How To Know If Your Remote Employees Are Really Working
You can track remote workers and their activities during work hours in several ways to ensure maximum productivity, such as whether or not your employees are using their work devices for personal use. However, how do you know if your remote employees are really working?
To know if your remote employees are really working, you can use Wolfeye for keystroke logging and live screen monitoring with archived recordings. You can also evaluate employees’ efficiency and productivity to get a baseline for peer comparisons and individual evaluations.
Monitoring remote employees’ activities online and while using work devices requires a holistic approach. Combine technology and appropriate organizational policies for an effective strategy. Keep reading to learn how to know if your remote employees are working.
1. Evaluate an Employee’s Efficiency
Generally, companies have distinct onsite and offsite work policies.
The latter considers remote employees‘ deliverables and work environments, but both policies have provisions to evaluate workforce efficiency. Since remote employees aren’t in the same place and time zone, in many cases, you must have an appropriate baseline for each individual’s efficiency.
This practice applies to all organizations, irrespective of the type of business, operations, work hours, and other factors.
You can choose the metrics relevant to your business and the types of tasks all remote employees are assigned. You can also use technology to assess and compare the efficiency of your remote employees, but software or tech won’t account for variables such as individual skills.
Consider the example of responsiveness.
Even if a remote employee is really working, you may have at least one other among your staff who responds faster, whether in real-time or otherwise, so you can’t use a template of efficiency for diverse professionals with different skill sets.
Therefore, you can’t have a blanket approach, especially if your operations include specialized niches. Once you know an employee’s efficiency, you can detect dips, highs, and optimum levels.
2. Assess an Employee’s Productivity
Monitoring employees‘ physical presence or remote workplace behavior isn’t easy unless you have them under constant video surveillance. However, you should assess an employee’s productivity to detect abnormalities. The parameters of productivity depend on the job profile or key responsibility areas.
Accordingly, you may have the following and other criteria:
- Active status (online/offline)
- Chat and email responses
- Completion of tasks or assignments
- Turnaround time for each deliverable
You should determine the bottom line to assess a remote employee’s productivity, whether hourly or subject to deliverables.
3. Compare Employees’ Performances
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the cornerstone for evaluating employees’ performances. Combine a remote individual’s efficiency and productivity with similar and other employees‘ performances to determine if the person is underdelivering.
Not all employees have the same efficiency or productivity, but you will have macro and micro perspectives with the 3 assessments I have highlighted. These non-tech solutions will help you lay the foundation for using technological tools.
Comparing the performances of remote employees will reveal if they’re working and how efficient and productive each of them is.
4. Keystroke Monitoring Software
One of the best ways to know if remote employees are really working is by utilizing keystroke monitoring software.
These tools record and report every key pressed during an active session, so you will get to know if a remote employee is doing anything or nothing. While keylogging or keystroke monitoring software can be extremely useful, the solutions come with false flags and limitations.
Besides, not every task is subject to, nor can be assessed by, monitoring keystrokes.
You might have one or more remote employees working on projects that are similar to yours. Numerous keystrokes or keywords may be relevant to your project or task, but the work might be for others. How will you distinguish among these activities based on keystrokes?
Furthermore, many tasks don’t have countable or measurable actions. What if you have a task or project not heavily dependent on keystrokes? Keystroke monitoring software may be useless if no action or activity is countable or measurable.
5. Time Tracking Software
Companies worldwide use time-tracking software to know if their remote employees are working. Most time-tracking software applications use the following actions as indicators of employees working:
- Browsing
- Emails
- Keystroke
- Scrolling
Browsing isn’t a reliable indicator if you don’t know what a remote employee is checking out online. Emails are a reasonable indicator, but only for those remote employees, primarily in the communications and support departments.
Others’ primary tasks are beyond emails.
Additionally, many time tracking software enables remote employees to manually edit an entry. This manual edit feature can facilitate misleading actions and nonproductive activities. If a manual edit or revision can change the report, you won’t know if an employee is really working.
6. Wolfeye Remote Screen Monitoring
If you want to know whether your remote employees are really working or not, you’ll need a solution like the Wolfeye screen monitoring tool. Wolfeye has the following features:
- Keylogger
- Live screen monitoring
- PC/screen/desktop recordings
You can use Wolfeye in myriad ways, such as:
- Access a remote employee’s desktop and watch everything on the screen live to determine if the activity is working or anything else. This real-time access will show you what your remote employees do on or with their work devices.
- Assess live screen recordings using the archived, historicized, or saved if desired option of Wolfeye. Not every activity can be monitored in real-time, so these recordings can be handy for any kind of assessment later, whether or not you need such analyses.
- Use the keylogger feature of Wolfeye to literally track a remote employee online or using a work device. You can gain access to everything your remote employees type or use to interact through the work device, including chats, emails, sites, or social media.
Wolfeye is the most comprehensive tool to conveniently decipher if your remote employees are really working. You’ll be literally watching everything a remote employee does on the screen of a work device. There isn’t a better or more effective way to track employee activity.
Conclusion
You’ll need a combination of organizational policies and software or technological solutions to know if your remote employees are really working. Don’t rely on either exclusively because such approaches have inherent flaws that will likely lead to an inaccurate assessment.
