HOW TO KEEP EMPLOYEES PRODUCTIVE DURING WORK FROM HOME (CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK)
Since last week, after the World Health Organization declared Coronavirus as a pandemic, it has become an alarming situation all across the globe. There have been more than 198,739 cases reported of being infected by COVID-19 in more than 78 countries worldwide. The effects are being felt in even those places where the outbreak has not yet reached. Which means a global shift is taking place in every form of people’s lifestyle that one can imagine.
Every government is taking measures to seize the spread of the disease and that is taking a heavy toll on all the economic activities as well. Since it is a contagious disease, all the steps are being taken by the government to stop this epidemic to reach the vast crowd.
All the places where more than 50 people can gather at a time are being asked to shut down be it restaurants, shopping malls, movie theaters or even offices.
The situation has not gotten that worse in India as only over 148 cases have been reported so far but preventive actions are being adopted over here as well. We are in the middle of this crisis and it is changing the shape of the world be it in the form of economic, politics or social at a much faster rate than ever.
People are more vigilant of news coming from all parts of the world about this virus outbreak and it seems the whole world is in the state of a mild shock because of the rising numbers that are showing up on the charts every day.
Naturally, with such a sudden change in the working style for the vast majority of workers in the world, it seems that the world is not prepared yet. Nevertheless, there are many advanced tools in the market that can tackle the unseen issues arising from the remote working by the employees of all kinds of organizations.
CHALLENGES RELATED TO WORK FROM HOME
So the biggest issue that is boggling every employer at this stage is how to continue day to day workings of their company in as much natural and unaffected way as possible. How can they ensure the employees would be giving their best while working from home in these times? Or even for the employees, the question they face is would they be able to work at the same level of productivity from home?
To answer all of these questions, a work from home staff monitoring system must be in place. And to your relief EmpMonitor is one such tool easily available in today’s online world to address the above concerns of the employers as well as the employees. It is an easy to use and simplistic employee monitoring software that has been a choice of many employers for more than the past five years.
BIGGEST STRUGGLE WITH REMOTE WORK MANAGEMENT-
Do you know how much your remote team is productive and at what rate? For some managers, the response to these questions is unsure. It’s difficult to know whether someone is being underutilized or isn’t doing their fair share without an understanding of their productivity.
Thus, remote employee managers need to build up ways to manage productivity for all employees.
This can include setting up measurements for how much work is expected to be finished every day. This might look like:
- Creating and maintaining a product blog.
- Scheduling more than 20 social media posts in various platforms per hour.
- Making over 200 cold calls per shift.
The productivity measurements you selected to evaluate the productivity of remote employees should also be the same criteria used for in-office employees. Every time there will be clear expectations in place, regardless of how and where your employees work.
There are many challenges that come with remote team monitoring. Fortunately, they can be overcome by using productivity monitoring tools and adding some new processes. This way remote teams should become more productive in the near future.
EMPMONITOR — THE TOOL OF THE REMOTE TRADE
With EmpMonitor you can monitor your employees’ work remotely. Through its comprehensive reporting mechanism, it becomes an easy task to track all your employees’ behavioral aspects of work while they work from home. Since it is the need of an hour to work remotely, even employees would not be having issues working under online monitoring conditions and would cooperate well to empathize with the current situation of their organization.
KEEPING EMPLOYERS IN MIND
Digital solutions can greatly help business managers implement remote work policies to protect employees amid the corona outbreak, they must still do their part in understanding the needs of their employees.
Few of the basic features of EmpMonitor to help you track your employees’ performance during remote working are discussed below:
Also Read: 11 Tools To Help You Track Remote Staffs Productivity
MEASURE PRODUCTIVITY OF YOUR EMPLOYEES:
For those who are new to this setup of working remotely, EmpMonitor allows you to measure productivity of your employees through specific readings, impressive charts and graphs.
It can record the login and log out time of your employees based on which it can calculate the productive hours your employee has logged in during a day or a week or even months.
If your team is spread across different locations, which is going to be true for the majority of your workers in these times, you can allocate them to different locations or departments. Later you can measure the productivity based on their specific locations or departments and this way you will have a deeper and holistic understanding of your total workforce.
You can measure which day has been the most productive for your employees by adjusting the dates for the data it will show on your dash-boards.
RECORDED SCREENSHOTS:
Well, one of the major concerns while working remotely with your workers is how to prevent sensitive data from being breached. EmpMonitor can take screenshots from your employees’ PC and save them for you to have a look at the later point of time.
You can inform your employees in advance about this feature so that they would refrain from doing any dubious or illegitimate activities while working from the company’s laptop.
You can pre-define the time intervals at which the screenshots from your employees’ computer would be taken. And it can record these screenshots for up to three months for you to refer to at a later point in time.
TRACK THEIR BROWSER HISTORY:
It is okay to check the news or other important information from your work-computer, (actually it is up to each individual employer to decide how much liberty can be given to their employees). But you have to make sure that they are not overdoing this to an extent that it is hampering their actual work.
