Questions You Should Ask Before Doing Remote Worker Monitoring

What Is Remote Worker Monitoring?

In this pandemic situation, it is important to stay away from the effect of coronavirus. So, employees are nowadays working from home or some other remote locations. Monitoring employees even when they are working from home and not in a traditional office landscape is what remote worker monitoring is.

How Is It Possible?

It is impossible to keep an eye on every employee, especially when they are working from home. So we should use monitoring software that can make this possible. There are many employee monitoring software available in the market. But my research and reviews of the people EmpMonitor is the best one to choose.

 EmpMonitor is the software used to track every activity of the employees no matter where they work. It works from the moment, it is installed in employees' working devices. You can have a detailed report of productive and non-productive hours of your employees.

 Let Us See Some Points About EmpMonitor:

1. It is used to track employees' work activity during office hours.
2. It counts the productive and non-productive hours of the employees.
3. It helps to increase the productivity of the employees.
4. It keeps the record of the employee's attendance so that no employee can cheat.
5. It tracks activities like keyboard inputs, email, file transfers, the total time an employee spends on a particular task, and many more.
6. It can capture screenshots at any time with higher quality.
7. It works silently behind the desktop without any disturbance and the employees cannot stop it. It is invisible to the employees. It will be neither on the taskbar nor in the program files or applications.

Also Read: 

How To Get The Most Out of Your EmpMonitor App

The Ultimate Guide To Employee Monitoring: A Smarter Approach Towards It

Why Is Monitoring Remote Workers Important?

To be focussed during remote working is difficult. There can be many distractions that can divert the minds of the employees. In this situation, it is really difficult to track employees' work. So the employee monitoring software is required to track the productive hours of the employees. This encourages the employees to stay focussed on their work and become more productive.

Through this software, it is easy for an employer to detect employees' regular performance, their total productive hours, their sincerity towards their job which helps the employer to give feedback to the employees which can increase the confidence of the employees as well as the key points on which the employees should work to be more productive.

During this remote working, it is a big headache for the employer to know about his employee's productivity which is impossible without a monitoring device. Due to this device, the employers can know every activity of their employees in a single click.

Are There Any Drawbacks?

1. Increased Distractions: Working from home can increase distraction.

Solution-installation of monitoring software that will keep the employees focussed on their work.

2. Decreased privacy: Monitoring software should be active at work time not at all the time.

Solution-This can be done by the employers by taking some valid steps.

Final Words:

Remote Monitoring workers provide transparency in the workforce. All the organizations should install EmpMonitor software in all the working devices of the employees for the betterment of the employees as well as employers. 

I hope this article was helpful to you. Is there something that you would like to add? Did I miss anything? Do you have a doubt? Please drop your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to hear from you!

Workplace Monitoring Policy That Won't Alarm Employees

 

Tracking employees and their work has always been surrounded by controversies. Where several people are opposing this employing tracking policy, there are others who are in favors of them. 

Hence, despite being a controversial policy, organizations want to implement this in their workplace. 

Reason -

1. It helps to increase the productivity of employees, by telling them where they are wasting time and how to optimize it.

2. Through this software, employers can find hidden skills of the workers and utilize it in the right place. 

3. It helps to protect the company from an insider threat.

4. By using this tool, managers can get a detailed report of individual employees and so that they can help them to acquire better results.

So why others are rejecting this useful policy, why they don't want to implement it in their workplace?

The reason is, they think this policy can break their confidentiality and increase the unnecessary work pressure on them.

This conflicting scenario is creating a dilemma for employers who want to implement employee tracking but, on the other hand, also want their employees to feel good while working for them. 

Well, are you also one of those who caught in this situation?

If yes, then stop worrying because there is an intermediate to this problem. And that intermediate is workplace monitoring policy. A policy where you set certain limits to track employees' work by informing them that they are under surveillance. 

According to a survey, this midway solution is working very smoothly to run an organization in a better way. Do you want to learn what those workplace monitoring policies are?

Let's dive into this article then.

Workplace Monitoring Policy 

•  Inform the employees about the policy

Keeping transparency in your workplace is one of the best ways to avoid any offensive step from the workforce. Hence before applying any kind of employee monitoring policy, make sure to inform about this to your workforce. 

