Most businesses are wary of remote work; they don’t know how to manage people from a distance while still maintaining a productive working rhythm.
In 2009, IBM developed a plan to allow 40% of its global workforce to work remotely. However, in 2017, as the firm’s revenue dropped, the management revoked its decades-old remote work policy. According to IBM, a lack of inclusion makes remote workers less loyal. It leads to decreased creativity, innovation, and productivity.
But in today’s scenario, it is about saving our lives now. Companies have no choice but to let employees work from home or shut down the company. More than 100,000 firms in the United States have already shut down permanently.
When facing problems as a business owner, it’s too easy to blame your employees. However, it is important to identify and rectify the issues. This is when employee monitoring software comes into play. Check out how tracking remote employees can affect your overall revenue.
6 Ways Tracking Your Remote Employees Affects Your Revenue
Tracking your remote employees can affect your revenue. Here’s how:
1. Productivity tracking
When you know exactly how much time your employees spend on tasks, you can more accurately assess their productivity. This information can help you decide where to allocate resources and where to cut back.
The research shows it, and you can see it for yourself. When employees can work from anywhere, they are more productive — and that productivity gets passed on to you as a business owner or manager. So how can you maximize your remote team’s productivity? Start by ensuring each team member has their own office — even if they’re working from home. You can use a GPS time tracker to track their location.
People who work in isolation (sometimes known as lone wolves) tend to be highly productive. When people are happier, they perform better at their jobs, ultimately increasing your company’s revenue.
2. Better Communication
How often and in what manner do your employees communicate with clients and customers? If you have remote employees, tracking their communication can help you better understand which channels are most effective for your business.
Working with a remote team means your employees aren’t sitting in one big meeting room, but you can still foster effective communication using technologies like Google Hangouts, Skype, and Slack. Make sure that everyone has a computer they can use at any time and encourage constant communication to cut down on it’s not my job misunderstandings.
It’s essential to ensure you have set office hours when people should be responding or doing work — and stick to them. Some cultures are more flexible than others, but it’s important to define your company culture early on.
3. Improved HR Management
While many organizations allow their employees to work remotely, they are often unaware of how effective and productive remote work can be. Most estimates put productivity up 25 percent when employees can work from home, but companies can increase productivity and revenue by creating a corporate culture that embraces remote work.
To do so, create a unified vision of what it means to have team members located across town or an ocean — essentially, foster relationships among all team members (both in-office and remote). This will result in improved employee satisfaction while also streamlining day-to-day operations.
If employees feel like they’re being micromanaged, it can lead to low morale and high turnover rates. Knowing that you’re trusting them to get their work done from home can help boost morale and keep good workers around longer.
Try the best remote employee GPS tracking app and always stay updated with the latest information about your employees and their safety-
4. Better Forecasting
If you are running any business, hiring remote employees is a great way to grow your business. Tracking these employees in real-time can help you better forecast your workload and plan for expansion. By understanding where your team members are and what they’re working on at any given time, you can more accurately predict when they will complete a certain work. This gives you valuable insight into when to expand production or hire new workers to meet demand.
A small mistake here could make all of your planning worthless, so ensure that everyone is working with peak efficiency by getting daily updates on what they’re doing, where they are, and how long their tasks are taking them.
5. Lower Costs
In-office employees require a lot of overhead, including space, utilities, and salaries. When you eliminate those office costs and hire remote workers, you reduce your overhead dramatically. Additionally, because working remotely gives you access to more talent than your geographic location would allow, otherwise, you can hire highly skilled people for less. On average, a remote worker costs 30% less than an in-office employee with similar experience — meaning more money in your pockets.
6. Better Planning
When you have a group of people working on your project together, there are always risks that one person may not be able to do their job correctly. If you find yourself having multiple people work on a project together, and if those team members aren’t planning correctly, it can greatly affect your whole business plan in terms of revenue. For example, if two designers are supposed to collaborate on an upcoming design idea, but when they don’t plan properly, they might inadvertently produce two different designs that aren’t appropriate for each other.