Hence, for this purpose, EmpMonitor will give you a detailed report of their browser history for you to know if they are surfing the internet for work-related purposes or otherwise.
It will record every single web-page along with the number of times they have visited those web-pages.
ALLOCATE TEAMS TO THEIR MANAGERS:
If your company size is bigger then it would not be possible for you to track every employee’s details. Hence, you can assign the team leaders or managers with admin rights to track all the information about their respective teams on EmpMonitor.
Based on those data they will handle their teams accordingly.
WHICH APPS ARE BEING USED MOST:
EmpMonitor will generate a comprehensive report of all the applications being used by your employees along with the number of hours being spent on each.
It will show you the top apps with maximum usage by your employees and you can get this information for right up to last six months which will be saved safely in the database of EmpMonitor.
INVISIBLE MODE:
If you want to spy on your employees without letting them know that they are being monitored then EmpMonitor has that feature too.
You can install the agent in your employee’s PC in stealth mode and they won’t know about this software running in their computer.
It will not be listed in the program list as well as they cannot stop it from anywhere from being run on their PC.
KEYSTROKES:
EmpMonitor has such a detailed monitoring mechanism that it can literally go up to the lengths of recording keystrokes from your employee’s computer.
What mails are they sending and receiving, what are they typing in their chat conversation or anything which you would like to keep secure can be made possible by recording the keystrokes.
And you can access this information for up to last six months.
CLOUD STORAGE:
Since all the data it will gather would be stored in the cloud, you can say that it has been specifically designed to make remote monitoring easy for the employers.
No hassle of installing it in the local network and saving the data on LAN servers.
These are only a glimpse of all the benefits that EmpMonitor has to offer to its clients. But once you will start using it, you will realize how smartly it has been designed to work smoothly in a remote setup.
HOW WILL YOU CONDUCT MEETINGS?
Apart from monitoring productivity you may also need to hold online meetings with your teams. While there are many online conferencing tools out there, Zoom is one of the most widely used software by the large enterprises working remotely with their employees.
It is a highly convenient cloud based tool to organize all your video conferencing, online meetings and group conversations in a simple platform which is quite handy. It is compatible with Windows, Mac and iOS.
And guess what, you can record your meetings too which can be played back at a later point of time. Tools like Zoom are going to be indispensable if you are planning to shift majorly to work from home settings.
CLOUD BASED PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Another tool which can be quite useful in this setup is Basecamp. It is a real-time communication tool that skips the traditional project management features like long-term planning, resource allocation etc.
It deals more with the agile methodology of project management with more priorities given to the immediate actionable steps to be performed by a team. You can create projects, track progress and manage tasks of your team all at one place. Since it is a cloud based software, you can login from anywhere and perform your tasks on it anytime.
QUICK MESSAGING
While working closely in a team, quick conversations are as much needed as detailed long conversations over emails. Slack is one such software which is specifically designed keeping office communication in mind. You can interact with your team all at once in a group or individually. It has an option to make audio calls too if you want to switch your text based conversation to voice.
What differentiates it from the rest of the short message apps is that it can give you statistics of the users in your group about their activity. You can see when they are online and what time they are most active in responding to your messages and much more. These analytics features are what makes it a best choice for office communication.
EFFECTIVE TEAM ENGAGEMENT
One of the major concerns for managers of a distributed team is how to keep their employees motivated and happy without physical interaction. Chimp or Champ is one such software that is specially designed to improve employees’ well-being.
It is an anonymous happiness meter through which you can check your team pulse to know which of the team members are more productive, less on sick leave, less likely to leave and so on. Because of its informal anonymous survey done on the employees, the managers get immediate feedback and hence the required actions can be taken without any delay. Use this software for maintaining transparency and motivation in a remote team.
TASK MANAGER FOR TO-DO LIST
Instead of making quick notes in a traditional way on a notepad or excel sheet about your quick to-do list, you can use this software called Todoist. It is a cloud based task management software which will give you a clear listed view of all the tasks that are present in your mind. You can add new tasks quite easily, organize and prioritize so that it acts like your assistant telling you about the tasks that you need to work on next.
What more, you can delegate tasks listed in Todoist to your teammates as well as make weekly or monthly goals that can be seen in the progress charts shown by it. It can be synced to various other cloud based services like your Google calendar, Gdrive, dropbox and many more. It is a good preparation for you to be working on a remote setup so that you can migrate your local activities too to a cloud based, easily accessible service.
WRAPPING UP
So if you feel apprehensive about the challenges related to remote working and its consequences on your workforce’s productivity, then you can rest assured that software like the ones listed has it all covered. Clubbed with online conferencing, project management, tracking productivity, etc, it becomes a complete package to cater all the needs of a fully functional remote team.
Although remote working has been foreseen as the future of work culture since a long time ago, it is becoming our reality much sooner than we expected. The world may not look prepared for such a sudden shift. But with proper planning, awareness and implementation of useful tools, the risks associated with productivity and day-to-day operations of a distributed team can be mitigated more easily than you can imagine.
Read more guide at EmpMonitor
