Remote work is here to stay and is gaining more and more traction. While numerous employees want to continue to work remotely until retirement, business leaders want to bring them back to the office full-time.
Now that it’s clear that employees want to retain work flexibility, refusing to return to the hustle culture, business leaders need to balance changing employees’ needs with their company’s success, facing a severe recession at the same time.
One of the biggest challenges on your way to embracing remote work is so-called productivity paranoia, the fear that your employees won’t be as productive while working out of your sight.
If you still have this fear despite the numerous studies that have proven quite the opposite you can always rely on the remote tracking app to track your remote activities and offer you insightful data on their performance.
And here are some other effective steps you can take to make sure your remote employees are highly productive and build trustworthy relationships. But first, let’s analyze statistics on this topic.
What Do the Numbers Say?
While employers wonder whether remote employees are productive, statistic shows that they work harder than their office-based counterparts. About 87% of remote workers state that they are more productive than before. At the same time, the number of virtual meetings increased by 153% globally since the Coronavirus pandemic, while the rate of double-booked meetings increased by 46% per employee.
This emphasizes the strain of remote employees multitasking during meetings, i.e, sending emails or answering direct messages, trying to get as many tasks off their plate as possible.
Despite all this, 85% of leaders don’t trust their employees are genuinely productive. This is why many businesses worldwide use remote employee monitoring software to gain objective insight into employee productivity and performance.
But you have to be transparent about the reasons for employee monitoring, and what you want to achieve with this process to get the most out of it. Otherwise, you’ll create a countereffect and lose your employees’ trust, forcing them to fake productivity just to leave a good impression on the track records.
And this is where the productivity paranoia comes in. This is the fear that you’re employees don’t deliver expected outcomes even though various productivity data show the opposite.
You should use this monitoring data and help your employees improve their time management, battle distractions and stop multitasking.
Here are several steps you can take to boost remote employee productivity.
Start Setting Clear Goals
Burnout has become a serious issue as 48% of employees and 53% of leaders complain that they’re drained and overworking. You can battle this serious issue by setting clear priorities and goals.
By telling your employees clearly what their tasks are and what outcomes you expect them to deliver, you’ll help them set priorities and focus on critical tasks rather than menial work.
Having a clear picture of their work and how it affects overall business performance and growth means a lot to employees.
Employees who understand their goals and priorities are 3.95 times more likely to stay at their current positions for at least two years. And when it comes to employee satisfaction, they are 4.5 times more likely to say they’re happy working for their current employer.
Here are steps you can take to set clear goals and priorities for your remote workers
- Set individual and team OKRs that align with the company OKRs
- Identify NO-KRs, i.e. what your team members shouldn’t do to get more meaningful work done, like multitasking or context switching.
Continuous Feedback is the Key to High Retention
If you want to show your employees that you care about their opinion and experience, start asking for regular feedback and listen carefully to what your employees are saying.
Even though employers can learn from timely data-based feedback, only 43% of employees state that their managers ask for feedback on annual basis. This means that 57% of business leaders rarely if ever solicit employee opinions or views about their experience and position in the company.
If you want to stay afloat in times of crisis, you need actionable employee insights to give you a competitive edge.
But feedback is a two-way process. Besides asking for employee feedback, you should make effort and give frequent data-based feedback to employees, focusing on their performance and further professional development. Remote employee tracking data can give you actionable insights into employee performance, helping you to create objective, detailed employee performance. This feedback can help your employees overcome roadblocks and become more productive and engaged, and more importantly celebrate their achievements.
