Professionals believe that 1 out of 4 Americans will be working in hybrid mode by the end of 2021, and around half of UK employees will also move in the same direction. Remote work is now a global issue and the number of people wanting to work in flexible terms is increasing rapidly. 

Working from home offers employees the benefit of a lot of things. They stay more close to their families and manage their personal life and professional life with great balance. In many cases, it is seen that employee productivity has increased when they work from home. Around 65% of employees say they feel more productive when they work from home. Of course, businesses need evidence that while employees are working from home their productivity levels are not dropping down.   

Why is Monitoring Remote Employees So Important?

It is easier for companies to monitor their employees in an office environment to ensure that they are performing productively to deliver their best work. Every business has their set of KPIs and ways to measure employee productivity which further ensures that employees are on the right track. But when you have a team of remote workers, managing them gets a little tricky. It is extremely difficult or impossible to know what they are working on unless you ask them for updates or get the final output. Having employee monitoring software to manage your remote employees is a beneficial practice to learn more about employee work activities without the need to ask them. With a employee monitoring software to manage your employees working from home you can:

• Keep your remote employees accountable for their given task or projects. The sense of accountability makes sure that the quality and quantity of work is not hampered for the remote location of employees.
• Helps your remote work force to reach their professional goals with right guidelines and coaching. If you identify any of your team members who are struggling to achieve required output when working from home, help them with ways that will increase their efficiency and performance, also show them areas where they need additional training and support. 
• When your employees are working from a distributed location it is extremely important that you encourage them when they are doing their best work. Because when an employee works from home, he feels insecure that companies might never understand his dedication towards his job. So a little bit of motivation can take them a long way. Motivating them not only helps them to feel better but it also encourages other employees to perform efficiently for the same kind of appraisal. 
• Hybrid work mode is becoming increasingly popular, but not everyone knows how to work efficiently. Demonstrate the success of other remote team members and their strategy to work to help rest of the team members. Let your employees know how the remote employee monitoring software tracks their working hours and activities which is being monitored by the top management. 
• Empower your managers and supervisors with the right tracking and monitoring software to manage the remote team. It will help your managers to focus more on getting work done without micromanagement. 

1. Identify your Key Performance indicators

KPI differs from business to business but one common thing in any business is they always look for an efficient employee who knows how to perform productively and deliver their task before deadline. It is extremely crucial for companies to set up specific KPI for individual employees and to encourage them to reach their highest potential. 

The monitoring software provides daily productivity reports which further helps managers to understand work progress. You can also share this analytics with your remote team members to let them understand what companies expect from employees and what companies can see from such software.  

2 Gives employees achievable milestones

Apart from sharing productivity reports or comparing their performance with top performers, you should also focus on giving employees goals that they can actually achieve. As a business owner and manager of the company, you should understand that the efficiency level of every employee is not the same. So if you find any employee who is unable to deliver project deadlines, you can help them by giving them smaller targets and make the work process easier for them to reach their ultimate destination to finish the project. This is an excellent way to maintain productivity. 

With clear achievable goals in place, managers can use the software to track work progress of remote employees to see employees are following the path towards the right outcomes.

3. Create a Productivity Tracking Policy

Going remote can be harder for some employees than it is for other employees. Domestic distraction and not having a dedicated workstation makes it hard for them to manage work from home. Let your employees know how the software you use to track their activities track all their internet usage to give business owners real-time data. Create a time tracking and monitoring policy to let your employee know how you are going to examine productivity levels of individual employees. This helps them to overcome any situation that distracts them to perform their best. 

Being open to your remote employees about how you are going to measure their performance will help to build trust in your remote teams and make them feel comfortable to work for you. 

4. Track Employee Working Hours

Time tracking is a common feature for remote employees, with the help of monitoring software managers can easily see when an employee started to work, how long they worked, their overall working hours, break time and idle time. Time tracking features helps managers to understand more about employees in detail, it reduces employee time theft activity, reduces absenteeism and makes employees productive.

5. Implement the Right Monitoring Software 

If you really want to run a profitable business with your remote team, then you need the right software to do so. The right software can help you gather information that is required to boost the performance of employees. There are lots of software available in the market that come with lots of unnecessary features and also hidden features that violate employee privacy. Surely, no employee wants to use a software that will track their personal activity. Choosing the right software for monitoring work from home employees will help you extract data that are useful and make your remote team happy. The best part of monitoring software is that, most of them come with the Free Trial option which you can try to understand about the software and its functions. 

No matter whether you manage a fully remote team or a hybrid team, you will need to find the right way to motivate, enhance and empower your team to improve their performance. Fortunately, with the right software for monitoring work from home employees,  it is possible for you to manage them as if they are working in front of you.