Maintaining Discipline and Productivity of Remote Employees

In May 2020, a large consulting firm was looking for an employee monitoring tool to track the staff who had to go remote because of the pandemic. The management was worried that without control, the quality of work would drop, which in turn would lead to financial and reputation losses. The firm chose CleverControl for the best features-price ratio. We assisted them during the implementation of the monitoring system and reached out to them in six months to ask about their experience with CleverControl.

The firm started by installing the solution on five remote employees to see how it worked and how it would affect their productivity. After a month of testing and getting positive results, the company extended CleverControl to the rest of the staff.

Since the remote employees used either their personal or corporate computers for work at home, the company decided not to use video and sound recording options to respect their privacy. Besides, the employees could manually turn off/on the monitoring, so the monitoring system would not record their personal data during the off-work time.

The management assessed the employees' productivity levels with the help of daily and weekly statistics reports. Also, they used activity statistics to control attendance and discipline - whether the employees worked their due eight hours and when they began and finished their work day. Finally, the managers performed occasional checks with Live Viewing to see how the work went.

CleverControl's reports had significant weight in the productivity assessment process; however, the management did not make any decisions based solely on those reports. They compared them with the KPIs and other indicators before making final assessments.

Based on that information, the company had to fire one of the employees for systematically low productivity and doing personal things during work time. Seeing that, some of the other employees tried to cheat CleverControl by using auto clickers and gaining 100% active time that way. Quite the reverse, exactly eight hours of activity every day seemed suspicious to the management, and they quickly revealed the fraud using CleverControl's app monitoring functionality.

Drawing the line, CleverControl helped the firm to maintain productivity and discipline during the pandemic. The monitoring system also contributed greatly to accountability - the manager could always log in to their monitoring dashboard and check the employee's activity at any moment of the day. Finally, the employees knew about the control, and they did not tend to idle away their work time or provide low-quality services to their clients.

• Active time statistics

  Tracking active time allowed the management to control attendance of remote workers.
• Live Viewing

  Seeing what employees do at any moment of the day contributed to accountability and transparency of the remote work.
• Programs activity monitoring

  Thanks to this feature, the management could detect the employees who tried to cheat monitoring.