Remote teams often lack the cohesiveness of in-office teams.

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Once making the move to a virtual work environment, many traditional workplace forms of communication, collaboration, and coordination are as good as useless. 

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As such, to create a tight-knit remote team that operates as a unit and works towards sustainable business productivity, you need systems in place to support effective functioning at a distance.

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In this guide, we’ll cover how one of the most important tools for creating accountability, employee monitoring software for tracking performance - can help you get the most from your remote teams.

1. Gain Workforce Insights

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Arguably, the most important reason to implement employee website monitoring for your remote team is to gain workforce insights.

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With a working time app, you can identify:

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• Top performers 
• Performance benchmarks
• Productivity trends

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You can use time tracking as a springboard to greater productivity insights. With remote workforce monitoring software, you can collect time data and then visualize it on the productivity dashboard before converting it into actionable steps for improving performance for remote workers.

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Here are a few simple examples of what you can do with time data and the insights it can lead to:

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2. Create Accountability

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One of the most compelling reasons to install time tracking in your virtual workplace isn’t directly related to the software.

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It’s a byproduct of implementing time tracking in your team: a greater sense of accountability.

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While this isn’t a feature or a guarantee, it taps into human psychology and works more often than not.

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How does time tracking create greater accountability?

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There are two ways time tracking can boost individual agency and encourage employees to take more accountability for their actions:

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• Incentive motivation: By sharing time data with employees, you create transparency and make it easier for them to hit performance goals and climb the career ladder. When team members can see how they spend their time, it puts the ball in their court, which can be an incentive for greater performance. 

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• Fear motivation: There’s no denying that tracking remote employee time also creates fear-based motivation in which nobody wants to be seen to be slacking or failing to meet performance standards.

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When you track time, performance appraisals become a straightforward case of reviewing the numbers, so employees have nowhere to hide. This level of accountability can skyrocket productivity and create an environment in which idle time is a thing of the past.

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3. Accurate Payroll

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In a remote team, payroll can be nigh-on impossible to calculate without solid numbers.

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With automatic time tracking, remote employees need not worry about being fairly compensated for their time and effort at work. Time tracking ensures that every submitted timesheet and payroll window is accurate, so an hour worked always results in an hour paid.

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Being able to distinguish between billable and non-billable hours is also useful, as you can divide employee time up into:

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• Paid sick time
• Paid time off
• Shift time
  
  

This is especially useful for working with contractors, freelancers, and agencies for accurate billing and invoicing.

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4. Improve Operational Efficiency

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Time tracking can be an effective way to boost operational efficiency within a company, but also within a remote team.

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How?

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When you use a comprehensive time tracking solution like Insightful, you can go the extra mile and find out what apps your remote workers are using most and least. You can also align the time they spend with the various processes and workflows they engage in.

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With this information, you can identify both apps and processes that are inefficient and refine them to create a more streamlined system of working.

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Say your remote team is spending a significant portion of time using a communication tool, but this seems to eat into their morning productivity. With time tracking, you can identify this trend and either reevaluate whether the tool is worth the expense, or find ways of relying on it less to reduce the impact context shifting has on your team.

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5.  Less Micromanagement 

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Nobody wants to micromanage - or be micromanaged.

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What if there were a solution to cut down on the need for micromanagement, leaving team leaders and remote team members to their own devices?

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There is: time tracking.

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Choose a remote worker time tracker, or a more robust monitoring tool. Just make sure it allows you to set up automatic time tracking and trust that your remote workers are spending their time wisely and don’t need you to check in regularly to keep them on track.

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As mentioned earlier, time tracking can create greater accountability, so by enabling it, you can take a more hands-off approach to managing the people in your team and spend more time on strategic decision-making.

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A computer activity monitor tool does the heavy lifting in this case, so you don’t have to brush up on how to monitor computer activity yourself.

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6. Greater Transparency

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In project management, it isn’t just the project manager and the team under them involved.

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There could be:

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• Senior leadership
• Various department heads 
• External stakeholders 
• Clients 

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With various parties involved, it’s important to be as transparent as possible to satisfy client and stakeholder expectations. When you can quickly and easily prove to stakeholders what your team has been working on through how they’ve spent their time, you can create a relationship built on trust.

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You can also use the time data to build performance reports using employee time tracking software like Insightful to present to senior leadership and prove that you’re using your team and resources wisely.

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7. Resource Allocation

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On the topic of resources, knowing how and where to allocate them when working in a remote team can be challenging.

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Fortunately, when you turn to time data, you can identify exactly how well you’re employing the resources at your disposal.

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Imagine you have a situation in which a project deadline is approaching, and you notice that even with solid 8-hour shifts from each of your remote workers, you’re not on track to finish the project on time.

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To avoid falling short of client expectations and missing the deadline, you could use the data provided by the time tracking system to justify bringing in a contractor to finish the project on time. The cost of hiring a contractor for a short period of time would likely be justified when weighed up against the cost of missing a deadline and the damage it could do to your reputation.

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