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As you read this, your company is probably still legally required to mandate its employees to work from home, rather than the usual office, where possible. Fortunately, even before the pandemic struck, 90% of remote employees said they felt more productive working that way, as Medium reported.
Nonetheless, instilling an impressive productivity rate in your remote workforce could depend strongly on you monitoring their progress, albeit in a way that doesn’t infringe your home-based workers’ privacy.
Make Transparency A Strong Priority from The Start
When many members of your team are in different parts of the country or possibly even the world, there’s the obvious question of how you should keep them all in the loop. After all, you can’t expect to physically bump into them in the office and so get an opportunity to tell them the latest news there and then.
You should therefore let your remotely-based workers know that your business is committed to transparency – and thus will be open about any changes or decisions it could make to how it operates.
Remember to Regularly Initiate Communication
If you run into any problems with managing a remote workforce, that’s likely to be a result of poor communication. The onus is on you to regularly check in on your home-based employees digitally, whether though email, messaging, Skype or, indeed, any other sensible means.
There remains, however, the question of when exactly you should reach out. You should establish and communicate the rules here early on; otherwise, you could too easily end up trying to video call someone when they are away from their desk, perhaps due to their schedule flexibility or local time zone.
What Is Your Team Working On? Make an Effort To Stay Informed
If there are often multiple projects on the go among your team, you should make sure you maintain a good overview of what’s happening on a given day. You could do that through utilizing employee monitoring software, though you should be careful with exactly how you use it…
That’s because some employees can be resentful of employers who use it. Recode has quoted one example of a worker who, speaking on condition of anonymity, complained about how much her manager knew about her activity: “I barely get to stand up and stretch, as opposed to when I am physically in the office.”
Scenarios like this are why you should reassure your workers that you are simply using this software to keep team actions visible and individual employees accountable rather than show distrust.
Implement A “Zero Trust” Access System
One way to be confident about what applications your employees use in their work is by limiting which applications those workers would be permitted to access in the first place. You could reliably do that by putting in place a “zero trust” remote access solution from a company like Wandera.
In this sense, you wouldn’t be “spying” on your employees but instead leaving them with fewer chances of making actions that would warrant your disapproval in the first place.
