Employee productivity monitoring is the use of various methods of workplace surveillance, mainly to improve the workforce’s productivity and to enhance an organization’s human resources.
So in simple terms, employee monitoring is mainly about gathering information about the activities of each employee.
Being a sub-set of workforce management, knowing that productivity is the key to business success, it’s crucial to understand how team members spend their work.
And this is true for every line of business irrespective of workplace framework, i.e., remote and on-site operation.
Remote Employee Productivity Management
Under remote operation, employee monitoring goes beyond the core time-tracking functionality of attendance or managing schedules and workflows. The goal is to build a culture of trust and transparency while ensuring productivity and respecting employee privacy.
This is why under remote work, monitoring needs new and innovative ways to scale production. In fact, some studies reveal increased productivity in the remote workspace. According to an article published in Flexjob, 85% of businesses reported that productivity has increased in their company.
This improvement is mainly due to the increased flexibility employees get under remote work. So with a proper strategic approach, remote work can easily be a win-win situation for both employer and employee.
Under remote workspace, employee monitoring is not only to calculate the activity percentage of every member. These monitoring strategies make the roadway attaches certain parameters of data security nods.
For example, features like live barge-in or system screen capture clearly show some malpractice conducted from any user end. Features like these work as a data security tag, although they are primarily built to measure any kind of productivity loss.
Again, close monitoring strategies help a supervisor to defeat chances of technical interruptions or at least help to find out the glitch that is causing the intervention.
So whether it is data security or finding technical glitches, the significance of a smart employee monitoring strategy is much higher under remote operation than its “on-site” counterpart.
How Smart Productivity Monitoring Can Enhance Operational Efficiency of a Remote Customer Support Team
With the sudden outbreak of the Novel coronavirus in early March 2020, most of the customer support teams worldwide are working remotely. Yes, for most of them, the experience of working outside “office premises” is either zero or very little.
And that’s why a certain change in the operations of contact centers from on-site to remote locations is a challenging task. This is true for both agents and the management team simultaneously. Now as a customer support team for a brand directly deal with customer satisfaction.
So it is the company’s responsibility to ensure that employees meet every pre-decided parameter of customer satisfaction even in remote operation as well. Handling customer queries, especially during this pandemic situation, promotes the brand value to the next level.
Hence even during remote operation, contact centers should not compromise customer satisfaction. To overcome remote working challenges, it’s important to monitor every activity of team members for unified and fulfilling customer support.
Using perfect remote productivity monitoring software will always keep your customer support team ahead of the curve. For example, to review the call performance of every conversation, using call recording software becomes mandatory under the remote contact center.
This helps deliver feedback and train every remote agent to improve their customer-handling skills. The same happens with features like screen capture. It gives an insight into employee’s engagement towards work and useful evidence to identify any suspicious behavior that might cause productivity loss.
So whether to coach employees or to pinpoint the area of improvement, monitoring always improves the operation efficiency of your remote contact center when implemented smartly.
3 Best Practices and Tools to Use for a Rewarding Employee Productivity Monitoring Procedure
With the more technical advancement, remote workforces are becoming increasingly common. Research conducted by Global Workplace Analytics shows a 159% increase in remote work between 2005 and 2017.
Surprisingly this study is way before the current pandemic situation. And with the current situation, this becomes more of a necessity for most organizations.
This is why using the best approach of remote work monitoring strategy clubbed with the appropriate productivity monitoring software has never been more important.
Yes, productivity is the livelihood of every business, irrespective of the workspace (in-house or remote); if your workforce is not productive enough, your business will suffer.
As an impact, your customers will get dissatisfied with your brand; and eventually will substitute you with your competitors who serve them better. To overcome this bottleneck, implement your best business approach through a conclusive employee productivity monitoring outlook.
1. Time Tracking and User Status
The first step to measuring remote employee productivity accurately is time tracking. Tracking hours is not only helpful from a payroll perspective. It clearly shows how much time an employee spends on a particular task to get completed.
