#RemoteWorkplace

[usnewsper-business]

Report: Many Companies unprepared for remote work, impacting productivity #Productivity #Remotework #remoteworking #remoteworkplace #Workfromhome

[hrtechcube1]

Brand marketing success depends on positive workplace experiences

The Appspace 2023 Workplace experience trends & insights report identified several opportunities for organizations to enhance employee connectivity. Respondents provided valuable insights into their workplace expectations and needs. Employees want improved processes for receiving organization-wide updates and more opportunities to connect with peers.

The research shows many organizations also need to do a better job helping their teams work collaboratively, whether they’re working from the traditional office, home office, or other locations.

Collaborative technology is often the missing piece to address these challenges. Business leaders who use collaborative technologies over outdated systems will improve communication across departments and workplace environments. Using employee apps can facilitate quick and easy collaboration and provide a platform for workplace announcements, videos, and other content types to keep both onsite and remoteworkplace announcements, videos, and other content types to keep on-site and remote employees aligned and engaged.

Employee retention is more likely to decline when remote and hybrid workers feel out of the loop. Employee apps allow teams to organize their files better and make it easier for all workers to find and share knowledge.

[mikefredroberts]

How to find lucrative work from home?

Looking for work from home has become one of the most requested activities. But not all offers are good. 🤔 Here are some ideas so you can find the best job and generate income from your own home.😃 

Credits: @jerryjhlee

[humanengineers]

Top Challenges To Solve Before Transitioning to a Remote Workplace By | Ben Eubanks | Human Resources Professional, Speaker, and Blogger Many companies are redesigning their workplaces so that employees can work from home most or all of the time. Not only does this method alleviate health concerns, but it also saves time, cuts down on office expenses, and reduces employee commutes. If you’re thinking about having your employees work remotely for the long term, figure out solutions to these challenges. Remote Communication When you’re at work, it’s easy to ask employees a question or give instructions; you just visit their offices or cubicles and have a conversation. When you’re working remotely, though, communicating with employees always takes more time. Thankfully, there are many technological solutions available. You just have to take the time to investigate their features properly so you receive the most benefits. One technical issue with transitioning to a remote work staff is that your employees’ phones are at work. The solution is not m... https://human-engineers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/GC-1-9.jpg https://human-engineers.com/top-challenges-to-solve-before-transitioning-to-a-remote-workplace/?feed_id=10817&_unique_id=60eeccb064f6d https://human-engineers.com/top-challenges-to-solve-before-transitioning-to-a-remote-workplace/?feed_id=10817&_unique_id=60eeccb064f6d

[shoury01]

THE FIVE LEVELS OF REMOTE WORK

COVID-19 has forced companies the world over to enact — or create — remote working protocols. The likes of Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all told their employees some variation of “work from home”. But so too are more traditional organisations across fields such as real estate, accounting and local government. Zoom team-selfies, are slowly polluting Twitter and LinkedIn feeds.

 But like most things worth doing, there are different levels of proficiency and sophistication to scale. Many newly-remote workers seem to conflate simply downloading Zoom, Slack, and having access to email with having this remote working thing sorted out.

But having a ball and a bat does not make you a Cricketer.

 A Case – Automattic Company.

When it comes to swimming in the deep end of the remote working pool, few companies are doing it better than Automattic — the company behind Wordpress, which powers 35% of all websites on the internet. Automattic has about 1,200 employees scattered across more than 75 countries, speaking 93 languages. It boasts a company valuation of US$3 billion and has made several significant acquisitions such as that of WooCommerce and blogging platform, Tumblr. The company does not have an office, with its employees collaborating almost exclusively online. 

Automattic’s founder, Matt Mullenweg (hence the “double t” in the company’s name) recently appeared on a popular podcast to talk on what he calls the five levels of distributed teams (he prefers ‘distributed’ to ‘remote’ because the latter implies that there is still a central place of work). Encouragingly Mullenweg’s sentiments echo the fact that the tools are only as good as how you use them. In fact, abuse of tools can actually make us less productive.

The Five Levels of Distributed Teams

Level 1: Non-Deliberate Action

Nothing deliberate has been done by the company to support remote work, but employees can still keep the ball rolling somewhat if they are at home for a day. They have access to their smartphone, and email. Perhaps they dial in to a few meetings. But they will put off most things until they’re back in the office and will be a shadow of their office-bound selves. Level 1 is where the overwhelming majority of organisations were prior to the COVID19 outbreak.

