The Best Remote Employee Monitoring Strategies

Many professionals favor remote working worldwide. As these arrangements get implemented, remote employee monitoring is growing in importance. But, supervising remote workers is challenging. This underscores the significance of effective remote employee monitoring strategies. Today, we’ll explore four of the best ones.

Why should businesses integrate remote employee monitoring?

Before taking a look at the strategies, let’s explore why they’re important. While it’s possible to work remotely without employee monitoring software, it’s not ideal. Remote working presents many challenges for employees and managers. A great example of this is in the area of productivity.

Productivity

Staying productive while working remotely can be challenging for many professionals. Depending on several factors, they may be inundated with distractions. These can have a sizable impact, leading to subpar performance. Utilizing an effective employee monitoring strategy can help professionals stay focused.

Burnout

Working from home can often blur the lines between work and personal time. For some, this can lead to overworking, followed by burnout. Professionals will perform much worse when they’re burnt out. They are also more likely to leave their positions in pursuit of new ones.

Collaboration

As employees struggle to focus and feel burnt out, collaboration becomes more difficult. This can have sizable negative effects, reducing the productivity of entire teams. Collaborative workplaces will be further affected by this challenge.

The challenges of remote employee tracking

Let’s now briefly look at a couple of the most prominent challenges of monitoring remote employees. Following this, we’ll cover the best strategies to overcome these obstacles.

Data accuracy

One of the biggest challenges in remote employee monitoring is data accuracy. Many companies use simple supervision strategies that produce inexact employee productivity reports. On the other hand, the best remote employee monitoring strategies that we are about to explore are quite accurate. These have a higher barrier to entry, as they need high-quality employee monitoring software to function. But, they can deliver excellent results, elevating your remote employee monitoring efforts.

Employee distrust

Another major challenge of remote employee monitoring involves employee distrust. This can stem from some of your team members feeling that monitoring is unnecessary. This can lead to a diminishing relationship with your employees, especially if you fail to disclose which type of tracking you wish to use. Because of this, transparency is vital when using employee monitoring software. It is not only important to disclose which tracking methods you will use but also why they are necessary.

The best remote employee monitoring strategies

While there are countless employee monitoring strategies, these four are among the best.

Automated time and activity tracking

Time tracking is a popular remote productivity monitoring strategy. But automating and combining it with activity tracking makes it more powerful. Implementing this strategy is very simple if you use good time-tracking software. All you typically need to do is install the tracking application on your employees’ computers. Your team members will then need to start tracking when they begin working. Following this, the software will measure each employee’s activity levels. Inactive time won’t be counted. 

This strategy works best with company-provided devices. This is because the monitoring application can be set to start up when the device boots up. You can also use this to protect your company’s intellectual property. If an employee falls victim to malware in their personal time, their work data won’t be compromised. Separating work and personal activities will provide professionals with enhanced privacy as well.

Screenshot tracking

Taking screenshots is another excellent way of tracking employee productivity. You can configure employee monitoring software to take screenshots periodically or at random. It is common to save screenshots between three and ten times within a ten-minute interval. You can then use these screenshots to verify that your employees were productive at a given time. This provides accurate productivity data, but you will need to review it manually.

One of the downsides of this is employee privacy concerns. To mitigate this, you can blur the screenshots. This will enhance privacy while allowing you to check how your team members spend their time. Using company-provided devices will help with this as well.

App and website usage tracking

Quality employee monitoring software can track what platforms your employees use at work. You can use this to determine if your team members are being productive. Simply mark non-productive apps and web pages in the tracking app, and you should be set. Many remote employee monitoring solutions can even warn against using unproductive apps for too long. App and website monitoring works only when tracking time, making it excellent if you value employee privacy.

Location tracking

Location tracking can help you see where your remote employees are working from. Working from home is the obvious choice for many professionals. But, many others prefer coworking spaces or cafes. While the workplace shouldn’t matter, some environments can have too many distractions. You can use geolocation tracking to ensure your team members work in an appropriate location. This will subsequently help you ensure adequate productivity levels and performance.

Closing thoughts

While remote employee monitoring can be challenging, high-quality strategies can simplify the process. You can even combine them to enhance your tracking efforts. Many remote employee monitoring software solutions offer all four of the mentioned strategies. If you can deploy them all together, doing so will ensure a high standard of monitoring accuracy.

These strategies only need good employee monitoring software, making them quite accessible. But, such programs can sometimes present hefty costs, especially for larger teams. Because of this, choosing a solution that allows signing up for a free trial can be beneficial. You can use these to determine the best strategy for your team before making a final decision.

About the Author

Arman Boyakhchyan is a content writer at WebWork Time Tracker – a feature-rich time-tracking solution helping managers and executives get the most from their teams. Businesses from a variety of sectors use WebWork’s multi-platform monitoring software to boost employee productivity both in the office and when working remotely.

WebWork LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/webwork-tracker/