How to Use Employee Productivity Tracker Tools to Drive Remote Business

Managing an offsite business is a challenge in and of itself, but keeping your staff working productively and efficiently doesn’t have to be.

Employee productivity tracker tools are becoming an essential part of the remote workplace, and this revolutionary technology is revamping time-keeping and project management as we’ve known it.

Understanding how your employees are spending their time online, wherever they are, is critical for measuring ROI, planning project timelines, and maximizing your operational budget. 

Read on to learn how to use employee productivity tracker tools to drive remote business growth and profitability.

How do you track employee productivity?

Those who have been thrown into the newly constructed remote work majority might be struggling with the gray areas of employee timekeeping and work-life balance. Turning your home into your office comes with a wide range of conditions, including distractions that aren’t present in brick-and-mortar workplaces.

If you want to understand how your employees are working at home, it’s important to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to timekeeping, metrics tracking, output, and revenue generation. 

All departments, from sales to accounting, should adhere to a set of goals that aligns with both the needs of the company AND the needs of the staff. While maintaining a high level of privacy and flexibility, remote workers should also be prepared to show how they’ve been handling tasks while on the clock. 

Employee productivity trackers work by providing a birds-eye view of each employee’s unique activity on a conditional basis. By integrating an employee monitoring program into your company’s suite of devices, you can view employee behaviors from any physical location. 

Some things that you can view using employee productivity software can include:

• Browsing history
• Login and logout tracking
• Session duration
• Idle time
• Downloads/USB insertion

Not only is productivity software essential for ensuring that all of your workers are spending their paid time effectively, but it’s also a great way to reinforce your company’s data security plan. 

By limiting and monitoring actions like site visits and downloads, you can provide staff and management with another layer of protection against cyberthreats such as:

• Phishing
• Ransomware
• Viruses and malware
• Identity theft

Protecting your employee’s information and your proprietary company information is easier than ever with programs such as productivity tracking software. Plus, businesses around the world can save more than $400 billion in lost revenue by reducing time card theft with productivity management software.

Why should you monitor employee workflows?

How your employees ideate, organize, and execute tasks can also have a heavy impact on how much money and time goes back into your project management structure. Workflows built through online automation software can easily reduce downtime, approval roadblocks, and busy work throughout various departments and specializations. 

From human resources to sales, there is a wide range of repetitive but necessary tasks that can be simplified via automation. Common tasks that are ideal for workflow automation can include:

• CRM commands
• Email drip campaigns
• Invoicing, payroll, and accounting management
• Reporting and analytics
• Behavioral data
• Inventory management
• Lifecycle tracking

To determine where you can reorganize your workplace structure using productivity tracker tools and task automation, consider all of the ways your teams are organizing their workdays. 

Collaborate and communicate with your onsite and remote teams to get employee feedback on tasks that they would like to automate, as well as projects they’d like to focus more time on in return.

Can employee monitoring programs affect employee productivity?

In general, managers have played the role of ensuring that employees are spending their time wisely while at work. But, as more and more businesses have adopted a work from home model, there has been an influx in technological solutions for effectively monitoring work time.

Not only are employers benefiting from the added transparency, but workers are able to use the same tools to manage their workloads more effectively. 

Productivity tracking software also includes a variety of task management features to help employees better use every minute of their workdays. 

From project automation to redundancy reduction, many companies are using this system to:

• Reduce overlap across departments
• Outsource tasks to maximize budget
• Lower overhead and operational costs
• Speed up project timelines 
• Eliminate busywork

While these systems are constantly monitoring employee data, they’re also helping workers to develop favorable habits that benefit themselves and the company at large. Maintaining work-life balance, while ensuring peak productivity, is essential for maintaining a profitable and harmonious workplace.

Understanding how workers are spending their time online can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to determine where labor, effort, and resources can be better reallocated to meet the needs of the company and all employees.

What is the best way to measure employee productivity?

Using a computer monitoring program like a productivity tracker is seamless, cost-effective, and can easily be integrated into your current tech systems. But, transparency and clear communication is essential for any type of new software or program rollout.

Since employees are often using their own devices to complete company work, this is one aspect for businesses to address if they want to use a comprehensive monitoring system. While project management platforms can help with task assigning and completion metrics, there is a limited amount of data provided by these online programs. Instead, utilizing company-owned devices for remote and onsite work is the best way to gain the most data about your employees while the program is simply running in the background. 

Adding productivity tracking software to your suite of corporate devices allows you to simplify data reporting and activity management in a few key ways. 

Using an employee productivity tracker to drive remote business depends significantly on these core data points:

• Determine baseline activity/productivity metrics
• Define how tasks will be measured
• Set clear goals and timelines
• Utilize surveys and feedback generation for improvement
• Identify sales targets and profitability metrics
• Obtain regular updates

From reducing instances of time theft to producing quantifiable objectives that all employees can meet, productivity tracking is more than a way to reduce the amount of time (and energy) you spend on remote management and HR tasks.

How can you track employee productivity at home?

Staff members have taken to their home offices in droves, and managers are no different. But, eliminating the physical presence of a manager or foreman changes the way many businesses track and analyze productivity metrics.

There are a variety of creative ways to supplement the built-in analytics and reporting that’s included in your tool of choice. From video conferencing to intermittent check-ins, it’s important to ensure that everyone is on the same page and aware of expectations when it comes to giving updates.

Many managers opt for regular video meetings to connect with staff and boost morale. Not online is this a great way to simulate water cooler talk and office socializing, but it’s also a great way to see how everyone is handling their respective tasks.

Having this subjective information, in collaboration with the data collected by their online devices, are the magic mixture for empathetic and pragmatic personnel management.

Instead of relying on physical timekeeping and good faith, this type of tracking software is essential for ensuring that off-site workers are spending their time efficiently and effectively.

Consider these benefits to maximize the value of your enterprise, while reducing operational costs at the same time. These are just a few ways to boost remote business profitability with employee productivity tracker tools.