The Coronavirus pandemic has hit the entire world, pushing everyone inside their closed doors. However, corporate’s have found a way out to continue their work by implementing the work from home policy. Telecommuting, something that we considered a luxury, is now the only way to commence work. Now, this is not something that we would have imagined a few months back, but it is actually happening.
Well, as a matter of fact, employees feel more productive when working from their homes as compared to their offices. But it becomes difficult for employers to know whether they are working on their systems or not. Plus, there’s an increased risk of data breaching and leakage when letting your employees handle your official information.
By now you would understand that managing co-workers is tricky even when they work in front of your eyes; it gets worse when they work from their homes. There are various solid reasons why you should monitor your employees in their (new) remote workplace. Let us discuss some of them in details:
- Data Security:
How can you let your employees handle sensitive data without monitoring them in real-time? One of the best things about remote worker monitoring is that you can keep a constant eye on your company’s information. This way, you can check for any potential threat and take necessary actions against it beforehand.
Look for the software and websites that the employees use to analyze and block the sources of malware. Restrict the usage of unauthorized apps in the office PCs, and check for suspicious activities by any employee. You can also check for data tempering, oversharing, irrelevant conversations, etc., to know if the workers are loyal to your corporation.
- Work Management:
When you keep an eye on your remote workers, you get to know the progress of every task that the employees perform. This way, you can deputize them to perform specific tasks that might be more urgent. Some tools like EmpMonitor provide you with graphs and reports of the employee activities, letting you assess the work status.
This way, you also get to know which activities take more time, discuss it with your colleagues, and come up with better solutions to get it done way before the deadline. You can also train and encourage your employees to polish their skills and teach them to work with new tools this way. They will also learn to work faster over time.
- Avoid Goldbricking:
We all know that there are two types of people- the ones who honestly do their job, and the ones who do it just for the sake of doing it. And it is practically impossible to know which employees fall in either of the categories unless you actually know their working and non-working hours out of their 9 to 5 shift.
Goldbricking is a term used to define the people who perform less than assigned and still get paid for it. Tracking and managing activities of workers in remote workplace will ensure that they stay alert most of the time. This way, they will have no other option other than to work sincerely. (Yippee)
- Transparency:
Bringing transparency in work culture is an inevitable issue that, sometimes, takes years to resolve. Here’s a thing- when your employees are aware of the surveillance activities, they establish more trust with the organization. And once they start trusting you, they start working in favor of your company with their own will.
The more transparent your work culture is, the more trustworthy your employees get. This way, they feel free to come up with issues and queries because they will be sure that someone will hear them out.
Conclusion
Managing employees is a very crucial step in every online and offline workspace. Apart from looking into the work progress, it also improves transparency and ensures data security on the premises. Nevertheless, you need to introduce some remote employee monitoring measures to ensure safety, security and improved productivity even in the online workforce.