Simple Steps Showing How to Manage Remote Workers
With the outbreak of Coronavirus in the past few weeks, many companies have introduced the policy of work from home to follow social distancing. This change of policy is happening at such a large scale for the first time in the history where many employees and their managers are separated from each other while at work.
The work from home should be implemented with clear policies and training in advance. But since the situation is calling for immediate actions, it leaves little or no time to prepare for the change of working mode. Nevertheless, there are few steps you can take based on research done on this area to manage remote workers and improve their engagement and productivity.
Challenges of remote working
To begin looking into the ways that can be applied for managing remote work, you must first become aware of the challenges arising out of remote work. Only when these challenges are taken care of can you be rest assured that the performance of your employees is not hampered and they are still able to give their best at work.
Lack of physical interaction
Before getting used to remote work it is a challenge for both employees to work most efficiently without the physical presence of their managers. Managers would be worried if their employees are working or not because they are used to seeing the employee working from their desk. And employees would not be able to manage working without manager’s supervision and ad hoc clearing of doubts. Due to remote work, employees may miss the support of their managers on various issues they face while working.
Lesser access to information
There can be a lot of challenges faced by newly remote workers for getting information from their colleagues or managers. Tasks related to getting even simple answers from colleagues might seem like a large obstacle when there is no physical presence of theirs around remote workers.
The communication happening between them can be disconnected due to lack of non-verbal information exchange between them. E.g. if you were physically present in the office and have seen that your colleague is having a rough day at work and then they send you a harsh email reply for any of your query then you may forgive them because you know what they are going through. But if you are working from home, you would have no information about their rough day and the harsh reply from them would hit you harder resulting in further distancing and offense taken from your colleagues.
Social distancing
With employees missing the informal interactions with their co-workers, loneliness seems to be a common complaint for people working in remote setup. It is a bigger challenge for extroverts to work at their best when they do not get a chance to connect with their co-workers while working remotely.
This social distancing results in feelings of less belongingness of workers to their organizations and may result in thoughts about leaving their company for good.
Distractions at home
It has been commonly observed that work from home brings in a lot of childcare responsibilities on working parents if they are not prepared for it. If they do not have a dedicated space to work virtually from their home then their work may get a lot of distractions from home’s responsibilities and childcare.
Since there is no time being allowed for the sudden transition to work from home setup, the family might not be prepared for supporting a working parent to work in isolation without distractions that are natural at any home.
Also Read: 7 Steps To Setup An Effective Effective Work From Home Policy
How can you manage your remote employees
The challenges of remote working are no doubt real but they are not unmanageable. If taken due care then every challenge of remote work can be tackled and be managed. The steps that must be taken to ensure smooth transition to remote work can include:
Conduct daily scheduled calls
A daily check-in call should be conducted with your employee or an online team conference should be held if the nature of your employees’ work is more collaborative. This way they would be prepared everyday for what they need to present, the questions they can ask and tasks that they can share with their colleagues. It will act like a forum where every concern and questions can be raised and dealt with immediately.
Set clear rules of engagement
Communication is one of the biggest challenges in remote working but if you set clear rules of engagement then everyone can start following and get used to the communication means which you have decided for them. There has to be clear rules set up by managers for example the team meetings will be held through video conferencing but if there is anything urgent that needs to be asked during the middle of the day then they can use direct messaging instead of calling a video conference again.
These rules will help them shape their mode of communication in a set pattern to be followed by everyone and will ensure a smooth flow of communication through different means for different purposes.
Monitor your employees online
The productivity of your team may not be the same while working in a remote setup. But with a proper online monitoring tool, it can be managed up to a large extent. While there are many employee monitoring software available on the web, there is none as superior and wholesome as EmpMonitor which has been making a mark in the field of employee monitoring for more than the past five years.
EmpMonitor can give you all the details of your working employee through which you can know where their most hours of a working day are being spent and if they are productive or non-productive. It has many features which will give you a chance to sneak peek your employees’ computer while working remotely.
Few of the basic features of EmpMonitor which will help you track and improve your employees’ performance can be looked at as below:
- Measure productivity of your employees
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.
You can also 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.
2. Recorded screenshots:
If you are dealing with sensitive data of your clients and want to protect it from breached then EmpMonitor can take screenshots from your employees’ PC and save them for you to have a look at a later point of time.
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.
3. Track their browser history:
EmpMonitor can 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
Read EmpMonitor Review: Remote Team Management — Challenges and Solutions Using EmpMonitor
Offer encouragement and emotional support
When there is a sudden shift of work from office to home and employees have to collaborate virtually with each other as a team then there are many unseen psychological effects that can affect them. Managers should be aware of such issues and hence should offer a listening ear to their employees to know what are the challenges they are facing due to this sudden shift and how are they tackling them.
They must address any anxiety or stress related to remote working and should ascertain to their employees that things will be back to normal when the situations would recover. A regular update on how the higher management is dealing with the current situation and what are the changes in the company policies being made to deal with the situation should be given to the employees to make them feel safe and secured.
Conclusion
The changes related to remote work is hitting every industry at a much faster rate than ever and it might seem that we are not prepared for it. But with above listed steps and an employee monitoring tool like EmpMonitor specially designed for times like these, you can stay assured on questions like how to manage employee productivity during work from home.
If you have any comments or want to share more steps that can help you manage remote employees during these times then feel free to add them below in the comment section.
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