Virtual teams are a new norm across the country – from virtual assistants at small businesses, to teams of architects, designers and engineers within large organisations to companies like Octagon Technology with a fully remote workforce. The benefits are clear but remote working can have its problems too, especially when it comes to tracking remote employee performance.
Each day your employees have a set of new tasks to complete and one significant challenge of managing your workers remotely may be to make sure that they accomplish all their job duties by their due date and up to the company’s standards. Some of your remote employees will have to ensure that their tasks are completed and recorded, whilst others will have to collaborate, communicate and schedule. In both cases tracking the remote employee performance may be a challenge. It is important you have systems in place in order to ensure open channels of communication between you, your employee and your customer. You also need to set up your expectations especially when it comes to their job standards, logging of their hours and information about the end product.
Many organisations actively utilise employee productivity software in order to obtain the best sense of what their remote team is up to during the working hours. But you don’t need sophisticated technology, Microsoft 365 Planner is an excellent tool that can be used for this purpose.
How can this help you?
Microsoft Planner is a very useful tool that allows you to organise and assign tasks, set up their due date and level of importance, and check on their progress. It allows you to efficiently track and redistribute tasks across your workforce, and send reminders directly to the employee’s email notifying them about uncompleted tasks. It combines incredibly well with Microsoft Teams, as although it is completely independent of Teams it works really well with it.
This is a great performance tracking instrument for large and smaller projects, especially when you have a project due date and need to make sure that all the smaller tasks are getting completed in a timely manner proceeding towards the final target. Planner will illustrate if the team members have started on a task and whether they have completed it. The tool also shows you if the task has been assigned to a different person for further action and completion or for billing purposes for instance. This is a great collaboration tool too, as it allows your employees to leave comments and send them automatically to the next assigned person.
Are there any limitations?
The drawback is that Planner does not give you live feedback to tell you how productive team members are being while they work on tasks, but it allows you to generate a report to give you a picture about your employee total activity by task name, date et cetera.
To get a more real-time look at your team’s progress you will want a project management tool. There are many on the market at the moment. You can choose from Status Hero, which is great for your team to provide quick “check-in” details about what they are currently working on, Toggl which allows you to see how long tasks are taking or RescueTime which lets you to see where time is wasted, and many more.
So now that you know that your team members are working effectively on the tasks you have assigned to them you can put your legs up and enjoy your cup of tea!
If you need any further information about Microsoft Planner please get in touch with me, I will be happy to help. Simply pick up your phone, I’m only a few phone beeps away (01522 797520) or email me – kamila@octagontech.com.
Kamila
General Manager
