How to Keep Track of Team Performance while Working Remotely?

Work from home can be fun if you’re an employee. You can just start working in your pajamas from the comfort of your home. Even if you manage to get things done and be super productive, there may be some issues. Sometimes, the lack of physical connectivity leads to miscommunication.  

If you’re a manager, handling a remote team can be challenging due to communication issues. However, the remote employee monitoring process can be eased by some smart strategies. Let’s find out.

Problems Faced While Managing A Remote Team

Poor Communication

While sitting inside your cabin, you can call in any employee to talk about an issue. This is not possible for remote teams. You have to text them or call them. If they don’t pick up, you can email them. Sometimes you don’t get a prompt response, which leads to delay in some official matters. It may take time to solve miscommunication problems.

Similarly, if you send a message/email to the whole team, not everyone might be attentive enough to respond to it immediately.

Tracking Employee Output

Are you aware of how much work each employee is producing per day? What is the overall team performance? These questions are a bit difficult to answer when you’re working remotely. You might not know how to monitor employees remotely if an employee is lagging behind or just slacking off at work. As a result, some employees may be left underutilized.

Developing Company Culture

Whether you want your team to be very professional or highly energetic and creative, developing a positive work culture takes time. Developing clear communication modes and building trust among employees is easier if everyone’s in the office than at home.

Managing Recruits

Just when you think that you’re managing the remote team effectively, an employee decides to resign. So, you have to hire someone new virtually and train them. This might not be as easy as it sounds, as the recruit might not fit in with the rest. They might not work well with the team or communicate properly, which can lead to missed deadlines and other problems.

Tips For Remote Employee Monitoring

Now that you know all about the problems, let’s look at the solutions to manage a remote team. Let's find out how to monitor employees remotely. 

Set Daily Goals And Tasks

Start with setting clear daily goals for all employees before they start working. Inform them how their performance will be monitored and what you expect from them regularly. Then, assign them their tasks and responsibilities, preferably on software rather than by mailing them.

You can use software such as Trello and Google Sheets as remote performance monitor to assign tasks. These are easy to use, access and share. As a result, you can monitor tasks your employees have completed and what’s pending. This information will be useful while preparing their appraisals.

Communicate More Often

You need to keep the communication channels as transparent as possible. Use virtual meeting platforms and tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams to communicate effectively with your employees. These tools let you send messages across multiple team channels and also allow personal messaging. No matter how trivial the matter may seem, inform all your employees about it.

Their response times, a remote employee time tracking, will allow you to evaluate whether the communication process is working out or not.  

Enhance Collaboration

Employees who work together efficiently and productively are easier to manage. For this, you need to improve their teamwork. Virtual meetings are a great way to enhance communication and increase virtual collaboration. You can also create effective online brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to pitch in their ideas.

Analyzing the performance in these meets will help you track their performance, enhance remote employee monitoring and contribution to the company.

Time Tracking

Tracking how many hours each employee is dedicating towards their work is important for measuring their performance. You can use Time Doctor, a remote employee time tracking tool. You can perform the following with this software –

• See what tasks your employees are working on
• Time spent on each task
• Websites visited during working hours
• Attendance
• Task management and allocation
• Login and log out times

Enhancing The Team Culture

If all employees don’t accept or follow the company culture, they won’t perform as you want them to. The employees who aren’t comfortable with your values and ethics will look for other opportunities. As a result, they won’t be dedicated to their work, and it will be difficult to do remote employee monitoring.

To build remote team culture, you have to set an example yourself. Take the initiative to be involved in the onboarding of new employees. Send them personalized gifts on behalf of the company. Furthermore, arrange weekly, or monthly group calls for interacting with team members.

You can create an employee handbook that consists of the rules, core values, remote performance monitor guideline, and responsibilities of every employee should follow.  Send this to everyone.  

Assign A Realistic Workload

A great way to monitor your team’s performance is by ensuring they have a decent workload. No one should be overworked, as it leads to stress and poor productivity. So, check-in on their workloads and see if their targets are achievable.

Make Remote Working Fun

Happy employees work better and are easier to do remote employee monitoring. So, why not make remote working a little more fun? Start by scheduling monthly virtual movie nights and game nights. Host “Employee of the month” competitions to keep the spirits up.

If you have the budget, you can send accessories to set up their home office. Be it an electric standing desk or an office ergonomic chair; it'll be a fantastic gift for any employee.

Endnotes

While remote performance monitor tools are great, there are a lot of factors you need to consider to evaluate a remote team’s performance. Communication, collaboration, job satisfaction, team bonding, and company culture are all important aspects.

Instead of just assigning tasks and tracking output, provide them the atmosphere to be better employees. Whether it’s placing an office furniture bulk order for their home office or monthly incentives, you have to go the distance to see the results you desire.