Improving Work Processes in a Growing Team

Today we are talking to Daniel, one of the top managers of a real estate agency in the USA. His agency was looking to implement an employee monitoring system to assess its growing staff's work. "We did not see any severe discipline or productivity problems when we had a small team," Daniel, one of the managers, says. "But as our team was growing, it became increasingly hard to ensure the involvement of each employee. We were searching for an effective tool to prevent possible disciplinary problems in future."

The company chose a three-month plan to test how it would fit in its work environment. At first, the monitoring system caused concerns among the employees, but the manager presented the bottom line to them. "We explained CleverControl was there to improve the climate in the office, not to spy or create unnecessary tension," Daniel says. "For example, it would save them from annoying duties like clocking in and out and tracking their work time." Monitoring also helped to spread the workload fairly. Some of the more experienced employees were unhappy that they had to do some work for their new colleagues who were not experienced enough. Analyzing logs of the work chats gathered by CleverControl, the management found the main bottlenecks the new employees faced. It allowed them to adjust the introductory program for the new employees to resolve these bottlenecks before they emerged.

However, the most challenging task was monitoring agents outside the office, for example, when they showed apartments to the clients. Although CleverControl does not offer many features for monitoring field workers yet, some of the existing options, such as geolocation on MacOS computers, came in handy. Thanks to it, the manager learned that one of the agents had a habit of spending 1-1,5 hours at a cafe idly surfing the Internet after meeting the client. The agent always told the manager that he had spent all that time showing the house to the clients.

Three months of using CleverControl showed us some areas that could be improved," says Daniel. "We will extend our license and see how these improvements work.

• User Activity Tracking

  This feature automatically tracks the start and the end of work and active time. It saves employees from clocking in and out and manual time tracking.
• IM monitoring

  Work chats can serve as a valuable source of information about the workflow in the office, in particular, what difficulties employees face.
• Geolocation

  The manager can see the device location on the monitoring dashboard and ensure the field worker stays on track.