Due to the pandemic situation, many companies had to resort to permanent remote work, which also led to the need for remote work control by employers—an alternative for which very few were prepared.
Allowing employees to work remotely was initially thought to decrease productivity and efficiency, but thanks to digital transformation, the opposite was demonstrated. However, new challenges arose, and the need for effective tools and strategies for managing remote work intensified.
For executives, the challenge is greater; in addition to learning to manage decentralized teams in terms of communication and connectivity, they need to control each employee’s performance and productivity and find a way to obtain objective data about their performance without resorting to spy systems that violate workers’ privacy, as they must comply with Royal Decree-Law 28/2020: the telework law, in force since September 2020.
The Telework Law
The telework law encompasses all the conditions, labor duties, and fundamental rights that employees have during this remote work mode; among these are the right to privacy and data protection, the right to digital disconnection, and the right to flexible scheduling.
Given the current challenging and necessary context, we want to teach you how to adequately control remote work, what guidelines to follow, and what solution is the most appropriate; one that will guarantee objective and accurate data about your team’s performance, as well as compliance with the telework law and respect for workers’ rights described herein.
Before the health emergency, companies implementing telework initiatives offered their employees the possibility to telework one day a week. Currently, many have 100% of their team working remotely for an indefinite period, while others have opted to adapt to a hybrid work model, allowing office work one or two days a week and remote work the remaining days, making it necessary to establish some form of remote work control.
Guidelines for Adequately Telework control
To face the mentioned challenges and ensure the proper functioning of the company, as well as compliance with the legal framework, guidelines must be defined that allow the control of remote work.
Establish a Remote Work Control Agreement
The recent telework law specified a series of necessary requirements to establish an effective remote work agreement. This must be signed by the employer and the employee.
Provide Employees with the Necessary Tools
The company must provide all employees with the necessary technological tools, both physical and digital, to perform their remote work without limitations or management issues.
Define Clear Objectives
It’s not only about defining a fixed work schedule but ensuring that each team member understands what tasks they must perform and what the priorities are. Defining a clear, and above all, realistic goal is essential to make the process easier and more effective.
Establish Follow-up Meetings
Managers must monitor the different projects and their progress, thoroughly track tasks to efficiently distribute workloads, and identify the achievement of objectives and task deliveries.
Besides email, teams should adopt other powerful communication tools and digital workspaces, such as Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace. This way, it will be possible to effectively and quickly track projects and tasks.
Implement Time Measurement Systems
Solutions dedicated to remote work control are useful for managers and executives; they ensure the proper performance and commitment of the remote worker, and for employees and teams; they help understand how to manage their time and verify their level of compliance with set objectives.
There is remote work software that offers performance indicators necessary to evaluate results and performance. These solutions not only provide productivity indicators but also allow analyzing, through the use of applications, the distribution of time among tasks. Data analysis improves decision-making.
The Most Effective Solution for Remote Work Control
To achieve compliance with the previously described guidelines, it is important to have the appropriate tools for remote work control. Especially when it comes to managing and measuring productive time that affects team performance during remote work. Therefore, it is important for the company to focus on promoting self-management during remote work, thus strengthening trust and commitment, increasing productivity, and promoting the achievement of objectives.
Finding a tool or control software that covers all or most of the company’s needs is not an easy task, and it becomes a bit more difficult when aware of the challenges that remote work imposes. Therefore, before investing in different tools, it is essential to analyze the market to find the best solution.
Performance Management Software
With the performance management software that measures remote work productivity, WorkMeter offers an “all-in-one” system that improves team monitoring, analyzes results, and provides an optimal employee experience, balancing workloads, and promoting self-management.
Performance management software makes it possible to control remote work through productivity and efficiency indicators during each employee’s work development, allowing for understanding and analyzing the time spent on different tasks, as it shows the use of the involved applications without violating employee privacy; it does not take screenshots, spy, or access the content of the work equipment, only analyzes the activity performed and the management of productive time according to previously set rules in the system, thus respecting workers’ right to privacy and guaranteeing data protection.
Performance Management is 100% automatic software, so the data is completely objective and accurate, based on each worker’s activity, regardless of their location.
Reports are generated automatically and in real-time, avoiding the loss of time in manual work and the unconscious human errors generated, allowing the comparison of information related to office work and remote work.
Being 100% cloud-based, data accessibility is possible from any place or device, thanks to secure information storage in the cloud.
Telework Control with Performance Management Software
Adequately controlling remote work involves not only tracking each employee’s performance but also complying with work hour registration. With performance management software, hourly registration is automatic; the system records each employee’s start and end time, as well as their breaks, rest periods, and offline activity. This ensures compliance with the telework law and the work hour control law.
Additionally, it includes a comprehensive vacation and absence manager to efficiently and quickly manage requests, validations, and accounting of absence days.
Regarding digital disconnection and digital health guarantees, performance management software allows creating digital disconnection rules and notifying employees when they reach their daily productivity and activity goal. It is also possible to know, in real-time, if employees are connected, available, or busy, for example, in a video conference. Depending on their availability, you can contact them by phone, video conference, or email. Thus complying with the right to digital disconnection described in the telework law and relevant to worker well-being.
Performance management software is very comprehensive, allowing remote work control and promoting the self-management of productive time, increasing both team and business performance.
Remote work projects improve their results when employees and their managers have performance measurement and monitoring solutions.
