A few decades ago, working a job at home was a dream that was too good to be true. Nowadays, there are jobs available for people of various degrees of skill in a myriad of industries around the world. Work at home jobs include telesales, writing, web design, computer programming, phone support, email support, and many other interesting opportunities for people to cultivate skills in careers that they enjoy.
Unfortunately, there are some challenges for the employer. In order to maximize profits and create better opportunities for employees, employers need to find a way to maintain trust and accountability in their workers.
Remote work variations
Before we continue to address the concerns of maintaining accountability for employees, let’s go over what it means to work remotely. Working remotely for a company could include a variety of situations. The employee might still be required to attend training sessions at company headquarters or to come to work at a physical location for some portion of the week.
More extreme situations of working remotely allow the employee to work at their home or office during their entire time with the company. Employees might have the ability to set up their own hours, or the hours might be mandated by the company.
Most situations of employment that involve remote work opportunities will require that the employee has access to a high-speed internet connection, and the employee will need to have access to sophisticated technology to accomplish the work required by the company. Some of these needs might be provided by the company, but majority of independent contractors are accustomed to providing their own resources to complete all the tasks that are asked of them by the company.
Can you trust remote employees?
When you’re not able to monitor an individual daily, it might be difficult to believe that they are allocating their time properly and working effectively. However, there are some ways to help monitor employees. Keeping tabs on their progress will help you trust the people that are working remotely and will keep employees focused on performing well at their duties.
Keeping track of remote employees
In order to establish trust and accountability in employees, many of today’s modern managers make use of sophisticated technology. Tools have been developed to help track the progress of the work being done by employees in various industries. These tools allow managers to see how employees are spending the time that is being billed to the company.
If an employee is not performing well at their work, they may be asked to make adjustments to their process. Managers should speak to employees in the same manner that they would address issues with performance in an office setting. Employees deserve to know that their performance is being monitored, and they should be made aware of the times that the quality of their performance is suffering.
Managers and other company officials use software to track the time that employees spend on particular assignments, and they may make daily check-ins with employees about their performance. If an employee continues to perform poorly at assignments, they may be reassigned, trained on better work procedures, or terminated from future assignments.
Each situation is different, so managers should note how some employees perform better with less interaction. If an employee is performing well at their assignments, they should be commended for their good work, and the employee should be promoted to better assignments when the work is available.
E-learning
In addition to keeping track of employees by monitoring the time they spend on assignments and checking in on employees when they need to improve their performance, employers should take stock in the value of providing training to their employees.
Providing regular training will keep employees focused on the goals that are important to the company for which they are working, and employees will be made aware of the procedures that are important to improving their performance.
Although providing regular training is important to maintaining high performance levels, training opportunities shouldn’t require employees to meet at a physical location. Since employees do the majority of their work online, employers must be willing to place their trust in e-learning solutions to communicate training instructions to their employees.
Future of accountability
As more people are able to earn a living by working from home, the ability to find trust in employees must be augmented as well. Consequently, the ways of tracking employee productivity have become more effective. Additionally, companies must implement e-learning programs to ensure remote employees are aware of the correct protocol.