Communicating them clearly about every single information in the policy by both telling them orally and providing the written copy is the best practice to be done.

• Tell them about why employing monitoring is important

Workers have the misconception that their employers don't trust them, and for that reason, they are applying the employee monitoring system. 

As a good employer, you need to break this misinterpretation, by telling them how this software is to help employees increase their productivity by reducing errors. 

Tell them how by utilizing this, the managers can get to know the hidden skills of employees and promote them to do better. 

• Inform them that the tracking method is for all.

Telling employees that the employee tracking method is applied to every employee irrespective of the designation will help you to solve the inferiority problem in the employees. 

Show them that employee monitoring is just for the purpose of improving productivity and applies even to the CEO of the company. 

Wrapping words

Tracking employees' work is a difficult balancing act, which can be controlled simply by applying workplace monitoring policy and informing the workers about this at the time of hiring only. 

Hope, this article helped you to understand how you can keep an eye on the workforce also by making them feel safe.

So let's don't wait!

Tell workers the importance of an employee tracking system and make them feel comfortable to work under surveillance.

How to Keep Track Of Employee Hours

 

In this epoch, remote working has become a new trend. Remote work is comfortable and uncomplicated for the employees because they do not have to visit the traditional workplace regularly. 

Well, if the workers of an organisation are working remotely at different places, then how to keep track of employee hours?

Here are certain approaches that can assist you to keep track of these employees.

1. Tracking employees through software that is suitable for portable gadgets.

The companies should choose the monitoring tool accordingly that consists of a mobile attendance system. There are a lot of employees who have to travel to accomplish their work. Hence if the system could be accessible from their mobile phones, then it would be peaceful to track their working hours. It comprises Global Positioning System(GPS) , so it becomes more comfortable for the companies to maintain their records.

2. Make use of a monitoring tool that employees can adopt.

Using a tool which will only assist the executives of the company is not a great deal, this is because it is the least favourite thing for an employee to keep track of their working hours. Therefore the companies should operate in favour of tools that the employees could access for themselves as well. The employees themselves can keep track of their working hours and even can know about their leaves. They will be able to track their productivity as well. This will give a boost up to the employees for being more productive during their working hours.

3. Choose a system that is convenient to install.

A company uses numerous software for different businesses. Introducing another software to their system could be a daunting task. Hence, companies must choose a system that can uncomplicatedly merge with another system. So that the professionals do not have to spend much time in installation.

As discussed beforehand the tool should be able to work on mobile phones, therefore it should be simpler to integrate so that it does not become a headache for the remote employees and they can use the tool accurately.

4. Get cloud-based monitoring software.

Cloud based productivity monitoring software is used to monitor the employees during their working hours by the help of cloud-based IT support. It should be a feature that all the companies should search for in a tool because it is economical at the beginning. It does not carry a lot of software along with it. Consequently, it can be installed easily without any hassle. The most important advantage of having cloud-based software is data storage. A company generates a lot of data while working but what if the data is lost all of a sudden. So to protect the organisation from this threat the companies should acquire cloud-based tools where the data is kept safe.

Conclusion

While coming across all these features you must be thinking what is the right tool that acquires these traits altogether. 

Well, the answer is EmpMonitor. 

EmpMonitor is a tool that will facilitate the job of keeping track of the employees productive hours. It is a tool loaded with all the characteristics such as easy integration with other software, cloud-based monitoring system, compatible for portable gadgets that are needed for proper tracking of working hours of employees working remotely as well as the regular employees of an organisation.

05 Ways To Manage Remote Workplace Disruption and Maximizing Productivity

When COVID-19 forced businesses from all over the world to instruct their employees to avoid coming to office, working remotely became the only option for maintaining the economy level. Ultimately, employees had to pack their office stuff and start working from their homes. 

And the hurry to provide employees the access to all the pivotal tools they might require to work effectively from their homes was a bit sudden for most of the employers. But slowly, when everyone got settled in, the most important fact that came out from this was that employees are 50% more productive and concentrated when working from home and not from the office. After getting such a positive report, companies even got to understand that remote workplace chores to be the best option for improving the productivity level. No one knows when this pandemic is going to over, so, in that case, remote working is the only option left for the companies. 

