By now, we’ve all bonded over the concept of remote working. We can appreciate today’s new work attire—an office-appropriate top coupled with some form of sweatpants—and we can collectively laugh at all of the creative Zoom backgrounds, from coworkers to late-night comedians. But what might bond us the most is the fact that we’re all in this together. By 2025, an estimated 70% of the workforce will be remote at least five days a month!
Funny Zoom backgrounds aside, remote work is not without its challenges for both employers and employees. The new modality can present communication challenges, loss of employee productivity, feelings of alienation, and high turnover rate. In an increasingly remote world, more organizations are adopting remote employee monitoring software. Here's a look at some of the key benefits of doing so.
Ensure Productivity and Match Employees with the Right Tasks
A survey from Harvard Business Review finds that 40% of supervisors had low confidence in their ability to manage employees in a remote context, and felt this could have negative consequences for the organization and their teams. Remote employee monitoring allows these same supervisors to more easily keep track of how employees spend their time to ensure that people are working on the right projects and tasks.
But that’s not all—the right remote employee monitoring solution can illuminate key learnings like which employees are best suited for which tasks and projects, based on how long it takes for them to complete things. This knowledge can help you build stronger teams with better outputs, and ensure that your employees remain motivated by working on the most meaningful tasks that align with their unique skill sets and work habits.
It’s no surprise that amidst the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in the number of companies that have implemented a remote worker monitoring solution. Gartner projects that 60% of companies with at least 1,000 employees have adopted remote work monitoring tools, compared with 30% pre-pandemic.
Boost Security and Create your own Policy and Rules
Another benefit of a remote employee monitoring solution is security.
Let’s set the scene a bit first: A majority of technology leaders think their employees have picked up “bad cybersecurity behaviors” since working from home. Further, we expect that remote workers will remain a top attack vector in 2022. Just think of all the personal laptops, mobile phones, and tablets your staff is using right now. The threat of mobile malware continues to rise, and more attackers will target these precarious endpoints to access your corporate network. A recent report finds that nearly half of all connected devices are vulnerable to medium and high severity attacks.
The right remote employee monitoring solution will allow you better enforce robust security practices across your entire organization, even when users are offline. At N8 Solutions, we’re pleased to offer a best-in-class solution from Teramind, which allows you to create your own security policy and rules. You can define what exactly constitutes dangerous activity, and set actions to automatically warn, block, or lock out users when these rule violations are detected.
Improve Communication
Another benefit to remote employee monitoring is improved communication. The shift to remote work has left many people feeling disconnected and disengaged. One source suggests that a whopping 70% of employees feel left out.
With remote employee monitoring software, you can provide rapid feedback on employee behavior with real-time alerts and notifications. This permits employers to give feedback based on particular projects and actions that an employee performed in the field, rather than only inappropriately indicating employees’ workability. It also presents a valuable, data-driven opportunity to assist and train those employees who are not meeting expectations.
The right tool, such as Teramind’s remote employee monitoring solution, will even help you discern which forms of communication (e.g., email, phone, or instant messaging) are best for your team. When you better understand how people do their best work, you can address and overcome the underlying causes of disengagement to support a more engaged and communicative remote workforce and greater productivity.
Better Project Management
A fourth benefit of remote employee monitoring is improved project management. The right solution enables your remote workers to manage their own tasks and track their own progress as they switch between different projects. You can also leverage innovative automation features to automatically assign tasks based on a worker’s application or website usage. Today’s most popular project management tools—like JIRA, Trello, BaseCamp, and Redmine—can all be fully integrated with your remote employee monitoring solution to streamline and automate project management.
Take, for example, your expenses tracking, which can be a mundane yet critical part of doing business and managing projects. With the right employee monitoring solution, you can do away with the laborious process of manual invoicing, and easily track remote hours and costs for everyone, from staffers to independent contractors or freelancers.
Ensure Quality and Boost your Team
Lastly, a remote employee monitoring solution can ensure quality outputs across your entire organization. The top solutions allow you to implement unique etiquette rules and corporate policies at your organization. Then, you can continuously monitor and provide feedback to ensure your remote employees are following these rules, behaving professionally, and delivering quality work. Often, bad behaviors are the result of poor habits or lack of training, and not because of any nefarious or neglectful actions. Remote employee monitoring is an opportunity not just to define how you would like to do business, but also to help your capable team flourish and rise to the occasion.
We hope this post helps illuminate just some of the benefits of a remote employee monitoring solution. At N8 Solutions, we’ve teamed up to offer Teramind, one of the best such solutions on the market today. Remote work is here to stay. We can help you overcome challenges and ensure productivity and security for everyone in your organization in the year ahead, no matter where your employees work from. Please get in touch with the friendly experts at N8 Solutions today to learn more.