When implemented properly using ActivTrak’s open, transparent and collaborative approach, remote work offers many advantages to employees and employers alike. However, it can be challenging for managers to unlock these advantages as they try to make the transition from the coronavirus pandemic-era remote work to a long-term post-pandemic working model.
One of the best ways to make that transformation effective is to implement remote workforce technology into your workplace to maximize productivity across your remote teams, no matter their locations or time zones. Read on to learn how you can leverage remote workforce technology to prepare for the remote-driven future using the ActivTrak approach.
What is remote workforce analytics technology?
Remote workforce analytics software collects and analyzes data about employee productivity to help you understand how your remote team members work. It consists of three main components:
- A uniquely coded agent runs in the background, collecting data on your employees’ work and executing responses to user activity. The agent isn’t a time-tracking, screen recording or keystroke logging tool. Instead, it senses keyboard and mouse movement in the active windows on your employees’ computers.
- A database aggregates the data collected by the agent. It produces team and user benchmarks to establish activity and productivity baselines.
- A software application analyzes the data collected by the agent and aggregated by the database to deliver insights using dashboards and reports. This visualization makes it easier to parse and understand how your remote employees are working.
Together these three elements give you the insights you need to understand how your remote employees work and to make targeted interventions to help them work wiser.
Benefits of remote workforce technology
Remote workforce technology is essential to improve work-from-home productivity. With a tool like ActivTrak that gathers user activity data directly from the source and analyzes employee productivity metrics, managers can help remote workers get clear insights into their productivity levels and identify specific areas for improvement. By using the metrics as a way to support (and never micromanage) remote employees, managers can also empower team members to take ownership of their performance data to improve their employee experience as well as their productivity.
Remote workforce technology also helps you better understand which processes are and aren’t working. From small businesses to big enterprises, there’s always room for improvement. Remote workforce technology can help you pinpoint inefficient workflows and isolate the tools that are causing distractions so you can make changes that improve productivity across teams.
Even more importantly, remote workforce technology can give you insights into which employees are juggling extra heavy workloads and working long hours. Employee burnout, overwork, and an uneven work-life balance are common obstacles that arise in a remote work environment. Remote workforce technology lets you easily compare workloads across teams to ensure responsibilities are distributed evenly, and this software offers additional metrics and insights that go far beyond what you might learn from time-tracking or relying on employees to raise their hands for help.
Challenges of remote workforce technology
These benefits notwithstanding, there are a few challenges to keep in mind with remote workforce tech tools. For example, some remote workforce technology can be hard to use and challenging implementations that require the involvement of your IT team can prove cumbersome. Some tools only deliver metrics without telling you what to do with that data, leaving you without the insights you need to drive real change. Also, with any employee monitoring software, there’s always the question of trust with your team members. Remote workforce technology can only work if you get employee buy-in and take an open, transparent, and collaborative approach to employee monitoring.
The best way to achieve all these benefits and avoid the challenges that can arise is by taking the ActivTrak approach to remote workforce technology.
ActivTrak’s approach leverages analytics to better support employees, whether they’re remote workers or based in a standard office workspace. Collecting relevant metrics is the best, most accurate way to understand how remote employees work. Data should only be gathered to generate valuable insights and support a culture of continuous improvement. The focus should always be on helping employees work wiser, not spying on them. All of your monitoring should be in pursuit of that goal.
Employee privacy and transparency are also key to our approach. It’s natural for some remote workers to feel concerned about their privacy when they hear that their employer will be implementing employee monitoring tools and technologies. That’s why our software never uses keystroke logging, screen recording, or any other practice that would violate employee privacy — it’s our top priority.
Monitoring and tracking employee performance should be used to help your remote employees work better so they can succeed. Encouraging remote workers to take ownership of the results of your monitoring can help them feel included in the experience and show that your aim is to provide insight, not oversight.
Top remote workforce technology tools
The best tools to support remote work can be separated into four categories:
Communication and collaboration tools
Remote teams need tools to ensure clear communication and improve collaboration for everyone. These include video conferencing software for video calls, instant messaging, email systems and file-sharing and editing tools. It’s best to find cloud-based options that work across platforms so employees can work seamlessly across devices.
Popular communication and collaboration options that include video conferencing tools for remote work include:
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Business
- Slack
Productivity and project management software
Keeping team members on-track and gaining visibility into where projects are is important for remote teams. Productivity tools like ActivTrak that show when and where employees are working build trust for managers that employees are on-task. Project management software shows team members who’s working on what, when projects are due, and what’s holding projects back. Automated tools also keep teams in touch with each other so everyone is on the same page without wasting time digging into progress.
Common project management tools and productivity software that support remote workforces include:
- Asana
- Monday.com
- Trello
- ActivTrak
Workforce analytics and performance monitoring
Managers and supervisors need insight into how remote workers are doing. At the same time, employees who work from home need to understand how their performance stacks up against organizational and personal goals. Leadership also needs a way to gauge how individuals are doing to provide feedback, training and development opportunities. While time-tracking tools provide some idea of how much time employees are logging, workforce analytics software goes deeper to show exactly how time is spent and which tools enhance performance.
Some workforce analytics and performance monitoring tools to consider include:
- ActivTrak
- UKG
- Time Doctor
Security and compliance solutions
Cybersecurity and data privacy are top concerns for organizations today, especially for teams that work from home. Employees that log in using public WiFi networks can create major risks for company proprietary data and their own privacy. IT teams need to be able to push security updates and cybersecurity functions to remote workers’ devices to safeguard company and client data. Employees also need a way to safeguard their login details through trustworthy password managers.