Level 2: Recreating the Office Online

This is where most organisations now reside — especially traditional ones. It is where your employees have access to videoconferencing software (eg. Zoom), instant messaging software (eg. Slack) and email, but instead of redesigning work to take advantage of the new medium, teams ultimately end up recreating online, how they work in the office.

This extends to many of the bad habits that permeate the modern office and suppress the ability of knowledge workers to actually think, with..:-

a)      . . . . 10-person video-calls when two people would suffice,

b)      . . . . 60+ interruptions a day — now via Slack and phone calls,

c)      . . . . the sporadic checking of and responding to email more than 70 times a day throughout the day,

d)      . . . . hyper-responsiveness that is expected of all employees, leaving them wired to desktop,

Mullenweg equates lack of redesigning work around the medium. A similar example was with the radio drama of the 1930s, which was essentially the acting out of plays over the airwaves. Adapting the content to the radio medium was not fully considered or appreciated at the time. At Level 2, people are still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases to be subject to what essentially amounts to spyware, with employers installing screen-logging software on their employee machines to ensure compliance.

Level 3: Adapting to the medium

At level 3, organizations start to adapt to and take advantage of the medium. Mullenweg points to shared documents (such as a Google Doc), that is visible to all and updated in real-time during a discussion, so that there is a shared understanding of what is discussed and decided, eliminating the risk of lost in translation errors and time wasted thereafter.

It’s at this stage that companies start to invest in better equipment for their employees as well, such as lighting for video-calls and background noise-canceling microphones. Effective written communication becomes critical the more companies embrace remote work. With an aversion to ‘jumping on calls’ at a whim, and a preference for asynchronous communication (more on that later), most of Automattic’s communications is text-based, and so accurate and timely articulation becomes key. In fact, Mullenweg says that most of the company’s hiring is performed via text as opposed to candidate phone or vide calls.

When it comes to meetings:

a)      Only hold a meeting if it is absolutely necessary and the same outcomes cannot be reached via a quick ad-hoc conversation, phone call, email, text or instant message.

b)      Set the meeting to 15 minutes by default, and only make it longer if absolutely necessary (the shorter the meeting, the more succinct you will have to be, and the less time there will be for pointless small talk and rambling).

c)      Set a specific agenda and desired outcome going into the meeting.

d)      Invite only ‘must have’ people (unless this is a big Type-1 decision, two people should usually do it with three on the rare occasion).

e)      Agree on next steps, allocate responsible person(s) and set due dates (this is especially important to avoid boomerang meetings).

f)       Never, ever, use a meeting simply to communicate information — that’s what email or IM is for. Many are indeed learning that all those meetings could have in fact been emails.

Level 4: Asynchronous Communication

‘I’ll get to it when it suits me.’ This is the nature of asynchronous communication. The reality is that most things do not require an immediate response. For most things, a one-way email or instant message should do the job, with the recipient responding when it suits them. If something really is urgent, then the mode of communication should reflect that. Pick up the phone, or tap that person on the shoulder, but only if it is truly urgent.

Aside from the obvious and massive benefit of giving knowledge workers time to think, create and get into the flow state (a psychological state whereby we are up to five times more productive according to McKinsey), but asynchronous communication predisposes people to making better decisions. If you want to cut emotion out of the equation, increase your response time. Giving people time to think between question and response, rather than fall victim to blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in a meeting or when tapped on the shoulders, delivers a compound benefit to the organization over time.

In order to avoid tennis games and duplication of effort, ensure that asynchronous messages:

a)      provide sufficient background detail, where necessary provide clear action item(s) and outcome(s) required.

b)      provide a due date

c)      provide a path of recourse if the recipient is unable to meet your requirements.

For example:

“Hey Sunil. Attached is the incorporation document for our new spin-off company. Please sign the document where requested and send it back to me by 4 pm this Friday. If you have any concerns, give me a call on 555 1983.”

Globally distributed teams, who work asynchronously, and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.

Awaken the Night Owls

Science suggests that our preferred sleeping patterns — our chronotypes — are programmed at birth. People are either night owls or early birds. Several studies have found that about 30 to 40 per cent of the population are night owls, which means that the modern 9-to-5 workday is sabotaging the creative and intellectual efforts of almost half the workforce. Studies show that while early risers are more alert in the morning, night owls show stronger focus and longer attention spans 10 hours after waking than their early-bird compatriots.

