Studies have estimated that by 2025, 70% of the workforce will work remotely at least five days each month. It is clear that remote work is far from a passing fad, or one necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
While it is true that the pandemic accelerated its acceptance, many companies have indicated they are going to remain remote even in its wake. In part that is undoubtedly due to the benefits that allowing remote work brings to the table.
The largest roadblock that tends to give employers pause is the productivity issues surrounding remote work. But if anything the last few years have proven that those can be solved with the right tools.
Keep Tabs on What Employees Are Doing
By far the best way to improve the productivity of employees working from home is by taking advantage of Controlio or some other remote employee monitoring software. It is essentially a tool designed to track what employees are doing on their computers, and how they’re spending their time.
Because Controlio is cloud-based, you can access its data from anywhere and at any time. When you do you’ll be able to immediately see what apps and websites your employees are using, how frequently they take breaks, and whether or not they’re wasting excessive amounts of time instead of working.
That information will let you identify any issues with employee productivity. In fact, Controlio will even calculate a productivity score for each employee to make comparisons easy and let you spot outliers that may need to be handled.
Give Employees More Autonomy
When employees are working from home it can be tempting to constantly message them and ask for progress updates, or require them to attend meetings more regularly. It is important that you suppress this impulse, as it can distract employees, make them feel fatigued, and kill productivity.
Instead of all that, it is best if you give your employees more autonomy and leave them to do their tasks. It helps if you have employee monitoring and can silently keep tabs on their progress for your own peace of mind, but even if not you should try to trust them and establish clear goals, deadlines, and an update schedule.
By giving your employees greater autonomy, you’ll boost their job satisfaction levels as well as their productivity. Ultimately your aim should be to have the minimum amount of oversight and smallest number of meetings possible.
Invest in the Right Tools and Training
A big part of the reason why working from home is so feasible is because of the many different types of digital tools available nowadays to help with communication, collaboration, and project management. The right tools can make a huge difference to the productivity of your employees – but only if you train them to use it properly.
Figuring out the ‘best’ tools can be tricky, but you should start by outlining your company’s specific needs for effectively managing remote workers and helping them complete their tasks. A key component of this strategy is implementing workforce time clock software, which not only simplifies time tracking but also enhances accountability and productivity across your team. From there, you can explore some of the more popular tools available and simultaneously review best practices and training to ensure they are used effectively.
Conclusion
As you can see there are lots of ways that you can improve the productivity of employees who opt to work from home. The three listed above are definitely a great place to start, but you should keep in mind that every team is different and you should definitely experiment, try out new things, and see what approach works best for your employees.
