Monitoring Employee Productivity From Home During The Holidays
This holiday season is here and despite the risk of travel due to COVID-19, AAA is expecting up to 50 million Americans to travel for thanksgiving alone. Companies are responding by altering their work from home policy and, in some cases, allowing work from home permanently. Square Enix, the popular game studio behind Final Fantasy, recently announced it would allow employees to permanently work from home. This comes right on the heels of Microsoft announcing it would also allow employees to work from home permanently.
Working from home is beneficial for public health, but it presents a challenge to many businesses that rely on traditional methods for time, attendance, and productivity.
Let’s dive into how MyTimeIn handles work from home from start of day to productivity.
Start Of Day Message (SOD) & Timely Arrival
The first thing we do when starting our day at MyTimeIn is check in with our team. We write a small note and bullet out our TODOS for the day. Built into MyTimeIn is a clock-in system which asks users for this start of day message, but it’s just as easy to collect in your company messaging platform (and recommended!). Ours typically look like this:
SOD: Hello everyone! Happy Wednesday!
* Improve client user interface with MyTimeIn
* Perform code review
* Perform pre-holiday write up
This works well with small teams with less than 20 people. If you have over 20 employees it can become very difficult to keep track of.
Inside MyTimeIn is a real time dashboard showing users who are currently late, clocked in late, or absent. This will allow you to quickly find employees that need attention.
Showing up on time does not tell the whole story though. Users could just as easily show up, clock in, then roll over and go back to bed.
Responsiveness
Have you ever had an employee show up, send their start of day message, then disappear for a few hours? This is a key issue we solved at MyTimeIn with real time presence tracking. Users with tracking enabled are required to run the MyTimeIn Desktop Application. This application regularly monitors the state of the machine from top to bottom. If it finds inactivity, it issues a warning. We keep track of this information and display it in a timeline.
We’ve found this to be far more accurate than simply looking for a green light in Slack or Skype – we track the users presence using techniques that we’ve spent over 7 years cultivating.
Focus
We’ve covered two important productivity concerns: the start of day message and being responsive. However, there is the last piece which is easy to miss: focus. Unless you are keeping tabs on everyones daily start of day message, you may not know if they are meeting their deliverables or actually being productive during their shift.
That’s why we built MyTimeIn Focus Watch: a feature that breaks down where users are ‘focussed’ during their shift.
We’ve found this to be particularly helpful when diagnosing productivity issues for work from home users. Users may be employing some sort of makeshift automation such as an oscillating fan attached to a their mouse, or putting something on their keyboard that moves the screen or holds a key to evade an idle status in popular communication platforms. Our idle detection would flag these behaviors, but they would also show up in Focus Watch: the focus would be on the same window for hours.
Other Features
MyTimeIn also has other useful features for tracking productivity at home. We can capture Screenshots for you on a set interval. We also have a Compliance Mode which obscures the incoming data to ensure privacy is protected for your data and your users data. Here’s an example:
Finally, we also offer a TODO system which your users can leverage to report what they have worked on for review. Completed TODO’s will be listed in our productivity tracking panel.
Wrapping Up
If you think MyTimeIn can help your business during this holiday season, we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at sales@mytimein.io or use the button below to contact us.