Now, when employees are working remotely, companies look for some of their goals to get accomplished without any hassle! And the list comprises of

• 100% increased productivity 
• 0% disturbance during the working hour
• Faster task completion

So, these were some of the things that every company wants from its employees. Keeping those factors in mind, we have come up with some of the 05 excellent ways that can help you accomplish your goals with great ease. 

1. Prioritize your employees health and wellness

Remember, employee safety needs to be your top priority in this current pandemic! After all, if the employees will not be okay, then how would they work efficiently?

Take care of all the employees, and yes, support social distancing as much as you can! Because your work is not as vital as an employee's life! Let them work remotely, till the situation cools down. Along with it, ask them about their health regularly, to get assured that they are okay and happy. 

And since mental health has become a trending topic during these couple of days, it's better to ask your employees, are they feeling better mentally? Because if you scroll your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube feed as well, one thing that you will find prevalent in all these social media channels is that different people, talking about "not to ignore mental health"! 

It is good to make people understand that "sometimes it is okay not to be okay"! But it is not okay to not open up about their problem to anyone. So, keep a check on your employee's mental health as well.

2. Balance structure and flexibility

When you have a structure, like, daily routine or schedule, you will get to manage time in a much better way, become focused and maintain a healthier work-life balance during work from home revolution. Having such a systematic work-life will even help you ease the anxiety level among your employees because of lots of work. 

Along with it, you will also have to become flexible with the work! For example, if you have female employees who are married or having kids, you only can't expect them to come on a last-minute planned zoom meeting while they are homeschooling their kids. It would be really not easy for them to manage everything all of a sudden. In such a situation, you can fix a proper meeting time, so that they would get prepared for it. 

3. Help your team to overcome the newest disruptions!

Most of the employees will be new to the "work from home" policy! So, they need to be informed about the likely challenges that they might have to face. And some of the difficulties can be dealing with several distractions, keeping themselves accountable, and at last 100% discipline. 

Now, how can you assist them? Given below are some of the best team workload management tips that you can share with your remote employees to help them overcome from obstructions:

• Arrange a new set up for working, not your kitchen table, bedroom, or couch.
• Think like you are still going to the office to work and get dressed accordingly. Forget about your comfy pajamas!
• Stick to the official schedule.
• Track your time to know how much time you are actually spending on a particular work.
• Kick-start every day with a win-win attitude, even though it's that simple as making your bed in the morning. 
• Make the needed boundaries! Don't play with your kids or pets during working hours. 
• Make music your only best friend to work the most effectively. 

4. Provide incentives

Incentives are a quick and convenient way to improve happiness, confidence, motivation, engagement, and teamwork. You can provide incentives like gift cards to your remote team, have extra vacation days, or provide a hebdomadal shoutout at the start of a virtual meeting.

5. Communicate daily

One of the things that bother companies a lot about the shifting towards a remote workplace is that you won't be able to have a face to face conversation with them. So, in such a case, you should look forward to communicating with every employee daily. Whether it's video calling or a conference voice call, talking with your employees is really very crucial.  

There are even many tools available in the market that can help you do so! Yes, I am talking about the Zoom cloud meeting app, which is popularly used by almost every company in the world right now. So, use this top-notch app to have a better engagement with your employees. 

Wrapping it up!

Now you are all set to maintain a highly productive remote team! Since employees are much more comfortable in the remote workplace, you need to plan out and manage them accordingly. Hopefully, this article is going to help you a lot with excellent ways to manage your remote workforce accurately and increase every employee productivity as well. 

You can even have a glance at: How To Implement Remote Worker Monitoring At Your Business?

Here’s How To Choose A Best Time Tracking App For Your Business.

Time management and productivity have a deep connection with each other. If we look ten years back from now, entrepreneurs struggled to track their employees’ performance or the duration of time they indeed contributed to the work. Fortunately, the scenario no longer exists today.

