Syncing Your Remote and Office Teams with Computer Monitoring Software

That remote work is here to stay has become an obvious conclusion by now. It’s a huge money-saver for companies, employees are happily embracing it (with a growing number of them even demanding it) and working remotely has been made really easy and smooth with the advances in the field of digital technologies, especially online communication and file sharing.

Now there are still some companies that require employees to be present in the office, and there are more and more fully remote companies too. Still, a significant fraction of corporations is somewhere in between - they have office space and a number of employees use it, but they also offer the opportunity for at least occasional remote work.

If you belong to the last category, this article is for you. It can be difficult to manage both remote and in-office workers at the same time, and the issue only gets worse if they’re a part of the same team and need to work together on the same projects. Luckily, employees tracking software can help you bridge the distance gap between remote and office workers.

How to Choose the Best Computer Monitoring Program That Works for Both Employee Types?

Choosing the software you’re going to use is an important decision to make. You’re going to have to take a lot of factors into consideration: which features you need, how many employees you need to cater for, and (depending on your answer to the previous two questions) whether you’re going to use free remote monitoring software or a paid one. Free versions probably won’t have as many functionalities, support or flexibility as paid ones, so that’s something you might want to take into consideration as well.

In your search you may have to go through a couple of different systems to find the one that suits you. Most of them offer a remote PC monitoring software free trial so make the best use of it to see if it could help you reach the goals you’ve set - in this case, getting your remote and office workforce to work on the same projects smoothly. For this, you’ll want, above all, convenient task tracking, customized employee grouping, easy access sharing and as much automaticity as you can get.

So now that you’ve found the best PC activity monitor for your diverse team, let’s go over some tactics for syncing the employees working from home and those who come to the office.

Task Tracking

One of the most important considerations and also one of the biggest issues when you have a dispersed team is task coordination. And having an online time management system can prove to be a great asset in resolving this easily.

You don’t necessarily have to see all your employees in order to know which tasks they’re on at any given time. Apart from monitoring the workers who are in the office, you can implement monitoring software for laptop devices that remote workers use and have all the tasks and everyone’s computer activities in one single place.

Once you have this neat overview of what all of the employees are doing, you can use it to orchestrate the workflow of the team, delegate effectively and prevent completing double tasks or missing something out.

Tracking Time

Another cool thing about monitoring software is that it can also be office and remote workers’ time tracking system. There’s not a shred of doubt over the importance of knowing how much time your employees spend on certain tasks - this information gives you an insight into the team’s progress on a project but it can also help you set milestones and deadlines for specific tasks.

It’s relatively easy to see how your in-office staff is getting along with their tasks, but if you wanted to do the same for remote workers, you’d have to call or text them to check in on their progress. Which is distracting them from their work and leading you into the danger zone of micromanagement. Instead, you can use employee laptop monitoring software to see which tasks they’re on and how long they’ve been at it.

Now you have a timesheet of all employees’ computer activities regardless of where they work from, without having to bother them with unnecessary questions all the time.

Organize Team Meetings

Even something as simple as getting all the team members to gather up so that you can discuss past progress, future plans or whatever else can be a bit complicated when half of your employees are working from home.

Remote IT monitoring software has a couple of features that could help you sort things out. First, it records all active time (i.e. the time employees spend working on their computers, which is more or less equivalent to working for telecommuters) and put this data in a team timeline. This timeline will show you when all of your workers tend to be active. This is your window of opportunity for getting all the employees to participate in a meeting without having to call them up when they’re off work.

The best computer surveillance software for diverse teams also has the ability to show you employee activity in real time. This way, you can check to see whether everyone is active and ready for the meeting to commence.

Track Performance to See What Works Best

Arguably the best thing about learning how to monitor computer activity of both remote and in-office employees is the fact that you get to experiment a bit and compare the effectiveness of different working methods.

When you have semi-dispersed team and your employee monitoring software reviews their performance on a regular basis, you get a bunch of useful data. For example, are employees more productive when working from home? Who does their tasks faster and who shows more initiative and creativity? By analyzing this, you’ll soon discover that remote and office workers are quite different when it comes to the way they do their jobs.

So if computer network monitoring shows that remote workers are much more productive, maybe you could give everyone on the team the opportunity to try it. If you don’t need people in the office, a completely remote team is a valid option to consider if your employees also want that. And the other way around.

Conclusion

Having half of your employees telecommuting and the other half coming to the office might be in sync with today’s trends but it’s difficult to get them synced with each other. One way to deal with this is using laptop monitoring software to track the tasks of all your workers in the same place. Maybe it’s a little extra effort but letting your employees keep the flexibility and stay satisfied is well worth it.

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