How to Monitor Employees Working from Home

After the COVID-19 outbreak, business owners started to understand the benefits of remote workers. You don’t need to invest in extra resources; you can easily hire talent across boundaries, and you can even scale up your business without any prior investment.

However, there are some drawbacks as well. Like, inability to observe properly, lack of proper communication, etc. Even so, you can’t deny the necessity of creating a remote office environment.

If you’re also struggling to manage your cloud office efficiently, follow these simple tips. We will tell you how to monitor employees working from home and never miss a single company goal.

Let’s begin.

Importance of Monitoring Remote Employees

Now, the first question is, why do you need to monitor your remote workers? From our experience, you should keep track of your team’s activities mainly for:

• Productivity
• Transparency
• Security

Employees can slack off when they know nobody is observing their work, and will make excuses for not meeting the KPIs or deadlines. This happens even with the in-house offices as well.

So, you need to monitor their activities properly to evaluate their efforts and pay them accordingly.

Ensuring Productivity and Accountability

You can set fixed hours and deadlines for each task assigned to a worker. Monitoring helps the leaders to complete projects with proper time management. Also, team members won’t indulge in other activities during work hours as they’ll be accountable for each minute counted on the tracker.

Maintaining Data Security and Compliance

You might need to share sensitive data with your teammates. To make sure they are not using the office resources for personal use, you have to monitor their screen during working hours.

Building Trust and Transparency

The monitor tool can also help to build a good relationship with your employees. Your talents will know their works are tracked, so they will give their best most of the time and try to convince you.

1. Establish Clear Objectives

The first thing you need to consider is your main motive behind monitoring.

The key purpose behind monitoring a person in your team can vary depending on the designation and work. For example, you should observe how responsive a client support executive is. And you can monitor a content creator to see if they’re doing proper research before submitting the file.

Don’t just keep a singular purpose for every employee. Set goals and purposes based on the deliverables. Like, create a goal of sending 1000 cold emails for the outreach team and track how many hours the programmers are efficiently working.

Most importantly, tell your underlings why you need to monitor them.

2. Develop Transparent Policies

No matter what time tracker you choose, you need to make sure the features go with the office policies. At the initial stage, you can try the work time tracker with some specific people and see if things are okay with it.

If needed, you can even redesign your internal guidelines to match the tool you want to use. Remote workers become more confident when they know exactly what is being monitored. So, be clear from day one.

Tell them whether you are tracking screen time, counting keystrokes, checking URLs, or only observing task progress. Don’t hide anything. You need open communication to maintain trust.

I always suggest organizing a short meeting to walk your team through the new monitoring structure. When your employees understand the purpose behind the tracking system, they cooperate instead of resisting it.

3. Utilize Appropriate Tools

Now, you need to set up the right tools to manage your team remotely. You can use multiple tools for tracking, communication, and reporting, and create a compatible monitoring system for efficient workflow.

Time Tracking Software

At first, purchase a suitable plan for a time tracking tool. Time trackers mainly help you see how many hours your employees have spent working individually. Some tools can even track the productivity rate and contribution on specific projects. You need to try to use tools that give you proper weekly or monthly reports on employee activities.

Examples: Clockify, TimoDesk, Time Doctor, etc.

Project Management Platforms

Project management tools centralize the whole office work in one platform. Such platforms will assign tasks, share notes, collaborate on projects, and much more.

Versatile project management tools like ClickUp, Trello, etc., will help you streamline your office management and teamwork with ease.

Communication Tools

Don’t create chat groups on Facebook or WhatsApp and allow your employees to communicate there. Regular social platforms kill valuable time. You need to pick platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams for connectivity.

4. Implement Regular Check-Ins

You can’t rely only on tools and data. You must interact with your remote workers frequently.

Conduct daily or weekly meetings to discuss progress and address concerns. Keep these sessions short and purposeful so your team stays aligned with the weekly or monthly goals.

Use video calls to enhance engagement and communication. Seeing each other on screen helps build a stronger connection. It also helps you understand their mental state better, which is often impossible through texts.

5. Focus on Results Over Activity

When you’re handling remote teams, don’t make the mistake of micromanaging every minute.

Assess employees based on task completion and quality of work rather than time spent online.

This approach creates a performance-driven environment and helps your team focus on what actually matters.

Encourage autonomy and responsibility. Give them the freedom to approach tasks in their own way as long as they deliver the desired output. Autonomy is one of the biggest motivators in remote work culture.

6. Ensure Data Privacy and Compliance

While monitoring, you must protect your employees’ personal rights. Adhere to laws and regulations regarding employee monitoring.

Every country has distinct labor rules, so make sure you follow them before implementing any software.

Protect employee data to maintain trust and integrity. Always keep recorded screen data and time logs secure. Let your workers know how long you store their information and who can access it.

7. Provide Support and Resources

Not every remote worker is comfortable with technical tools at the beginning.

Offer resources to help employees adapt to remote work tools and practices.

Give them short guides or internal documentation to understand the monitoring process clearly.

Provide technical support to address any issues promptly. If any worker faces device or software problems, assist them immediately. It keeps productivity high and reduces downtime.

8. Gather Feedback and Adjust Practices

You must remember that your remote work structure will improve over time.

Solicit employee feedback on monitoring practices. Ask them whether the tools feel intrusive or if the policies need clarity. You will learn a lot from their opinions.

Make necessary adjustments to balance oversight and employee well-being. When you keep the monitoring process flexible, your team stays motivated and respects the system.

Final Thoughts

Effective employee monitoring or time tracking helps you measure performance and growth. It also increases efficiency as the matter of accountability comes when your office times are thoroughly monitored.

However, the best way to monitor employees working from home is to measure how well they are working rather than what they are doing. Your workers shouldn’t feel like they are working under strict surveillance like prisoners.

Your teammates will be motivated when they understand you’re measuring outputs over controlling their activities.

If you’re also thinking of onboarding a new time tracking software with easy functionality and top features with budget-friendly plans, visit TimoDesk today.