This will look like you took longer than expected and cost you extra because all employees are paid based on how many hours or how much work they complete per week.
5 Expert Tips To Efficiently Manage Your Remote Workforce
1. Set Up A Set Of Rules From The Start
Before hiring remote employees, decide how to set up your company’s communication processes. What communication channels will you use? Will you hold daily meetings? Weekly meetings? Team-wide standups? Will there be a single manager or multiple managers, and if so, what do they do?
These questions will affect how effectively and efficiently your team can work together and whether they trust one another. It might also be useful to have a clear list of rules regarding time off work, office hours, and working from home. Communication is key for an efficient workforce.
2. Know Your Employees, Know Your Business
It’s crucial to know who you’re working with. Setting up a face-to-face (or, at least, Skype) meeting once or twice a year is a great idea to stay in touch and share ideas — especially for distributed teams that might not get together otherwise. It also helps you uncover new ways your team can work together and achieve mutual goals. For example, during these meetings, we recently realized we were missing out on an important resource: our interns!
Seeing as they aren’t just employees but also college students trying to balance studying with their jobs, we started scheduling weekly drop-in hours where students can stop by to get help from our more experienced interns or us.
3. Listen To Your Employees
Although a boss can’t have direct contact with every employee all of the time, they should always be listening. Find out what is essential to your employees and what bothers them. Make sure that you’re on top of their concerns and promptly address issues. You don’t want to ignore an issue simply because your remote employee isn’t in front of you when it arises, but you also don’t want to overreact. An excellent way to stay up-to-date on how well your employees are being treated by management is to ask for anonymous feedback from individuals who aren’t afraid to speak their minds.
4. Don’t Micromanage
As a team leader, your job is to ensure that your employees are completing tasks. If they’re doing so, it’s OK to allow them room for creativity and self-direction. In other words, don’t micromanage everything they do; let them follow their passions! Ultimately, you want to give your employees as much control over their projects as possible. They know what they need to do — and have probably already done some research on best practices and workflow — so trust in their judgment when it comes to getting work done. And if they ask you a question or seek advice along the way, respond promptly. But otherwise? Get out of their way!
What To Keep In Mind While Tracking Remote Employees?
Did you know that 73 percent of workers believe that keeping track of their job would harm their trust in their employers? In fact, over 40% of respondents said that viewing their work was a breach of their privacy.
So, to use such technologies successfully, you must have a good purpose and intention.
That’s where “Workforce Software” comes into the picture. These tools allow employees to track their productivity and identify areas where they need to make adjustments.
Many of these tools also allow employees to set goals and track their progress which can help them stay on task and meet their goals. In addition, many of these tools also provide employers with insights into employee productivity to help them identify areas where they may need to make changes to improve overall productivity.
Highly regulated businesses have to keep an eye on their employees for legal and regulatory reasons. However, other companies should use employee productivity tracking systems to better understand the behaviors and difficulties of remote employees. It should not be used to keep track of every mouse click and keystroke.
In the following industries, monitoring remote workers’ performance directly and substantially affects revenue:
- Architects & Engineer
- Accounting
- Agency
- Consultant
- Healthcare
- Design
- Real Estate
- Landscaping
- Attorney
- Construction
- E-Commerce
- Manufacturing
- Software Development
- Janitorial Services
Ensure that you are always honest with your staff, informing them that they are being observed and the goal of this action.
Closing Thoughts
The data gathered from tracking employee productivity can benefit business owners and managers. If you’re not currently tracking the productivity of your remote employees, we suggest using productivity tracking software. It helps ensure that your team meets its goals and provides you with insights into improving your revenue stream.
Sign up to try the best workforce software that comes with a face recognition attendance system and boost your revenue-
Efficient and productive employees are beneficial to your organization. Apart from implementing an employee tracking software system, you should follow other employee-friendly practices.
Make them feel appreciated! Value them for their efforts, especially when things are tough! Give them incentives when you feel employees really deserve it.
Have you ever tracked the productivity of your remote employees? Tell us in the comment section.