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7 Tactics for Time Tracking When Working from Home

7 Tactics for Time Tracking When Working from Home

When a business is managing remote employees, there are frequently concerns about productivity and time. How can management get the best work productivity from their team when they don’t physically report to the office every day? What are the best time management tools and strategies that also allow employees to feel the most autonomy and freedom in their workday? Here are 7 best practices and strategies for tracking and monitoring employee time and productivity without micro-management of employees.

The Planning Stages:

1. Create KPIs with Employee Input That are Tied to Company Goals.

Take time to work with employees to set KPIs to measure their work and productivity. To help your employees find meaning in the hours spent on their work, tie these KPIs back to larger goals for the business. Employees will appreciate the impact that their work has on the business and will find extra motivation even if they are working remote because their time and productivity will have greater meaning. It will also help employees to achieve better productivity because they helped set the goals for their work. Having some ownership will make the employee feel more empowered in their work. They may also feel more amenable to employee monitoring software and time tracking because the employee helped create the standards that the monitoring software will track their work against to decide if it’s good, bad, or not on track.

Create Personal Employee Goals

2. Create Personal Employee Goals:

Another good management strategy to help your team achieve higher productivity is to take time with them to set personal goals that they can track. These personal goals for employees might include building skillsets that help them perform their work better (as part of a team or individual) or get their productivity higher. These goals might require that the employee get training from internal management or an external source, or that they take an external course to get certification in a software, certain tools, or an area of their work or the business in general that they have less familiarity or time working in. An employee and their management can track these personal goals together (possibly on monitoring software) along with their KPIs. Again, this kind employee monitoring actually feels empowering to the employee because these kinds of software are tools tracking work that’s measured against standards that they asked their management to spend time tracking.

Strategies to Apply During Work:

1. Employees Should Always Be Tracking Towards KPIs and Personal Goals.

When remote employees use productivity and tracking software to track progress towards team and personal KPIs and their personal goals, these tools often help them improve their work output and quality. These tools can help remote employees get their time organized and become motivated, using their time in the best way possible to keep on track and reach their targets. They also know that management will have specific expectations that the employee knows how to work towards. It always makes employee monitoring more effective when the employee knows exactly what work they need to be doing to meet the expectations of the management tracking them.

2. Use New Technology to Save Time and Money at Work.

Use New Technology to Save Time and Money at Work

To help remote employees improve their productivity, a manager can invest in business software that automates some tasks for their team. For instance, the employees in a business that are responsible for tracking and running payroll can be freed up to achieve higher productivity and complete other work when their employer invests in payroll software tools (like MP’s). These tools can be well worth the investment when their features enable a remote employee to achieve exponentially more in their work and contribute more to the team at large. Their productivity could be what helps a company grow its services, product offerings, and its client base. This effect is magnified when a company invests in software and tools that improve the productivity of a whole team of employees. Some other examples of this kind of time-saving software for remote employees are Zoom, Excel, project management software, or CRM software.

3. Invest in Software, like MP’s, for Better Collaboration—Remote and In-Office.

It can help remote employees be exponentially more productive when their company invests in software like MP’s Perform and Engage to facilitate the best collaboration possible between the team. Working together as a team, remote employees can come up with the good solutions to difficult problems, bounce ideas off each other to increase creativity in their work, and even help to motivate each other as a team working toward collective goals. MP’s Perform and Engage makes it easy for remote employees to connect over team message boards, to use tools and features that feel as easy and appealing to use as social media, and easily look up and contact relevant team members with interactive org chart tools. A good additional benefit to facilitating team collaboration is that remote employees will subconsciously influence each other to be more productive. As they hear about the achievements of the employees on their team, they will be inspired to put time into achieving more themselves.

Evaluation:

1. Use Productivity Software like MP’s for Monitoring Remote Employees.

Remote employees will perform at a higher level all the time when their workplace uses employee monitoring software (like MP’s). Employee monitoring software will help to track how employees are using their time. It even has tools that can track a particular remote employee and their patterns over the workday. The software’s tools and features will then analyze the trends of its employee monitoring and offer suggestions about how this remote employee who is underperforming might make better use of their time to become a good example for their peers. (Of course, the same software tools and integrations can be used for tracking, analyzing, and improving an in-office employee’s time and performance, too!)

2. Use MP’s Software for Monitoring Time Remote Employees Work.

Sometimes a business doesn’t need to use a time tracking or monitoring software for any reason except to track the time a remote employee is working. Time tracking is important for these employers so that they can pay their team (especially any non-exempt employee) accurately. When a business uses MP’s HR software for time tracking, a remote employee can use the software to clock in and out, tracking their breaks and lunch time. The time tracking software will save a remote employee’s time data so it’s easy for an employer to use tracking tools later to easily run reports, automate payroll, and complete reporting for special projects that require time tracking, like taxes and ACA filing. Most importantly, the time tracking software will ensure that you get every remote employee on your team paid exactly what they have earned and get every employee on your team paid on time. Since a paycheck is the most basic contract between an employee and their employer, using a time tracking software to ensure that the process is error-free and prompt is of the utmost importance, no matter what industry, what team size, or where the business is located.

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