How to Measure Remote Worker Productivity

Measuring the productivity of your remote workers can be a challenge. It can take a great deal of creative thinking and various policies. The following includes some of the ways you can do this:

Make a Policy for Evaluating Remote Workers

Your employee should know what you aim to achieve in your business. There are many tasks to delegate among the workers, and if you are creating a policy for your remote workers to follow, make sure they understand what they are supposed to do. Evaluate business results or outcomes by evaluating the following:

• Increase in website visitors
• Customer satisfaction level
• Increase in sales or revenue
• Successfully completed projects

The above are business-minded efforts that will help you determine your employee’s productivity. Communicate to your employees how you will evaluate their work. The expectations must be clear enough that your employees can work independently. The goal is to accomplish more work; part of that is your employee knowing what they are expected to do daily.

What Are the Three Types of Productivity

You can easily tell when your employee is doing their job by the number of tasks they complete. The following includes the three types of productivity you should be concerned with evaluating:

• Capital productivity Measures output vs. input
• Labor productivity Measures how much the company has gained financially
• Material productivity Measures work produced and the amount of materials used

Make it clear to your remote workers you will be measuring all of these factors as you evaluate their work separately. The easiest way to do this is per project. The outcome of every project will be evaluated using the above factors.

Create Milestones for Each Task

When a task has clear milestones put in place, it is easier to keep track of productivity. Milestones are steps or checkpoints identifying what has been completed toward accomplishing the end goal. Employees can track their progress through these milestones, and you can see if they are making the required progress to complete the task on time.

When your employee sets essential milestones, it helps them move further along the path toward success. It is also better to see anything hindering the project or identify what may be blocking that path. You can tell when your employee is achieving their goals based on how many milestones they accomplish.

Wolfeye Remote Screen

A fantastic monitoring device that will help you determine your employee’s productivity is Wolfeye remote screen software. You can view your employee’s screens and see what they see. It allows you to ensure your employee is moving ahead and working on set goals toward finishing projects and helping the company.

You can check the websites they visited and see if they are working hard or spending company time posting on Facebook. Taking screenshots of your employee’s computer activities allows you to record what is on the screen and look at it later. It is spyware that can be very useful for measuring your remote employee’s productivity.

Use Project Management Software

Project management software assists you in measuring the productivity of remote workers and teams. If you want something less invasive than employee monitoring software, you can use project management software as a guide. Employment Hero will help you track your employee’s progress. Your remote workers will have a private board for daily lists and group work.

Team leaders will assign work to your remote employees, and you can view and follow projects as they come together. If you see an employee is slacking a bit, you can help by redirecting them back to their task. You will also be able to see whether the work is divided up fairly among teams. It is also helpful in tracking results.

Determine Baseline Completion Times  

Set baseline completion times and work with employees to find out when they expect to be finished projects. Check-in with them several times weekly to see where they are and if they need more time. Some ways to get employees to respect deadlines:

• Create a schedule or timeline
• Hold remote workers accountable
• Make deadlines clear and concise
• Break down projects into smaller tasks
• Keep a positive attitude about deadlines
• Use a deadline-tracking tool like Monitask

Baseline completion times are a great way to determine worker productivity and even offer assistance to other team members if necessary. You also want to maintain communication between you and your remote workers. They can tell you if they are overwhelmed.

Hold Regular Team Meetings

Having regular team meetings helps everyone, especially your remote workers. They get a different interaction than they would if working in the office, and team meetings can help bridge the gap. You can encourage open communication between teammates; everyone knows where each other stands. Keep everyone moving and help boost motivation among your remote employees.

Merge Daily Tasks with Long-Term Goals

Setting daily goals that are doable for your employees will help them get to the finish line. Assign your remote workers tasks they can do on a day-to-day basis that will help ensure that they have something they know they need to do each day. This tracking keeps remote workers motivated to complete their daily tasks, not to kiss up to the boss, but because they know they are one step closer to achievement.

