As an outcome of the coronavirus pandemic, telework has become mandatory. It is now clear more than ever that remote work can play a critical role in sustaining both the national and global economy. However, a relatively small number of US businesses are prepared for the shift. Hence, if your company continues to operate during the quarantine – even if you’ve never regarded telework as a viable option before – you are among a few lucky ones.

In case you have no prior experience in managing remote teams, now it’s high time to find out how to optimize the overall work process and attain superior productivity results with time tracking. Let’s explore this matter step by step:

1. Develop Telework Directives

Create a remote work policy and discuss the rules with your teammates to make sure everyone agrees and follows. A few points to cover in your telework code are

• employee availability and responsiveness requirements,
• productivity measurements,
• and cybersecurity.

Feel free to outline any other relevant employee responsibilities and rights in your policy as well.

2. Educate Employees on How to Perform Productively When at Home

Give recommendations to your employees on how to improve performance outcomes while telecommuting. To help you out with this, we’ve already written a guide to remote work for beginners. There, you can locate a ton of valuable information on methods to organize your home-based workplace, work processes and online team communication.

3. Select the Right Time Tracking Instrument

Choose appropriate tools for remote work management. Don’t try to utilize many different apps simultaneously – this approach will only add more pressure to the lives of already stressed employees. What you need to do is just decide on which software your team will use to communicate, coordinate tasks and track work progress.

Here’s how you can carry out all the 3 of the above activities in actiTIME:

Form a detailed work plan and distribute workloads

To observe whether your team shows any progress when telecommuting, create a work plan and make an exhaustive list of tasks in actiTIME. Then, assign each of these tasks to individual employees to show what they’re expected to work on. To minimize the risk of errors and misunderstanding, attach clear instructions to all assignments. Also, don’t forget to set deadlines and estimates for every objective in the developed plan to make the best use of the organizational time.

Promote performance transparency with task comments

For a more accurate picture of the team’s progress, ask your staff members to not only track their work hours daily but also add comments on tasks they’re engaged in. Encourage them to specify which part of the job is already completed, what’s yet to be done and which problems they’ve encountered on the way. As a result of such a task breakdown practice, you will increase employees’ accountability and gain a chance to detect factors hindering productivity promptly.

Coordinate tasks among employees

Instruct your employees to overview workflows and general project progress on the Kanban board and pass assignments to one another by switching their statuses. When assigning tasks to others, your teammates may add notes to clarify the essential points their colleagues should consider when taking over the job. In this way, the team will avoid communication failures and save precious time.

Run daily reports to inform decision making

actiTIME has a plethora of valuable reporting features that can be applied to evaluate different aspects of business and team performance:

• With the Time Track in Detail report, you can review the whole of the time tracking data submitted by your employees and see all of their comments. As an outcome, you will form a comprehensive picture of the work progress.
• If you want to control project costs more efficiently, assume running the Cost of Work report. With its aid, you’ll see the total cost of conducted works based on subordinates’ hourly rates.
• To assess employees’ performance efficiency and make sure they complete tasks on schedule, utilize the Estimated vs. Actual Time report. It will let you understand if your team experiences some productivity issues or whether your approach to task estimation requires improvement.

4. Advance Your Leave and Schedule Management Practices

It is hard to maintain performance transparency when you struggle to monitor who is absent from the workplace and why. An efficient tool for leave and schedule monitoring can assist you in resolving this problem, and we happen to have an excellent solution for you – actiPLANS. We’ve made a thorough review of ways you can apply this piece of software to make your leave management system more accurate and responsive to the present-day epidemic situation.

Also, actiPLANS mobile app displays which members of your team are absent and why in a straightforward chart. By using it, you’ll gain more clarity about employees’ availability and, as a consequence, your company’s current performance capacity. Besides, it will help your subordinates manage day-to-day communication and task coordination during the telework period much better.