If your company is running a virtual office, that means you don’t have a physical workplace. Instead, your entire company is going to be operate remotely – and the majority of your interactions with employees will be facilitated by tech and take place digitally.
One type of tech that has played an increasingly important role in virtual offices is employee monitoring. In fact, it has such a large impact that if you’re planning on running a virtual office you need to understand the role it has to play.
Track Attendance and Work Hours
Unlike a conventional office, you won’t be able to ‘see’ when employees come into office and start working, and when they go home. This makes monitoring their attendance and work hours more difficult, and while you could do so manually – learning how to monitor employees computer workstations offers a better solution.
Using employee monitoring tools such as Controlio will let you track exactly when employees start and stop working as well as whether they’re active or idle during work hours. In other words it will take attendance and make it easier for you to track the total work hours that your employees clock in.
In addition to providing accountability, the time tracking insights from employee monitoring can also be used to look for signs of overwork. As you can imagine this can be useful when managing remote workers who often feel isolated and suffer from poor work-life balance.
Measure and Improve Productivity
Alongside time tracking features, employee monitoring software such as Controlio can also track employee activities such as app’s used, websites visited, emails, IM chats, downloads, file transfers, and more. Based on this activity you can measure how productive employees are, or in the case of Controlio have it done already via the productivity score.
Being able to measure how productive your employees will ensure fairness and prevent bias in your evaluations. On top of that you can also use the data to identify and solve inefficiencies, workflow bottlenecks, or other issues that affect productivity – improving it in the process.
Another way it can improve productivity is by providing insights that you can use to identify areas where employees can benefit from further training. By addressing the weaknesses of employees and providing them with support, you can gradually improve their performance levels and productivity.
Conclusion
To sum it up, employee monitoring can play key roles in virtual offices by providing oversight, accountability, and a way to improve productivity. To be honest there are few other tools that can do the same, which is why it has become an irreplaceable part of any system where employees are working remotely.
If you’re planning to operate a virtual office, it makes sense to think about implementing employee monitoring right from the get go due to the importance of the role it plays. Just be sure to do so in a way that is transparent and respects the privacy of your employees.