Time tracking and workflow management are key to efficient business operations in general. When the work setting is remote, as it is at my digital marketing agency, those initiatives become more challenging.
By Tyler Jordan, CEO and Founder of Jordan Digital Marketing
A focus on employee productivity is one of the reasons cited by the many, many enterprise tech companies (including, ironically, Zoom) who have returned to in-office or hybrid set-ups in the last couple of years. While I believe that RTO (return-to-office) mandates are often meant to encourage people to leave voluntarily and serve as an alternative to tough-to-swallow layoffs, I know that there is a persistent thought that employees are more productive when they’re working in an office, with managerial supervision.
My response: if we can make it work in a remote setting, so can you – and, in the process, save money on real estate, retain more employees, and continue to hire the best talent regardless of location.
We believe so strongly in the benefits of remote work that we actually built a platform to address our workflow challenges. In this article, I’ll outline those challenges – for executives, managers, and employees in remote workforces – and some recommendations for how to address them in your own company.
Remote workflow challenges for executives
For executives like me, there are two big questions regarding workforce productivity: are employees working the hours they’re expected to work (whatever that means at your company), and is their work profitable to the company?
At my agency, the latter question boils down to a calculation of employee time spent on clients and the fees we charge those clients. Quite often, agencies that run this analysis for the first time find out that a decent proportion of their client base is either unprofitable or barely profitable because employees are spending too much time on those accounts.
The truth is that both of those questions are valid no matter the work set-up (remote, hybrid, or in-office full time). Yes, it’s easier to tell whether employees are sitting at their desks and available to work if they’re in the office, but that’s no guarantee of productivity. Our solution – time-tracking software that categorizes time spent by employee on a client basis – covers both. By incorporating AI, we’ll soon be able to ask simple queries like “How many hours did my team spend on Client A last month, and how did that compare to the month before?” and get real, actionable data to use across teams.
Remote workflow challenges for managers
Managers have similar challenges to the ones I just described, but you can add burnout prevention and client load balance to that list.
Client load balance is part of an agency manager’s job – not all clients need the same amount of attention at the same time, so knowing when to flex resources (and, more difficult, how to flex resources) is key. Burnout prevention is the flip side of wondering if your employees are actually putting in enough time – every company has employees who will work themselves to the point of burnout if they’re not reminded to take things like daily breaks and/or PTO. Without being in person and witnessing body language or physical wear and tear, time-tracking software is a helpful tool for throwing up red flags when employees might be working themselves too hard.
Remote workflow challenges for employees
I’ll start this section by saying that much of it comes from personal experience (CEOs are employees too) – and that if you’re truly worried about your employees slacking off, part of the problem is your culture and your hiring process. The vast majority of people I’ve ever worked with are much more prone to over-working than they are to slacking off, which leads to the following challenges:
Your day – and week – needs more structure. A visual layout of your meetings and pending deadlines can be extremely useful for planning out a productive workday, prioritizing what needs to be moved up, and moving non-essential tasks later in the week.
You need to take more control of your work-life balance. It’s one thing to suspect you’ve worked a 60-hour week; it’s quite another to see a bunch of them stacked up in a row. For many overachievers, data is an objective way to warn against losing work-life balance. Time-tracking software can help you identify trends before they turn into crises.
Early usage of our tool has taught us that strategic integrations (e.g. Asana, Zoom, Google Calendar) will make things even more streamlined for our remote workforce, and we’re working to incorporate those as well. For now, I can say as an employer, manager, and employee that the challenges of remote workflow are real – but very addressable with the right solutions.
Explore Hrtech Articles for the latest Tech Trends in Human Resources Technology