Have Tools Available for Support

Remote workers can sometimes feel isolated from the rest of the group. It is essential to provide resources that will give them extra support. This support could include online training to help them sharpen their skills, productivity tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and mentorship meetings to help with goals and direction. It allows employees to teach each other. 

Key Performance Indicators

Key performance statistics help you understand how your remote employees are performing. They can be more specific than evaluating outcomes or implementing policies. Key performance indicators are more geared toward long-term goals:

• Customer lifetime value
• The average revenue per customer
• Churn rate (how many customers stop using the service)
• Project schedule variance (how often projects are completed on time)

You need to ascertain which remote employees are pulling their weight. Key performance indicators can be beneficial. Find out how employees are doing with the above challenges and if they are meeting their work requirements.

Measure Productivity Annually

Meeting with your remote employees annually to measure productivity is helpful to the business because it can improve and strengthen the workforce. If your employees make mistakes, you can offer them guidance and insight. By meeting once a year to give them an evaluation, you are giving them the incentive they need to consistently do better and aim for a glowing review from you.

Get Client Feedback

Collecting client feedback can help you learn which employees are the most beneficial to your company. You can also identify poor employee performance and help them improve as best you can. You will also have the added advantage of learning about customer satisfaction levels. It can prevent churn, address customer issues, and help your company.

Ask the Right Questions

As the employer, it is your job to determine if your remote employee is slacking off or if they need a helping hand. Asking the right questions can eliminate the guesswork in this area. Inquire about worker productivity by asking the following:

• Do you need some help completing a task?
• Is there anything I should know about the project?
• Is there anything preventing you from meeting your deadline?

You want your employee to trust you enough to tell you the truth about what they need to keep the momentum going. Your employees need to feel safe to be able, to be honest with you about the point they are at with the project and whether they need more help.

Give Them More Flexible Schedules

When you have remote employees, give them more flexible schedules because they are not working in the office. Remote working comes with its own set of obstacles. Allow them to perform at whatever times they prefer, and let them develop their structure throughout the day. It will show you trust them to take care of business when needed.

Ask Them to Have a Designated Workspace

If your remote workers have a designated workspace, it will help them immensely. They will likely be more inspired and productive. It can improve employee performance to have a work-based setting or an office at home that is specifically designed for work. It will help them focus, decrease distractions, and create a healthy work/life balance, which enables employees to be more productive.

Hire the Best Employees

It may sound simple, but creating a team that works well together is key to giving your company the best chance to succeed. If you have excellent employees, remote or otherwise, they can help each other work more productively as a team. Remote workers can be a bit more complicated to manage, but the sky is the limit if you have an outstanding team of people working under you.

Video Calls

Remote workers can be challenging because they need direct contact with their bosses, supervisors, and managers. They cannot see their facial expressions or read their body language. The outcome could be better communication. Video calls are the best soliton to this problem, as it is a convenient and effective tool for measuring remote employee productivity due to significant face-to-face interaction.

Trust Your Employees

Trust in your employees goes a long way toward having a healthy, robust business. You do not need to implant employee monitoring tools if you feel it will compromise the integrity of your business relationships. Instead, trust and believe that your employees will do their job. If there is a reason to think otherwise, address it if and when the time comes, but give them a chance to prove themselves first.

Have the Right Technology  

The right technology can propel your remote workers from being satisfactory to extraordinary. Choose technology that allows your remote worker to do multiple tasks simultaneously, such as create, edit, and store documents all in one feat. You can have teams collaborate by using the appropriate technology. Time clock software can also be helpful. Live chats can encourage brainstorming.

Reward Hard Work

If your employee does a good job, let them know you appreciate them by rewarding their hard work. If employees feel valued, it incentivizes them to go above and beyond the call of duty for the company. If anything can measure employee productivity, it is how a worker responds to feeling like they are valued. Good employees will get even better, showing you that they value their role at the company.

Implement an Internal Feedback Process

By implementing an internal feedback process, you learn your employees’ honest opinions about their colleague’s work performance. Ask your employees to fill out brief surveys and find out what each person’s strengths and weaknesses are according to the people who work with them. This way, you can help them in areas they need to improve.