Level 5: ‘Nirvana’

This is where your distributed team works better than any in-person team ever could. Mullenweg equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organization’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned.

The disadvantages:

Three big disadvantages or concerns that face newly remote teams, and how to counter them, can be found below:

1)      Team bonding and building

a)      Instead of telling their employees to be at the office 11 months a year, and have 4 weeks off, the script gets flipped. Employees have 11 months of remote work a year and have to make time to travel for up to 4 weeks a year for team bonding and building events.

i)        To counter this, organizations can make use of custom-built apps which keep track of who has met who, and then assign seats, say at a dinner party, so that people sit with people they’ve not yet met before.

2)      Osmotic and office communication

a)      With everybody working online, you miss out on watering hole conversations, overhearing other people say something that you can help with, or just having a general awareness of your team’s activities by virtue of being within earshot of discussions.

i)        To counter this, some organizations use an internal blog, and a place where an incredible amount of conversation and activity is chronicled and captured.

3)      Security

a)      Mullenweg points to endpoint security —computer networks that are remotely bridged to client devices — and used for BYOD such as laptops and smartphones.

b)      The alternative — being inside the office wall, as Mullenweg says —essentially becomes a single point of failure, and compromises depth in defense.

c)      What we should be doing instead is rather than over-emphasizing just access control, we need to be protecting against malicious behaviors. With over 70% of IT hacks using social engineering to get inside, he has a point.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

 ***Concept Courtesy – www.automattic.com

[employeescreenmonitoring]

Remote Work Monitoring Software- How To Ensure Employee Productivity?

Remote worker monitoring is a crucial term for organizations these days. Every business owner wants to get the most out of their employees, which seems a bit difficult during the ‘work-from-home’ module.

Employers across the world have been looking for a compelling employee management software amid Covid-19 pandemic. But, it's more important to reveal its upsides before implementation. 

In addition to giant corporations, small businesses are now turning their routes to affordable yet reliable software that accelerates productivity and growth within a company. So, if you are also planning to enter-in, then read out this article to get a clear view of remote work monitoring software and its positive impacts.

Perks of remote monitoring methodology.

Recent research and employers around the globe together conclude that employee monitoring has various advantages of monitoring employees for both the individual and corporation. See those benefits below:-

Timely Execution of work: When employees know that their activities are under surveillance, their work ability automatically boosts up and they perform much better than before. Consequently, they produce better outcomes for achieving targets on time. Nothing can encourage a worker as good as monitoring. They might feel shaky at first, but with the time flies, everything turns back to normal.

Germinating the seed of trust:  Remote worker monitoring is a big help in building trust between employers and employees. Employers can easily figure out the status of assigned work, the potential of workers, as well as, exact working hours.

Sound Management: For any remote workers, monitoring software offers enormous benefits, including their record of attendance, login/logout time, billing, and guarantees accuracy.

What is remote work?

Remote work is the same as workplace work, but takes place outside the corporate building or in other words, at employees’ homes. With the rise in Coronavirus patients worldwide, more and more companies adopt this working approach as a means of safety for their invaluable assets, that is employees.

An employer/manager doesn’t need to be a pro in employee management to carry out result-oriented strategies. Instead, he/she should learn some fundamental remote force management skills while initiating. 

Past evidence claims that a skilled manager can obtain approx 30% more productivity than workplace employees because remote employees get the flexibility to work round the clock. In this context, experts say that- “Workers won’t work for additional hours, until and unless they get a monetary or non-monetary appreciation for that extra time duration invested".

Also, have a look at the List of Top Remote work monitoring solutions

EmpMonitor

Hubstaff.

Timecamp.

Hivedesk.

Toggl.

A few best approaches to successfully implement remote monitoring at the workplace

Before proceeding, think about the reason why you want to see your employees’ doing. Is it really beneficial or are your employees worth to be trusted blindly? In case your workforce already gives their best to organizational success, then the equipment of a remote work monitoring software will be nothing but a waste of money plus efforts.

As soon as you determine a reason for employee monitoring, identify the necessary feature to get in the best remote work monitoring software. Here, features should be the ability to capture screenshots in real-time, web browser tracking, activity monitoring, keylogging features, app tracking, and so on.

