This Is How Remote Workers Can Be Tracked

Employee tracking involves a company monitoring its staff’s location and activities during the workday. Employee tracking is essential for enhancing workforce productivity, while also preventing the misuse or theft of a company’s resources.

As explained by the human resource experts at Apollo Technical, one of the most notable changes in business trends in 2020 is that more and more people are working from home. Accordingly, businesses need to continually adopt new technology to manage remote teams effectively.

While a survey by Becker Friedman Institute among 10,000 employees revealed that most workers are just as productive working from home as in the traditional office, taking extra caution is wise. But how can you track these remote workers to optimize productivity?

Below are some of the available tools at your disposal to solve this challenge.

Remote Desktop Access

One of the most effective ways to track remote workers is by monitoring their PC screens over a period of time. This requires specialized remote desktop software that, among other things, lets you remotely view the live PC screen of target computers.

One of the most effective remote desktop applications is the Wolfeye Remote Screen. Once installed on the target computers, this application will allow you to monitor the Windows computer screen remotely and discreetly.

This application provides an easy-to-use web-browser-based interface, enabling you to view the computer screens of remote workers in real time. If you are managing a large team, this application also takes periodic screenshots of the PC screen.

This allows you to view what the remote workers see at various intervals. It also makes monitoring surfing behavior easy so you can minimize time wastage on non-business websites.

Email Tracking

According to the Harvard Business Review, the average business professional spends 28 percent of their workday on email. According to this source, companies are looking for solutions to reduce the 2.6 hours spent on the email box each day without compromising productivity.

That’s why email tracking is an efficient tool for tracking remote employees. With email tracking, a manager or business owner can determine how much time employees spend in the email box and what exactly the employees do during this time.

Some of the critical questions you can answer with email monitoring are:

• Who are your employees emailing?
• How promptly do employees respond to customer queries or leads?
• How many emails do the employees send or receive on any given day?

Many tools allow you to provide insights into employee email use. This makes it possible to determine which employees are the busiest and which employees are lagging.

One of the features of the Wolfeye Remote Screen software is email monitoring. Other worthy mentions include EmailAnalytics, Insightful, and ActiveTrack.

Keystroke Monitoring

Another useful function of the Wolfeye Remote Screen is keystroke logging. Not to be confused with email monitoring, keystroke logging or keystroke recording involves tracking and recording keyboard activity by employees.

With keystroke monitoring, a manager can determine just what activities occupy the bulk of the remote employee’s work while on the computer. Some of the insights from keystroke monitoring include the time spent on non-work websites, social media sites, documents, and other applications.

Implement Project or Task Management Software

The growth in remote work has created a demand for apps that provide a centralized platform for businesses to monitor the productivity of remote workers. Some of today’s most popular project management software are ClickUp, Basecamp, and Asana.

In essence, project management software makes it easy for the project manager or supervisor to create new projects, assign them to employees remotely, and monitor the progress of these projects from the app.

You can log into the application anytime to determine which tasks are assigned to which employees, the turnaround period for projects, and whether certain employees need additional work.

While these apps are largely popular among companies that hire freelancers, they can be utilized for companies that hire remote workers with similar positive results.

Time Tracking

Most remote desktop applications have a time-tracking feature. For example, the Wolfeye Remote Screen monitors the amount of idle time in an employee’s workday. You may also want to consider getting specialized time-tracking software to keep a close eye on how employees are spending time.

Some time tracking tools include built-in start and stop timers that let managers know when employees begin a new task or go on break. The Wolfeye Remote Screen, for instance, monitors idle time to allow managers to track task progress.

These tools provide a helpful way for managers to determine the busiest remote employees and those that are slacking. They also enable managers to determine just how much time in a workday remote employees actually spend on tasks.