Cloud technology has made it possible to measure employee performance, the amount of time invested in different projects, and figure out what’s going on in an organization. So, having a best time tracking app

With the ability to improve the working culture of businesses, regardless of size and revenue earning nature, such apps/software proves to be a fantastic investment. Here, ‘selection’ makes much impact on the benefits you get. Our article has been drafted with a sharp aim of guiding you. Keep reading for a detailed overview.

Kinds of Time-tracking Apps

Time-tracking or productivity monitoring apps have different forms and functional features based on business. For instance, an accounting firm must invest in software that can easily create invoices and perform other book-keeping works.

Similarly, productivity tracking software should always include features such as report management, and payroll management elements. There is various compelling monitoring software, which often offers free trial plans for evaluation.

How to choose the best software for time-tracking?

The first and foremost thing about choosing these kinds of software is seeking significant features that are indeed necessary for your business. Check out the list of features.

Time Monitoring

Every business owner wishes to calculate the exact hours of their employees for the betterment of the working procedure. For businesses that hire field workers, the geo-tracking feature must be attached to time-tracking with push notifications. In addition to online, offline work mechanism is too necessary to put employee management systems in a location where the internet can’t be available. Time is money, so an employer always has the knack to bring productivity again on the track.

Project & Client Management

Time-tracking apps/software doesn’t solely come with this single feature. It also provides other ease like preparation of project evaluation notes. It helps all the members to keep themselves updated to remove obstacles that come across the way to succeed. The ability to figure status of work accomplished, goals to be achieved, further expectations. Experts claim that software with both the mentioned abilities is most-demanding these days.

Preparation of Timesheets

Timesheet is a crucial component of time-tracking apps. It helps managers to distribute hours and eases up the processing of bills. Make sure to choose an app that grants the permission of accepting or rejecting timesheets whenever needed. Employee overtime working hours are as important as the routine hours, thus overtime records and management have a direct impact on the success of any enterprise.

Support Team

The other key aspect of picking the best time tracking app is the availability of a responsive and prompt customer support team. Any app, including time-tracking, might get various technical issues while using. So, a team must be there to solve the same. A compelling software lets you contact their support team through email, quick chat, phone number, and so on.

Every time-tracking app must allow you to integrate it with the existing software or applications on your desktop. Tools like EmpMonitor provide integration for CRM, accounting, task management, and other prevalent programs that are indeed crucial for every organization irrespective of their size or profit-earning capacity.

Also, Learn How To Manage Remote Work Easily With Powerful Monitoring Software: –

Conclusion

Even though we made the best efforts to give you a better idea, quick research is always needed to be confident while thinking how to choose a Best Time Tracking App. Making any decision in a rush can be a big loss to your business. Therefore, choose wisely and get the best. 

05 Benefits Of Using Productivity Monitoring Software For Your Workplace

An organization always aims at making the most out of their employees. With so many distractions such as social media platforms, chatting with colleagues, and frequent breaks, it’s too challenging for employers to ensure 100% productivity. All these factors result in wastage of working hours and money too.

To get rid of such downsides, more and more companies are using productivity monitoring software at their workplace. And, for those who don’t yet have recognized the perks of using employee monitoring software, we have compiled some benefits to make them aware. Let’s take a peek on them.

Raising Overarching Productivity Of An Organization

Productivity Monitoring Software

With a thorough and timely analysis of employee monitoring software, employers can gain valuable insights related to raising/diminishing productivity of their company. Once they get the data, it’s no longer a daunting task to encourage their employees to perform better.

Real-time Employee Tracking

Companies at first look for the feature of real-time monitoring so that an organization can track and reveal employee's activities. With an automated approach, employers get to know their team’s work without any need for manual work.

Check Out Work-in-progress And Status Of The Project

Ongoing Projects

Simply assigning tasks to your employees isn’t a sound process of working. You need to timely figure out the status of projects and the amount of contribution for each member associated with it. An ideal monitoring tool comes with the ability to track down an entire project with the essentials.

Easily guide & supervise your employees

An employee management tool assists employers in accelerating the working ability of their employees and also helps them identify working or non-working employees to avoid lagging during work. Due to this feature, most of the companies try to cut down unnecessary costs to invest in optimal solutions, which indeed turns out to be beneficial.