The top security software for remote workplaces include:
- Norton
- McAfee
- Nord VPN
- NordPass
- 1 Password
Must-have remote workplace technology features
To ensure the cost-effectiveness of your remote working technologies, it’s best to look for software that includes the following features:
- User-friendly interface and integration: Remote employees need to be able to start using software without a high learning curve. They also need the software to integrate with other programs and to function across device types.
- Cloud accessibility: Because remote workers log in from various locations, they need to be able to access company programs from anywhere. Cloud-based applications allow for real-time collaboration for all employees, regardless of their geographic locations.
- Automation and AI assistance: Tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation save remote workers time by doing repetitive tasks for them.
- Security and encryption: Remote workforce software needs to have native features that prioritize data security for company, client and employee data, including encryption and authentication.
- Real-time analytics and reporting: Remote team members need insight into company priorities and productivity metrics in real time to make changes or address issues quickly.
- Scalability and customization: The right remote workplace technology will be ready to grow as your company does, whether you’re increasing headcount or adding new products or services. You should also be able to customize the software to your business processes and industry.
How to choose remote workforce technology
Even if you know how to take the right approach to remote work monitoring, you’ll need the right tools to be successful. When choosing your remote workforce technology, you should look for a solution that offers:
- Productivity reports: Identify the patterns that can fuel success using clear reports that let you drill down into the data.
- Workload management insights: Get insights across remote workers, workflows, and tech tools to understand workload balance, identify employees at risk of burnout, and better support healthy work habits.
- Application and website usage metrics: See which apps are being used effectively and which aren’t. From video conferencing apps like Zoom to instant messaging apps like Slack and other general project management tools, there are a lot of apps and websites that are essential to the success of remote or hybrid work. Seeing how they’re used can help you identify sources of distraction, training gaps, and underutilized tools so you can enable employees and maximize return on your technology investments.
- Activity classification: Classify apps and websites as productive or unproductive to easily assess productivity trends and pinpoint sources of distraction.
- Personal insights: Let remote workers see the results of monitoring for themselves so they can find ways to improve focus, productivity, and work-life balance on their own without a manager’s intervention.
- Benchmarks and goals: Set remote workforce productivity benchmarks based on real-time and historical data and then track your remote teams’ progress towards them.
ActivTrak’s Remote Workforce software offers all of these features and more to help remote teams thrive.
Remote workforce technology best practices for maximizing productivity
Just because you’ve purchased and implemented the best remote workforce technology doesn’t mean it will work perfectly. To set yourself up for success, follow these best practices to maximize productivity:
- Create clear training pathways for new employee onboarding and whenever a new technology is introduced. Offer self-serve training tutorials and customer support options to empower remote employees to understand and use remote tools to their full potential.
- Communicate clearly with employees about the benefits of remote technology and how it’s supposed to be used. This helps gain buy-in from employees to use technology correctly while preventing abuse.
- With productivity monitoring software, it’s important to be open with remote employees about what you’re monitoring and why. Support open communication about the process and get employee buy-in by explaining how it benefits them. Encourage remote workers to take ownership of the results of productivity monitoring. Ask the right questions. Remote workforce technology should answer the question, “How do you work?” rather than, “Are you working?”
- Adapt your technology as needed. Productivity and performance monitoring software shows you when technology is hindering productivity or being used incorrectly so your team can take steps to change it. Employees should also have ways to give feedback on technology, including sharing tips on how to improve productivity with tools.
Remote workforce technology in action
What does remote workforce technology look like in practice? We worked with SiteTech Systems, a diversified consulting, research, and analytics company serving banks, credit unions, and government entities to help them make a smooth transition to remote work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
As a consultancy, time tracking and staying on top of employee productivity is essential for the team at SiteTech Systems. That’s true whether team members are working out of a home office full-time or in-office. Once the company switched to remote work following the pandemic, they found themselves struggling to stay on top of productivity beyond employees submitting time tracking logs remotely.
ActivTrak helped SiteTech Systems reconcile the remote time tracking logs of all its employees and gave leadership the insight necessary to drill down onto the collected productivity data to add more color to the information. As Trevor Greene explains, “There’s a lot of variance in the work we do, so gleaning that additional context isn’t easy — and was a huge bonus. ActivTrak checked all the boxes we needed and many more.” With that context, the SiteTech Systems team unlocked the data-driven insights they needed to boost productivity across their remote teams.
“We’ve got a very young workforce. Remote work is what they like and want — and they’re pretty good at it,” Greene notes. “I’m 100% confident that if we decide to embrace remote work on a more permanent basis that we’ll be able to do so first and foremost because of ActivTrak.”
Ready to learn more about ActivTrak’s remote workforce technology?
Remote work is here to stay, and companies that adopt the right remote workforce technology policies will future-proof their companies and gain a competitive advantage. Using the right technology that’s designed to increase productivity and efficiency for remote workers increases profitability and employee well-being.
ActivTrak helps increase workplace productivity by 20% on average, increasing employee hours by 25% while lowering costs 18%. Over 9,500 customers of all sizes trust ActivTrak to collect and analyze workforce data, enhance productivity management, set compliance alarms and understand technology usage in their organizations. Get in touch today to learn more about how ActivTrak can be your flagship remote technology.