We love having the ability to pick a work environment that is suitable for us; however, working with someone for an extended period of time may create challenges that would be difficult to overcome if done in person. Managing a team in an office is one thing, but doing this with everyone’s home is something entirely different. How do you keep a team motivated and doing their work without having the ability to see their activity? How do you make sure that the team is doing their job and being productive without having non-stop video calls? How do you keep the trust in the team and make them feel trusted while having access to their activity?
I experienced this myself three years ago with my company, and it started with hiring a bunch of people, having a precise set of expectations, and abstractly feeling like I was to manage them, but I had no clue what their productivity was. This is when I discovered Controlio time tracking software, and my whole perspective about managing a team changed completely.
The right tools can make remote work more productive than in the office.
The Remote Work Revolution and Its Challenges
The move to remote work is not a change that is going to happen again. The transformation of working remotely is going to be a change that is going to change how we work fundamentally.
Remote workers have an average 72-minute time savings per day due to no longer needing to commute. Studies show that 40% of this time savings is then used in a productive manner.
Yet, remote work creates very real management barriers. Without an office clock-watching environment, managers have no perceptive means to understand how work is actually done. Are team members actually productive, or are they just using the presence indicator and just taking a screenshot of the task every few hours? What are the tasks, and how do they consume time? And where are the workflow bottlenecks?
These knowledge gaps generate anxiety for managers and employees. Managers have productivity concerns they cannot solve. And employees are unavailable to work on tasks that demonstrate their value to the organization.
Why the Old School Thinking from the In-Person Office? Set Up Doesn’t Work for Remote Work
Remote-first companies’ biggest error is looking to the traditional office setting for management in a distributed workforce. Visibility issues are worsened by a full schedule of video conferences, ongoing requests for status updates, and expectations for quick answers. These once-used in-office techniques are counterproductive to the very reasons remote work was first used and what benefits were expected from using it.
I learned, in the early days of working from home as everyone else had, that I was wrong to set up daily meetings, to direct hourly reports, and to expect immediate answers to my messages.
The situation worried us all as team morale dropped, productivity went down, and our best employees started to look for new jobs.
The issue wasn’t with my team; it was with how I managed them. Different management strategies are required for remote work, with emphasis on outlining expected outcomes in advance, forming a plan, and working without micromanaging, ideally using a creative supervisory methodology.
Controlio and its Solution for Remote Work
This is where the Controlio Tool comes in and is a true game changer. When it comes to remote employees, Controlio is an advanced tool to measure systems and provides more extensive options for reporting employee activity.
Automatic Activity Tracking
Controlio will automatically measure the employee’s computer activity and measure which application he used, what website he visited, and whether he was actively working. All this is done without processes to measure and without interruptions to the work.
Once I started to work with Controlio, I was able to observe working patterns that are usually invisible to independent managers. Controlio detected one employee in the team who, despite having long working hours, wasn’t very productive. Then Controlio sent an alert that this employee spent 70% of his working time on technical issues, and the reason was that our organization was in need of technical improvement. We resolved this issue, and his productivity went up two and a half times.
Controlio provides a comprehensive analysis of the productivity data down to a single-minute level.
The system generates activity reports by activity type and then by organization type so that you get true productivity analyses and not just hours logged.
We learned that not all “unproductive” time is time wasted. Short breaks and even quick checks of social media can increase productivity levels and the length of sustained focus when done in moderation. Controlio’s data showed us how not to take unreasonable expectations to the extreme.
Real-Time Visibility Without the Need to Micromanage
Managers can expect productivity levels from the dashboard and can even see who is assisting someone in their activity and how. They can manage support assignments without interruptions.
The Controlio tool helps to eliminate anxiety over remote working. You don’t have to blindly hope for productivity with Controlio—a system that provides objective data for you. You don’t have to hold meetings to engineer “check-ins” against your will. Control perspective from real-time data and focus your interventions concerning data points that suggest problems.
Trust Without Undermining
Your trust issues are understandable, and Controlio is a tool that can be used to help ease your concerns. Controlio is a data extraction tool, and I was concerned when balancing trade-offs and was sure to be highly open with how Controlio would be used.
