Agent performance monitoring: How to improve productivity in the workplace

Monitoring your remote workforce with agent performance monitoring tools is the new normal. Here’s how you can put the tools to your good use. 

In this age of ‘work from home culture’, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to monitor the productivity of their employees. Agents working from home for prolonged periods are losing motivation and the quality of their work is deteriorating.

Organizations find it hard to provide quality client support to their customers. Modern tech infrastructure offers a solution to these issues, using remote agent monitoring software to regulate employee productivity while also maintaining enterprise data security. 

Remote workforce management tools like this also ensure that organizations can provide their workforce with the best possible workflow setup through an in-depth analysis of employee behaviors.

How can employee monitoring help your organization?

Measuring productivity in the workplace is an integral part of any organization’s regular functioning. It ensures that customers are receiving the best customer service from the organization’s agents. 

Agent performance monitoring is essential to maintain the quality of work output, retain employees by identifying their productivity patterns, enable transparency regarding organizational data and improve the work experience of employees. Remote working makes it difficult to perform these key functions. But certain companies now provide solutions for all agent monitoring needs of enterprises. Organizations hire these middlemen to maintain the quality of customer service while also ensuring the best working environment for their agents. 

How to measure employee productivity?

Agent performance monitoring is not just for constant surveillance of employees, it is a tool that analyzes employee behavior patterns. Gain insights into the kind of challenges employees face at work and help organizations to make the workflow smoother for their employees. Supervisors, higher management or human resource departments can proactively monitor their agents and see how much time they spend in productive or idle work hours. Daily time-sheets are produced for each agent system showing the time spent working on different activities.

These tools also provide performance scores for agents regarding benchmarks like average time taken for each query, etc, while developing and sending regular graphical status updates for agent systems to assigned supervisors. Supervisors can even make note of each tab and activity an agent opens on their system to ensure that work hours are spent productively.

This software also has features for monitoring the system status of employees. A supervisor can easily mark the low battery status of an agent’s system and intimate that to the respective agent, thereby ensuring that there are no interruptions in the workflow. Further, it monitors network health and VPN status on user systems and informs of any network connectivity issues. Operational efficiency remains high when these minor system roadblocks are attended to preemptively. Communications with clients are never interrupted by system management tools.

Work productivity tools like productivity tracking software make it possible for managers to study work behavioral patterns by getting into the core of how employees perform throughout their day. 

What other benefits businesses can have using work productivity tools? 

1. Eliminate potential security risks

Organizational security and transparency are increasingly becoming a concern for enterprises in remote working situations. Modern technology, however, can analyze mouse and keyboard strokes on agent systems to identify any potential security risks or manpower inefficiencies. If supervisors note any potential red flags in an agent’s systems they can do a live barge-in on that agent’s system.

System wipes on the agent’s system can also be initiated by supervisors to prevent any possible data leaks or malpractices. This ensures security for the client’s contact information as well as for confidential organizational data. Multiple checks are put in place to identify suspicious behavior in employees and protect sensitive organizational data.

Some programs use AI-based two-stage verification processes to ensure organizational security. There is also a system lockdown feature during work hours that makes sure that employees cannot load sensitive data onto USB sticks or any other devices. This ensures that work compliance is always in place. 

2. Improve team productivity

Performance monitoring software also has some very useful team productivity tools. One of the biggest problems of remote working is a reduction in the operational efficiency of organizational teams.  Ohio University Assistant professor Glenn Dutcher in his research shows that when teams work from home their productivity decreases because no one wants to be the only person working harder than the rest of the group.

The solution to this problem is through innovative software applications. Supervisors receive daily activity logs and timesheets for agents of each team. They can also see the agent system’s first and last task of the day. There are even features to take regular customized screenshots of the agent’s screen to understand their work patterns.

3. Collaborate more easily

Many important features make working in teams and collaborating within the organization very easy. Encrypted video conferencing, live chats, team channels, and team-wide broadcast systems are very useful team performance features. Supervisors and employees can connect through group chats or one on one messaging without any need for switching screens. Managers can broadcast important messages to relevant groups without having to send company-wide emails. 

Work productivity tools with collaboration integration take away the need for organizations to use any third-party messaging platforms for intra-organizational communication. Supervisors can monitor their agents and share necessary confidential information with them directly through integrated chat options without any fear of data leaks.

They also ensure that message alerts are no longer accompanied by any annoying interruptions in workflow. These broadcasts and alerts only flash across the agents’ screens without interrupting their calls/communication with clients.

A culture of mutual trust and respect develops among the workforce through regular collaborative efforts. The broadcasting feature can be used to congratulate exceptional employees or teams and boost organizational morale.

4. Manage compliance and increase operational efficiency

Employee productivity tracking software can save a lot of time in the work process. In a regular course of work, a lot of time is wasted waiting for reports from agents and feedback from supervisors. These tools remove this problem allowing supervisors to give real-time feedback to employees through monitoring their user systems whenever required.

Supervisors can also broadcast weekly rosters and other important notices to all relevant employees at one go by using agent performance monitoring tools. The inefficiencies of physical notice boards are replaced with immediate on-screen alerts.

But why should you monitor your agents regularly?

A company’s biggest asset is its workforce. Having a good, efficient, transparent work culture is imperative for a healthy enterprise. Assisted agent monitoring can be a very useful and time-efficient method for upper management to keep an idea of their employees’ behavior. This ensures employee privacy while also making sure that organizational managers can monitor their performance. An optimum level of supervision keeps agents motivated and inspires healthy competition and cooperation among them.

In today’s fast-paced world professional burnout has become one of the most common causes of employee turnover. The stress of managing a work-life balance while working from home is adding to the pressures on working professionals.  Employee monitoring can help identify changes in work patterns indicative of burnout and help employees seek timely intervention. System inefficiencies that add to an agent’s workplace pressures can also be recognized and rectified.

Employee monitoring software for remote teams provides a comprehensive picture of the work pattern of all agents and thus points out any possible bottlenecks in the workflow which affect the organization’s overall output and efficiency. Historic records of employee behavior can be studied to make predictions and alterations for the future. Corrective measures based on analysis of agent behavioral patterns will eliminate the inefficiencies of the operational setup of the enterprise. The more employee behavior patterns are analyzed, the better the workflow can be streamlined to remove redundancies and reduce time requirements for each query.

Summing up

As remote working becomes part of the ‘new normal, companies are looking for more permanent solutions for their agent monitoring needs, with a healthy market full of companies offering great solutions. Remote working is the new norm – and agent monitoring provides a reliable metric with which to guide us into the new era of work-from-home solutions.

But it doesn’t end at just providing supervisors with endless data. It presents the data in the form of easily understandable graphical reports and charts. This information is actionable data. Management can use the information gathered from agent performance monitoring reports and take specific targeted actions to improve, modify or correct certain elements of the workflow.

Modern remote solutions are part of a new outlook on how to supervise employees and keep them happy and productive. Working from home does not mean slacking off anymore. It is no longer an excuse for half-hearted efforts and low-performance scores. Agents working from home are now expected to be working at their highest efficiency.