Now, when you choose the right fit for your organization, then it's time to make your entire remote employees aware of the policies regarding that software’s implementation, working abilities, and also the benefits it brings. This session must be brief yet effective enough to encourage your employees to support remote monitoring decisions.

Even though your employees stand in favor of employee management software, it’s necessary to conduct timely check-ins and quick evaluation to find out if everything is going on the right track or not.

Are you ready to reach topmost heights?

From the description explained up to now, ‘remote working’ might not be a strange concept to business owners.  

Apart from concealing the safety & security of any organization, monitoring tools also provide great peace of mind to employers. Entire work and employees’ workplace proceedings is tracked and recorded in the form of videos or screenshots through performance indicators.

When you properly implement strategies, remote staff monitoring brings various upsides to your company. Timely improvement, certain appreciations, and praising employees’ work can help a lot to raise employee dedication and performance. It contributes a lot to the smooth operation of a business.

[milindmk]

[employeetrackingsystem-blog]

05 Ways To Track Remote Staff’s Productivity Efficiently

I am sure you already know all about remote employee monitoring software and their implementation in all the industries currently, due to the pandemic. That may sound convenient to you, but there are lots of things to be taken into consideration. 

When an employee is working from home, he/she is not bound by the rules or by the ever-watching eyes of the manager. There are also many distractions while working from home like; TV, phones, pets, etc. All of these factors lead to low productivity. Thus, to ensure that this doesn’t happen in your organization, I have put together five key ways with the help of which you track the productivity of your remote employees efficiently. 

1. Set Goals

Setting goals for your employees is necessary as it helps you track their daily or weekly productivity. You should distribute the tasks between the whole team equally; this will decrease the workload on a single employee and help him/her maintain a better work-life balance. 

This strategy will also help you keep an eye on your employees’ tasks, which will help you track their productivity and improve it all together. The distribution of tasks will also keep the employees engaged, and they will look forward to the new task as it is not the same. 

2. Track Productivity

As I mentioned above, tracking productivity is crucial, and if you want to ensure your employees are giving their 100%, you have to track their productivity. A great way to perform this work is to use the best remote employee monitoring software.  There are many tools available on the market for this task, but the best one is EmpMonitor. 

This tool has features like productivity tracking, screen capture, stealth mode, etc. which helps you intensively track the productivity of both remote and in-house employees. 

3. Monitor User Logs

User logs are also important to monitor as it shows employees’ login and logout time. These logs will show you when an employee is coming online for work, and when he/she is logging out. Using it, you can track exactly how much time employees are working, and if they are staying punctual or not. You can also record these logs by using EmpMonitor.

4. Internet Usage

Internet usage of an employee tells you which sites he/she has been visiting and how frequently. This usage needs to be monitored because while working from home, employees may use social media sites more, and it will affect their overall work. 

It can be easily done with the help of a productivity monitoring software, EmpMonitor. It has a feature called stealth mode, with the help of which you can track the activities of your employees without them noticing. The stealth mode hides the monitoring tool from the task manager so that users won’t find it there and close it. 

Doing so, you’ll be able to track the top websites visited by employees and see which site has been used most by them. It will help you minimize social media usage and help increase productivity. 

5. Track Idle Time

There are many other reasons for the loss of productivity; one such reason is idle time. Sometimes employees spend their time sitting idle for some reason, and working from home leads to this more often than usual as there are no restrictions. 

You can overcome this loss by using a monitoring tool like EmpMonitor. This tool tracks every activity of employees by working in the background, and it also tracks their idle time. If an employee is doing nothing for more than 5 mins (no keyboard or mouse input), it stops recording time as productivity hours.

Conclusion

Remote employee monitoring software is the perfect option to monitor the productivity of employees. Implementing such software creates a sense of responsibility amongst the employees, and they work more seriously. But, you have to do all these in the most ethical way possible as the monitoring should not affect the morale of employees. 

