Guess how many people in the US freelance? Exactly fifty-three million, which makes the USA a freelance leader. For comparison, only 1.4 million people started their freelancing career in the UK and 8.9 million in Europe.
It is spread in all popular areas of business like designing, copywriting, editing, marketing, web development, accounting, project management, etc.
Freelancing is a growing thing, however that are certain pitfalls for companies who work with freelancers on a long-term basis, that could be eliminated with the help of remote employee monitoring.
Why should you monitor your remote employees?
We agree that there is absolutely no sense in monitoring an employee who was hired to do a one time job. But it does make sense to monitor the work of someone who’s building a long-term relationship with your company.
Not for spying purposes, but for the good of your company and your remote staff.
Pros of remote employee monitoring
You have accurate data for payroll and reporting
Yes, there are different ways of paying for remote job. You might pay for a whole project or pay by the hour. Time tracking is important in both cases. However, the second one is more vital.
Automatic remote employee monitoring provides you with accurate data about total worked time and days, that can not be logged in or changed.
So, when calculating payroll or reporting to your clients using the data from the time tracker, you can make sure that you are not under or overpaying the employee and bill clients properly.
You can visualize their work
Taking screenshots might seem dragonian, but it is an important insight on employee’s work. With their help, you can literally see the working process in real time.
Isn’t it a benefit when you can check how the project is going on and make timely changes to the working process that is happening far away from you?
You can analyze their productivity
How would you like it if except for just capturing time for payroll and invoices, you could also analyze the productivity of remote employees?
Saying depending on the software and websites that they use during the day. Except for some general ones, there are resources that are specific for each type of job.
In Yaware.TimeTracker you can set a productivity status (productive, unproductive and neutral) for every particular website or application, and so, see how productively employees use their billable time.
You give them a tool for self-control and improvement
Using Yaware.TimeTracker the remote staff gets a chance to analyse their performance using detailed reports with the time and productivity data.
Using it each employee can recall the working day, see where s/he spent time unproductively, what distracted him/her and take that into account.
Having an exact picture of the day, an employee can improve the daily planning, increase productivity and eventual outcome.
Cons
Privacy concerns
It is quite natural that the employees might not like the idea of being tracked because of the risk of disposing personal information.
There are two simple ways out of this situation:
1) an employee can create a separate account for job purposes and switch whenever they need to use the computer for personal needs. However, this is very time-consuming and inconvenient;
2) is you are using Yaware.TimeTracker, then the employee can just pause or stop the monitoring any time needed. Thus, no time will be tracked, and no screenshots will be taken.
Conclusion
As you can see, the pros are stronger than cons. And you can always find a consensus with remote employee monitoring, if you use a flexible tool, like Yaware.TimeTracker.
