As more professionals work from home, managing remote employees effectively becomes more important. Businesses use lots of strategies to do this. One prominent example involves a popular productivity tool: time tracking software.

In this article, we’ll cover how you can manage remote employees more effectively with a time tracker. We’ll explore a few things you should do to streamline your management efforts and get the most from your team.

How to manage remote employees with a time tracker

Let’s jump straight into our main topic and start looking at a few strategies for managing remote employees.

Monitor productivity

Monitoring productivity is one of the most important steps in managing remote employees. After all, maintaining and boosting productivity is probably one of the primary reasons why you’re interested in this topic. Doing so with a high-quality time tracker can be quite easy. Apps like WebWork offer comprehensive productivity monitoring features that can help you in lots of ways. You’ll be able to track important productivity metrics to ensure that your team is performing their best. You should even be able to detect distractions if your time tracking app can generate detailed reports like WebWork.

Manage time

Time is another important aspect of managing remote employees effectively. Time management will help you ensure your staff members spend their work hours optimally and complete tasks on time. You can experiment with novel strategies like day theming to help your employees perform their best. Of course, time trackers will help you a lot with this. You may use them to track how much time your team spends on specific projects and tasks. This data will then assist you in prioritizing tasks correctly to boost your company’s output.

Track task progress

Tracking the progress of your team’s tasks can give you lots of insights into staff productivity. But, to do this correctly, your tasks must be somewhat equal in size and difficulty. If your professionals frequently work on varying assignments, you can split large ones into small tasks. This will have the added benefit of making larger ones easier to start for your staff. Then, by tracking how quickly progress is made, you will be able to manage remote employees more accurately.

Simplify payroll

Payroll can be quite tedious for businesses, especially those that employ lots of freelance professionals. But, a time tracker can be very useful in this task. By using the tracked time data collected by the app, you can calculate payroll hours with a few clicks. As an example, to calculate payroll in WebWork, you must first set hourly rates for your team and projects. Following this, the software will calculate earned amounts as your staff tracks time. You then have the ability to access this information through WebWork’s reports. As a result, your management team will save lots of time that can be spent elsewhere.

Automate leave management

Leave management is an important part of managing remote employees. Using a time tracker can simplify this process quite a lot. Apart from simply tracking leave time, you can automate leave management with a feature-rich tracker. With an app like WebWork, you may enable your team to request leave in just a few steps. Following this, approving or rejecting requests will take one click. This will not only save you time but also help prevent management errors.

What to look for in a time tracker for managing remote employees

To achieve the best results when managing remote employees, your time tracker needs a few key things.

Functionality

When using a tracker for productivity strategies other than time tracking, functionality plays a vital role. Using an app with more features will help you collect more data and streamline your management efforts further. This will help your company save time in lots of places. You will then be able to use this time in ways that matter, such as to increase your business’s output or the quality of your products.

Scalability

Using a time tracker that can scale as your organization grows is always important. But, it is especially vital if you’re looking to use such apps for managing remote employees. A time tracker that can’t scale well will lead to management challenges as your company grows. Fortunately, most quality solutions on the market can be scaled up pretty much indefinitely.

Challenges of managing remote employees with a time tracker and how to address them

While managing remote employees can be easier with a time tracker, there are a few challenges to be aware of.

Transparency

Implementing time tracking software can raise concerns for some professionals. This is especially true if your remote employees use their own devices to complete their work. As a result, it is important to ensure a high level of transparency when using a time tracker. You should communicate what you will be tracking and keep your staff informed. You should also avoid micromanaging your team members, as this could lead to low professional engagement.

Work-life balance

Continuing on the topic of employee engagement, a healthy work-life balance plays a major role in this. While remote working generally improves this balance by eliminating activities like commuting, it can also do the opposite. For some professionals, working from home will blur the lines between their work and personal time. Fortunately, improving employee work-life balance is quite simple with a time tracker. Using advanced apps like WebWork, you can even disable tracking work hours outside of your staff’s schedule.

Collaboration

Collaboration is another area where remote working can be worse than its traditional counterpart. This stems from lacking communication, which is a common challenge for teams that work from home. But, you can improve remote collaboration by using time tracking software. You should dedicate time for your team to work together to help them share ideas and provide each other with feedback. This will lead to an increase in productivity, enabling your business to grow faster.

Final thoughts

Managing remote employees effectively will help them perform their best. You may do this by using a time tracker, which will provide your organization with many other benefits as well. When choosing a time tracker for this purpose, be sure to implement one that has lots of functionality. This will enable you to track plenty of key productivity metrics and speed up your team’s growth.