Here’s how you can use EmpMonitor to track the productivity of employees -

[maddockandassociates]

Here are ideas to help companies create smart, remote work strategies to keep employees "productive, satisfied and contributing".

https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/4-winning-strategies-for-a-remote-workforce#.XrLNxWhKg2x

[usnewsper-business]

Report: Many Companies unprepared for remote work, impacting productivity #Productivity #Remotework #remoteworking #remoteworkplace #Workfromhome

[humanengineers]

Top Challenges To Solve Before Transitioning to a Remote Workplace By | Ben Eubanks | Human Resources Professional, Speaker, and Blogger Many companies are redesigning their workplaces so that employees can work from home most or all of the time. Not only does this method alleviate health concerns, but it also saves time, cuts down on office expenses, and reduces employee commutes. If you’re thinking about having your employees work remotely for the long term, figure out solutions to these challenges. Remote Communication When you’re at work, it’s easy to ask employees a question or give instructions; you just visit their offices or cubicles and have a conversation. When you’re working remotely, though, communicating with employees always takes more time. Thankfully, there are many technological solutions available. You just have to take the time to investigate their features properly so you receive the most benefits. One technical issue with transitioning to a remote work staff is that your employees’ phones are at work. The solution is not m... https://humanengineers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/GC-1-9.jpg https://tinyurl.com/yz6phybe https://humanengineers.com/top-challenges-to-solve-before-transitioning-to-a-remote-workplace/?feed_id=11242&_unique_id=60eec7bf5df08

[employeescreenmonitoring]

Remote Workplace and Best Practices: The Coronavirus Workplace Updates

Working from a remote workplace has become common nowadays. With the ease of connecting to the VPS of the system from anywhere, employees have the flexibility to work from anywhere, anytime. Either you have regular work from the home system or if your employees are adapting to work because of bad weather or illness or any pandemic situation like COVID-19. It's important to let your employees remain productive. 

Shifting from workspace to remote working employees plays a vital role in minimizing the consequences of any novel situation.  Though it's a little adjustment for the ones who have not worked in this telecommuting environment before and it could also be somewhat stressful. Thus, proper communication and planning play a key role in managing remote employees. 

Let's know check, what are the benefits of adapting work from home culture - 

The WFH system provides tons of benefits for both employers as well as their employees. As per the recent statistics, remote work helps to increase productivity, which helps organizations to grow high. Employees become more efficient towards their work as they get less distracted and less stressed as they don't have to deal with commuting, etc. Similarly, it helps to reduce operating costs to run their business smoothly and also reduces the employer's compensation claims. 

What Are The Best Practices When Creating Work From Home Programs?

Organizations that are planning to move their on-site to the remote workplace should create some guidelines, considering all the key things to ensure what all they need. So, here are some of the key elements of work from home policy that should get shared with all the employees. 

Adopting advanced technology 

The latest version of computers or laptops, high-speed internet connection, quick access to required tools, phone conferencing software, productivity monitoring software, etc. 

Using a secure connection 

Remote employees should have a proper internet connection and work with trusted VPN. The VPN system is a buffer between your operating device and wifi-connection. It saves the encrypted data from intercepting or tampering.   

Implement communication apps 

Keep in contact with workers who operate from home via Skype, Zoom and other chatting options. Remote workers can often feel disconnected from the rest of the team so it is important to stay in touch with them through telephone, email, texting, or video conference.

Set Clear Goals 

Build a strategy function with your particular program's goals. The policy should include guidelines for the daily work schedule of an employee, overtime policies for the company, summary of a dedicated workplace, guidelines for reporting personal injury and damage to company equipment, and security of confidential business information.

Test The implemented programs

If you are implementing a work from home policy, take the time to evaluate its effectiveness thoroughly. Adjust the program based on your findings and bugs.

Trust Your Employees  

One of the most critical aspects of a home-policy function that is not included in the document itself. Employers need to support and trust your workers while they are not working on-site to get their jobs completed.

After implementing the work from home policies, there might occur some risks. So, let's know How to prevent risks and take safety tips?

A key best practice for ensuring protection and minimizing claims for workers' compensation is to develop guidelines for working from home that will help reduce the potential risks. The policy should include guidelines on risk management that are related to research from the above-mentioned home security criteria, including:

Create a workplace 

Even when the employees are working remotely, Employees should set up a  dedicated workspace where they have limited distractions to concentrate on their job. 

Check the work area 

The workplace should be checked to ensure that it is free from any risks, including problems with fire and ventilation, slipping and dropping risks and other regular risk factors.

Learn the workplace injuries

Teach all your employees how you can prevent workplace problems that may arise both in the on-site and remote workplace. 

Conclusion 

These are a few of the best workplace practices along with the risk prevention tips that will help employers. Apart from that, the best remote workplace monitoring software can also prove advantageous to manage to work calmly during this pandemic situation.

Also, See This Video To Manage Remote Work Easily:-

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