The global pandemic has led thousands of employees to transit from office workers to remote employees, including those who have never experienced it before. Remote work arrangements are established suddenly, putting both employees and managers to adapt to new work patterns alongside their fears and public health concerns.
Without deliberate endeavour from both management and employees, remote work can leave staff emotions stressed, distracted, isolated, and unmotivated.
Millions of workers now operate from their homes. As of now, there is no certainty that we are going back to our everyday lives any time soon. Companies and small business owners will likely continue to operate remotely after the pandemic.
As beneficial remote work is to company owners, it comes with challenges as well. However, going virtual is a necessity to survive. Managers have to find their way around it. As a result, company owners are facing uncertainty about remote workforce productivity, management and engagement.
What is remote employee productivity?
- Productivity as a habit
Productivity is a way to measure the efficiency of employees concerning time. Now regarding remote work, productivity can be defined as the result of outputs from a unit of remote worker inputs. Productivity is about achieving project goals with minimal effort and less time. Whenever an employee is trying to be productive, he's building a character that allows him to achieve his goals while optimizing time usage, spending valuable time on things that matter.
- Remote Employee Productivity brings about Good Time Management
There is a clear difference between achievement and movement; remote employees creating to-do lists helps you organize your tasks so that you complete them, but they are not tools that draw you close to project big goals. Remote employee productivity can be increased in various ways; choosing the one that suits you and aligning with team goals. As you work towards being productive, you will be able to differentiate between tasks and cut down unnecessary ones and focus on the ones that put you in the path of your goal.
- Productivity in remote employee requires a high level of discipline
Remote employees mostly work on a flexible schedule. They cannot draw a plan that provides long breaks leading them to work on a full shift or more compared to company work programs where there are longer breaks, more time off, and more extended sick leave. A remote employee requires a high level of discipline to meet up with team demands; that's why being productive is a behavioural entity instead of what companies believed to be requirements.
Stanford did a survey, 500 employees of an experimental company were split into two, some working remotely while the other half works in offices. It was discovered that those working from home had increased productivity than those working in offices.
Why remote employee productivity?
- Minimize cost
There are many reasons why employers focused on the productivity of remote employees. Since remote employees do not require office space and resources in the company, they help minimize operational costs. Research has proved that remote workers are highly productive. Distance is not a challenge when it comes to remote employees; the best of employees can work from various locations with different time zones.
- Enhanced Professional Engagement
Employees can also benefit in several ways by working from their homes. Surprisingly, remote employees have greater professional collaboration and improved productivity. They are protected from usual office distractions and often enjoy a flexible work schedule; this is why most remote employees deliver results before the deadline. For better effectiveness of employees, managers should structure a work plan that enables employees to balance their profession with their personal life, and it helps maintain focus to achieve goals.
- Organization of tasks
A survey done by Airtasker revealed thirty percent of remote employees have a to-do list that helps organize daily tasks in order of priority; workers' productivity is enhanced, and results are delivered before the deadline. Remote employees should learn to pen down their tasks rather than jumping from one task to another—set meetings at intervals where you discuss with your team essential tasks to help you track your progress.
How to measure remote employee productivity?
Companies are changing the way work is being done by transiting to remote work; so many workers are doing this for the first time, and this could be challenging. There are distractions when you are working from home, which include attending to family matters, unworkable environment. It is crucial to monitor their productivities and get them back on track. There are several metrics we can use to measure the input of an employee relative to their output. Here we discuss three metrics of measuring remote employee productivity.
- Increase or decrease in call volumes
Metric: number of calls made within a specific period.
Formula: Difference between calls made before and after a change of task within a given task
Call volumes are very useful in monitoring the productivity of customer service management and sales teams. you can get a brief of such data on any customer-relationship management (CRM) dashboards that give information on calls made by team member
Call targets should be set daily, weekly, and monthly. If all customer services representative queries are resolved within the specified time, then remote work is suitable for your business.
If call volumes are declining by the day, managers need to review what work has been done by remote employees and made appropriate corrections.
- Customer Satisfaction rate
Metric: The measure the quality of service offered by a remote employee
Formula: Dividing the positive feedback by the total number of responses and multiply by 100
The customer satisfaction metric is used to drive data based on survey results. It helps gather the number of negative feedback from clients and evaluate the quality of your work. While working from your home, organizations send weekly or monthly surveys to clients to give their opinion about the services offered.
- Weekly sprint completion rate
Metric: Amount of work done in a week
Formula: Difference between completed work before and after interference in a specific sprint cycle.
Monitoring tasks done by a remote employee can be used to measure remote employee productivity. Tasks are divided into sprints, where each task has a specific time for completion.
As COVID-19 crisis continues, we can see how effective remote employees can be utilized in the business of the day. Investing in remote employees' productivity can be considered a profitable one as it helps companies reach milestones in a shorter time.