With a smart time tracking tool, you will get a comprehensive outline of a remote worker’s actual working hours without interrupting their work.
All these tracking data can be used for enhanced productivity and underperforming employees while rewarding the superstars. Most importantly, it will give a clear picture of the entire remote workforce’s capability and an early sign of manpower deficiency to the management team.
Besides time tracking, real-time activity status helps to understand every online or active user’s live working status. Capturing keystrokes, another way of close monitoring clearly shows an employee’s engagement level toward his task.
2. Customizing Online Activity
Under remote operation, since there is no face-to-face interaction, there will always be a high chance of browsing unproductive websites. For example, surfing social media websites through the working laptop can decrease productivity for a remote employee.
Not only about social media, but a person can also access any website that is useless for his/her working purpose. This not only reveals a chance of productivity loss but also be harmful to data safety and security.
An employee productivity monitoring tool having a feature like “website whitelisting” is best for the same. This allows the user only to access those websites that are whitelisted or authorized by the organization.
So it works as the ultimate remedy to stop any remote worker from accessing a website that is both useless and may hamper data security.
Along with whitelisting, monitoring every online activity or internet use will give you a complete picture of the entire digital activity of your remote working team.
3. Screenshots and Other Tools
One of the basic and most useful live tracking features is capturing screens/displays of every remote employee’s system at regular intervals. Taking screenshots gives you an accurate and live insight into what an employee is doing during working hours.
If any malpractice is conducted against your organization’s remote operation adherence, this feature works best to identify it. Also, it gives a clear insight in case of any troubleshooting that might hamper the productivity of an employee.
Another useful tool that ensures zero interference or pauses in the workflow is live monitoring of the user’s system battery status. Monitoring this makes a supervisor notify the team member beforehand.
What’s important here is making monitoring strategies effective and practical rather than making them more instructional, which may cause employee dissatisfaction.
This will sequentially enhance the operational efficiency of your entire remote workforce with less effort and to a great extent.
Looking for a Perfect Remote Work Monitoring Platform: Your Search Ends Here with Leapmax
The sudden outspread of the COVID-19 virus disrupted our daily lives more or less to some extent. Until then, there is no permanent solution regarding vaccines or medicine; maintaining social distancing or staying behind locked doors is the only current remedy to stop the spread of this easily transmissible disease.
However, there should be no compromise with business continuity in terms of customer support or marketing. For most of the leading business houses worldwide; organizing remote operations appears as one of the best solutions.
To maintain the same output, what’s important is choosing the right remote working solution for your remote workforce. And it should cover two basic facets accurately namely, employee monitoring and data safety and security. Ideally, workforce monitoring is related to productivity.
But in a broad sense; actually, close monitoring can ensure a complete solution to your remote data safety concern as well. Leapmax, as a remote workforce management solution, is specially designed while keeping this concept only.
We know that maintaining productivity while keeping data security intact is the “mantra” for a remote operating business process. That’s why all of its features come with this dual beneficial idea.
From screenshot-capturing features to website whitelisting, this platform is committed to catering you with the best remote productivity management for your business.
Its one-stop solution comes with features like monitoring real-time user status, checking battery status, website whitelisting, and application tracking. The best part, Leapmax not only helps you to measure productivity, but you can publish productivity reports under this platform as well.
So being a report management platform as well, its target is to improve your remote team’s operational efficiency while helping you keep the entire team on the same page.
With Leapmax, ensure your remote operation is running at peak performance which is critical in today’s competitive business landscape.
Recent Posts
- Workforce Analytics Software: The Need and Benefits Explained
- Mastering the Hybrid Work Model: A Blueprint For Success
- Top 10 Strategies to Improve Employee Performance in a Company
- Employee Burnout – the Meaning, Signs, and Ways to Prevent it
- What is Employee Analytics? Learn Key Metrics, Importance, and Tracking Methods