Work From Home: Avoid peaks, valleys

Q. How can I ensure employees remain effective?

A. The final piece of the work-at-home puzzle is maintaining consistent employee efficiency and effectiveness.

There are several ways for providers to monitor how productive and effective employees are while working remote. Providers will need to build a process that is consistently measuring the workflow and avoid the peaks and valleys that are sometimes associated with a remote workforce.

ACU-Serve uses a user activity monitoring software. ACU-Serve uses this program in three major ways: basic activity tracking, rules-based alerts, and recorded video sessions that can be viewed on demand like watching Netflix. Basic activity tracking will record a date/time, process or URL accessed, and the duration that a user spent on that process or URL. This gives a good idea of what software and websites users are accessing, and we can make sure that everyone is following our standard operating procedures for approved software and websites.

Rules-based alerts allow an alert to be sent when certain behaviors are observed. For example: idle time over a defined period, excessive social media use or job searches. One of the tools our managers find the most useful is recorded videos of the work as it is being performed or was performed. This is especially helpful for new hires, where a supervisor can view a user's screen to watch workflow and processing time, on-demand or live, with an employee when they have time, and recommend areas where additional training may be required.

Regular communication with the team is also important to make sure that remote users feel like a stakeholder in the success of the company.

Deciding to keep this model beyond the pandemic will only be effective if providers can truly gauge profitability. That decision is one only they can make.

John Stalnaker is vice president of sales at ACU-Serve Corp. Reach him at jstalnaker@acuseservecorp.com.