I emphasized that the intention was optimization of processes and assistance in employee achievement and not spying or catching employees in the act.
Most of the collaborators preferred this system. Instead of being under constant surveillance through the calls and messages, they received constructive feedback, having metrics of productivity that showed how valuable they were. The top employees additionally enjoyed the system, as they had tangible evidence of their productivity.
The tips below will help you increase your chances of being successful as you work from home.
Controlio fosters productivity by taking the guesswork out of expectations. Instead of being told to just work, you have clearly defined targets for how many tasks should be completed, how many are in progress, and how your time is allocated.
Preserve Your Work-Life Balance
Remote work can put you in a position to have a better work-life balance, but this will only happen through establishing and protecting your boundaries. With the Controlio app you have the ability to set the boundaries and to ensure that you are not working in a way that is counter to your own interests.
With Controlio, I was able to see that a number of my employees were working 10 to 11 hours a day, and I took steps to redistribute the incoming work before employees burned out.
The most effective remote work teams are controlled by the results, not the processes.
Rather than focusing on whether an employee is physically sitting at the desk during work hours, CEOs should focus on whether the employees are getting their tasks done and contributing to the success of the organization.
Controlio, an employee monitoring tool, will help you keep track of the tasks completed as well as set goals to keep employees focused on goals. Employees work more when they are given freedom of choice in their working hours and when they are responsible for achieving certain goals.
Make Use of Asynchronous Communication Asynchronous communication is the opposite of synchronous communication, where all the participants of the conversation are in real time. Use instructions, recorded calls, and messages to explain the topic. This way, you can respect the working hours of the employees, take into account their time zone differences, and reduce the number of meetings.
Questions and Answers
Q1: Will employee monitoring software make employees feel like they are not trusted? This is a subjective question for the person. When monitoring is done as a way to improve work processes and not as a way to collect surveillance data, employees feel in control of their work. From experience, monitoring increases trust in employees as long as there are objectives to be achieved. Employees appreciate having Controlio to track workflows. The goal should be Controlio as a tool to improve employee workflows.
Q2: How can I ensure I keep track of employee goals without monitoring them? Employees have control over their own privacy when using Controlio, as the privacy monitoring features are customizable.
Oftentimes, the extent of monitoring can be customized, and you can set tracking for work hours only, exclude personal apps, and even turn off things such as screenshots. My recommendation is to get feedback from employees on where monitoring should stop, when monitoring happens, and how the data gets used. Most privacy concerns go away when employees feel like they have a say in what gets tracked.
Q3: Can remote work actually be as productive as working in the office? Yes, and in fact, it is often even more productive. Studies show that when remote employees get proper guidance and supervision, they tend to be more productive than office employees. Without the need to drive into work and being able to work when they feel the most productive, they can be more output oriented. With Controlio, you can eliminate the guesswork and be able to see work being done and the output.
Q4: What do you do when employees are in different time zones and, as a result, have different working hours? This is the type of challenge most of the remote teams face. Controlio helps you to see what your team has done even if they are working different hours. Establish a set of working hours when everyone should work, and do most of the work in that time.
Leverage Controlio’s data to aid your team in focusing on completing work by deadlines, as opposed to completing the work at the same time, and workload balancing across time zones.
Conclusion
Well-organized remote work is very different from a well-organized office job. With a remote workforce, it is important to find the tools necessary to work with your team in a different environment and to not simply try to reorganize the environment of work as has been done in the past.
Controlio offers the ability to manage remote work without needing to monitor workers. This offers managers the ability to manage without needing to micromanage employees and offers employees the ability to control their work without losing the autonomy that they need. This binds the remote work relationship by being fully integrated with the constructive, trust, and confidence that is required for remote work. Controlio also offers the counter to management worries concerning remote personnel.
In order to avoid all the work that is involved in managing a remote workforce, it is important to manage based on data. Determine the outcomes required, determine the tools required, provide the trust and data that are required, and avoid ongoing discussions/meetings. Employees need to be able to determine their location and time to maximize their effectiveness.