates employee independence, self-organization and work-life balance. As such, it’s become more of a requirement with job seekers than just one of the benefits. And apparently, it’s here to stay.

These days, companies that don’t allow remote work even for a couple of days a week are slowly getting extinct. On the other hand, companies that employ only and exclusively remote workforce are growing in numbers. These are the kinds of businesses that we’re going to focus on in this article.

Managing a 100% remote team comes with its ups and downs, and it’s your job to make as many ‘ups’ happen and as few ‘downs’. Which isn’t easy at all since your team is dispersed, you can’t see anyone, most of the communication is asynchronous, and still, everyone should work together seamlessly.

When we put it like this, it becomes obvious that you need some sort of a tool to get a better overview of who does what and how efficiently. In other words, you need something to make sure that the time your remote workers claim to be working is really spent on productive activities instead of watching YouTube all day long. Enter: employees monitoring software.

This tool can do everything that we’ve just mentioned, but you might be tempted to believe that your employees aren’t going to like it. Well, as it turns out, app usage and employees monitoring software is often better received than managers expect. This is because it offers quite a few benefits to employees themselves, which we’re going to talk quite a bit about. However, its use should be conducted with a bit of caution, too.

But first, on to the good things!

Why Your Remote Teams Will Love Monitoring Software

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Accountability

When an employee is working 100% remotely, one of their primary concerns could be whether they’re paid fairly for the work they do every day. For example, if they need to stay overtime, how can they make sure that that’s going to be recorded and paid for? They need some way to ensure that they always have accurate data on their activities so that you can be aware of how much effort they put in. Computer activity and employees monitoring software can provide just that.

You can either track their use of productive apps and websites and count that towards their contribution, or you could assign them tasks and project and let them turn the timer on and off depending on which task they’re working on. This is a classic example of a win-win situation - your remote employees will get a reliable way to record their working hours, and you’ll get proof that you’re paying for the actual work done.

Productivity

Another thing that a lot of remote workers appreciate is to be given an opportunity to improve and grow as professionals. A huge part of this development process is being more productive and efficient at their jobs. You can enable them to achieve this by giving them access to their employees monitoring software data.

This way, remote employees can see their performance metrics and figure out how they can improve their productivity. The analysis includes how much time they spend on productive tasks, what their most productive time of day is, how long they tend to waste on distractions, and much more. These things can tell them how they can improve their performance and productivity, and this is definitely a type of personal development strategy that they’re going to value.

Independence

We’ve mentioned in the introduction that independence and the ability to organize their own time and workload is one of the most important and most common reasons why remote work is gaining in popularity in the first place. Your only job is to try not to do anything that would prevent this system from working properly. Like, for example, micromanage.

Your remote tracking software for computers can provide you with everything you need in order to find out what each employee is working on at any given moment, so there’s really no need to bug members of your remote team with progress questions five times an hour. Let them focus and manage their time, and they’ll be grateful.

Transparency

One more thing to keep in mind if you want to be completely convinced that your remote teams aren’t going to have a problem with employee tracking software is the fact that they understand the need for business optimization and data protection, and they also appreciate honesty and transparency. Which means that as long as you explain to them why you think implementing and using this system is beneficial to them and to your company, they’ll understand and they’ll be on board.

Things to Be Careful About

As we’ve seen so far in this article, there are many benefits to using employee tracking and employees monitoring software for teams who work from home. But even though there are so many good uses, there are also a couple of don’ts that go along with them.

Here, we’ll only mention the most important one. There’s one fundamental thing that you always need to keep in mind when tracking remote workers. That’s the fact that the employees whose permanent situation is to work from home don’t have the option to leave their laptops in the office. They keep the machines that they use for work at home, so it will probably happen on occasion that they use those computers for personal activities, like checking social media, watching a Netflix show or doing some online shopping.

Having this in mind, monitoring their activities outside their working hours is very likely to lead to some form of privacy violation. So, it’s best to make sure that your remote workers can turn the monitoring system on and off according to when they’re doing work-related tasks. If this isn’t possible or convenient, you can find a program that allows you to set custom working hours during which the monitoring features will work.

Conclusion

Teams that are 100% remote work a little differently than in-office staff. But those differences can sometimes be a good thing, if you only know how to cater to them. Using computer tracking software can be perceived as a positive thing by your remote workforce provided that you use it in the right way. With that, the possibilities for improving your remote team’s productivity are virtually endless.