Don’t Organize Lengthy Meetings

Boring Meetings

Corporates always seek ways to avoid wastage of time and productivity. Therefore, they don’t want to spend time conducting meetings that focus on discussing employees’ working approach, profitability, and downsides. Instead, they utilize the same amount of time to explain new policies to their employees as well as resolve communication issues that probably occur in remote work.

How to choose suitable employee productivity & management software?

Having heard about benefits, the other crucial thing to consider is the selection process of the ideal software. Read out the further description carefully.

Determine your budget

Every software offers different plans for monitoring, so you need to choose a software that suits your budget well and doesn’t influence the overall expenses. A small business usually starts with few employees, where free plans are enough to satisfy their craving for robust monitoring. Software like EmpMonitor offers free plans. Read more here for detailed information.

Look for features

Whether basic or advanced, you must see if the tool you have selected has desired operating capabilities. When it comes to productivity monitoring, the must-have features include work measurement, employee surveillance, screen mirroring, data security, and alike. It’s merely a quick recommendation, however, research is quite advantageous in this respect.

Snooping your competitor’s doings

Rather than spending time, effort, and workforce in the evaluation of best Productivity Monitoring Software, organizations can choose worthwhile software by revealing their competitors’ strategy. In a nutshell, they should use the same software which the leading business uses in their industry.

Conclusion

It’s not the sole purpose of the best productivity monitoring software to keep an eye on productivity metrics. Further to this, such software tells whether the work process is going flawlessly or requires tweaking. Both the employer and employee should learn the benefits of employee screening and agree on its implementation. That’s the key to the development of any organization.

Want To Know More About Measuring Employee Productivity? See This Video:-

03 Hacks to Put Your Cautious Foot Forward Towards Employee Internet Monitoring

Well, it's a bitter truth that free and unlimited internet is like an open treasure. Especially to those who came to office only to prove their presence and showing how busy bee they are.

Opening their excel sheet on one and Facebook or other social media sites on another, these segments of employees take most of the bandwidth, slowing down the official work and decreasing the productivity of the agency. 

So how to find these employees?

How to stop them from using the internet for their personal exposure?

Well, are you also fighting from these queries and want to fix it?

If yes, then, fortunately, you have landed on the right article.

What you only have to do is, continue reading till the end.

So without wasting any time, let's dive and learn Employee internet monitoring! 

Most fruitful techniques to control internet usage by your workforce.

·        Ban the unproductive sites.

Restricting particular sites can help you to handle the parasitic section of the workforce. 

Yes, this is correct, but not entirely.

There are countless websites present over the internet other than Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and many more.

Banning them is also not feasible and efficient at all.

It is because many of the social media sites can be a part of work in your business.

Hence, going manually and figuring out unnecessary websites is the only way by which you can handle this crisis.

  

·         Monitor the internet usage of your employees.

Have you heard about monitoring employees' computers?

Basically, it is the practice by which the authority of an organization keeps the track record of employees' computer activity from a centralized location. By this, they can see how an employee is spending their hours during work.

No, they don't do it manually or using surveillance cameras.

Instead, they use innovative software termed as Employee monitoring software. 

By this software, you are allowed to monitor any website that is opened in the browser and get it saved in the cloud storage immediately.

·         Track the traffic and bandwidth usage of your workforce.

Mapping the traffic and bandwidth usage from every single computer will help you to see and find which system is using extra internet from the usual ones. And hence you can take action on them. 

Now the question arises how?

1.   To efficiently trace the bandwidth usage of your employees' computers, you can install tools, which have the capacity to find the users who are hogging the internet and blocking the bandwidth. 

2.           To handle such users, you can use software that has a feature called the firewall. By using this, you can create a boundary separating a trusted internal network and untrusted external network and hence can secure your network very efficiently.

Tieing them up:

Since the internet is a very precious asset of an organization, it must be used productively.

But some parasitic workforce is using it for leisure, causing a breakdown in the productivity of organizations.

But innovations and technology have opened the doors for employees.

So use the above tips and catch the collar of employees wearing the mask of productivity.