The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a new world order where most companies are now offering remote working opportunities to their employees. While it provides benefits like cost savings on office space, it does come with its own set of challenges.

The biggest challenge that companies face is struggling to track and measure their remote employees’ performance effectively.

So, what can you do to track and measure your remote employees’ performance?

That’s what this post is all about. Read this post to learn five effective remote working tips to track and measure your remote employees’ performance the right way.

Excited to learn more?

Let’s get started.

1. Assign Clear Roles and Make People Accountable

One of the best ways to ensure that everyone in your team remains productive is to set clear roles and responsibilities. If five people are working on a project, each should be very clear about which part of the project they are responsible for and exactly what they need to deliver.

Making a clear scope for each project is a good way to ensure that. It ensures that the project work is divided into clear tasks, estimated time for completion of each, and who is responsible for each.

You can use tried-and-tested templates to create a project plan or scope, to make your job easier. You can even create your own template for creating comprehensive scope documents.

Once you start doing this, when anything goes wrong, you will know exactly who should be held accountable. Also, if projects are completed on time, according to the scope, then you’ll know that the team is performing well, collectively.

2. Set Clearly-Defined KPIs to Measure Performance

Setting clear performance measurement KPIs is just as important for employees working from the office and it is for remote working employees. Most organizations have a narrow view and place the most importance on the number of hours an employee spends on work.

That, however, is far from being a good measure of performance. An employee’s performance should be measured by the work done, rather than the hours spent working. In fact, an efficient employee will ideally spend fewer hours finishing a task than an inefficient one.

So, think about the right KPIs for each role in your organization, from the perspective of what work they are expected to deliver. Here are some examples of relevant KPIs for different roles:

• Content writer: Word count and quality of writing
• Sales executive: Number of clients acquired, sales generated, etc.
• Instagrammer Executive:  Instagram marketing, campaigning designing and implementation.
• Customer service executive: Number of calls answered, average time on call, customer feedback, etc.

These KPIs will and should differ for each role within your organization if you want to measure remote employees’ performance effectively.

In instances where it’s challenging to define KPIs to measure performance, get creative. For example, the team at Solitaired used self-reported productivity and employee engagement scores to measure remote work performance.

3. Use the Right Remote Working Tools

One of the key challenges that remote working poses is the difficulty in tracking each employee’s work and time. To overcome various remote work challenges, you need to invest in good team collaboration, time-tracking, and project management tools.

Team collaboration tools like Slack can help you keep track of when each employee logged in, when they completed a project, how long they were on a break, and more. You can integrate this with time-tracking tools, project management tools or an online attendance tracker to get the most out of it.

It is essential to have a good time-tracking tool for your remote employees, preferably one that can show who is online at any given time. Specifically, this helps make sure that no one uses remote work as an opportunity to slack and spend their working hours on work.

Project management tools can make your project workflow smooth by showing exactly who is responsible for what and what the level of progress is on each task.

One note of caution though:

Do not resort to micromanagement or use time tracking as the only way to measure performance. Remember, these tools are just to keep things organized, but actual performance depends on a lot of other factors than just time.

4. Set Daily or Weekly Goals and Deadlines

This is one of the best ways to track and measure remote employee performance. It is simple and effective. All you have to do is set short-term goals and make sure that each employee delivers on those goals and meets deadlines.

If they do not, then you need to look into the reasons for that. If they deliver the required amount of work within the given time frame, then things are good.

Simple, isn’t it?

This is something you should do, in addition to everything else. It can act as your first alert in case an employee is not performing well and fails to deliver on time.

5. Maintain Transparency

The most important thing to take into consideration when measuring employee performance is to ensure that everyone is on the same page. That is why it is important to disclose all performance measurement KPIs to each employee and create clear guidelines and write them in a good format for your remote employees.

Make sure that your employees know what is expected of them and provide them with the necessary tools to track their own performance on those KPIs. If there are any subjective parameters that you consider, then disclose those as well.

If an employee is not performing well, they should be given enough chances to improve rather than just being informed about issues during an annual appraisal. You can also train your employees and provide them with the necessary tools to upskill and improve their performance.

Conclusion

One of the biggest threats of remote working for any organization is not being able to track and measure remote employee performance. However, this is a challenge that you can easily overcome simply by following the tips given in this post.

Use these tips to effectively track and measure the performance of your remote working employees the right way.

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