Ask HN: How to monitor activity of remote employees? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to monitor activity of remote employees?

7 pointskull13 comments

We are a fast-growing company, but all 100% remote, with team members spread across the world. With below 10 team members, everybody was working 24/7 and it was easy to spot somebody is dropping a ball. With a team of 20, it is now difficult to keep an eye on people, and some employees are taking an advantage of being remote. Especially managers, whose responsibility is to help others and keep track of things, so the number of emails, calls, and chats is not a good indicator of their engagement.

The ideal tool will be super simple and take screenshots few times a day. Anything you can recommend?

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Hi Daniel,

I won't comment on your thought process and won't try to change your mind. I'm running a remote team as well (software development). Objectively, any tool that you install on your employees computers can likely be circumvented by the most motivated worker.

Monitoring will set the expectations for employees to spend XX hours on the computer doing work related tasks. This is only a proxy for what you are really trying to achieve: high productivity.

There are a few caveats to the approach of monitoring employees for hours logged:

- it sets the expectation as time spent instead of productivity

- maximizing hours in front of a computer is counter productive to maximizing productivity. This is mostly true for creative work (programming, design, problem solving, etc.). I won't post links, don't take my word for it, do your research.

- you will miss out on a lot of very good employees. Top performers can (usually) easily get a job. Monitoring employees has a negative connotation. This is anecdotal but I know a few top programmer and they will run away as fast as possible from your company.

Rather than intrusively monitoring, look at your high performers and use that as your base productivity. That could be your expectations for all employees (again, I don't necessarily condone this but you seem to have very high expectations). Add a bit of flexibility to this as not everybody is always top performing (personal life, preoccupations, etc.).

Then, the non top-performer will need your help in getting to top-performer. By coaching them, you can then focus on these less performing team members and get them on a growth path to meet your expectations. You will have to cut people whom you think will never meet your expectations.

best of luck

As detaro wrote: Measure results, not behavior.

Are deadlines missed? Products sub-standard? Then you have something to worry about (and remote work is not a factor).

Are team members regularly having one-on-one meetings with their managers? Are the employees comfortable enough that they can be open with the manager about any blocks or problems encountered? That's a good sign. If you want to count anything, keep track of one-on-ones.

This may be of some use (free reg required). https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-remote-wo...

Exactly. Treat adult employees like adults, Netflix-style.

Another aspect is near-realtime organization-visible projects, issue status (and ticket system) and KPIs that show attribution to prove people to gain visibilty and credit to avoid “what does person X do all day?” This also makes performance reviews more automated for both sides of the table.

Having unified, unform tiers of performance management processes that ensure minimum of staff and management fudging plus including qualitative, 360 feedback also helps scale the management and HR layers.

I've always found that if you trust people, and you communicate openly with them (such as explaining what you want), you are rarely disappointed.

I wouldn’t say “always.” Also, trust isn’t binary: it’s earned and varies. You usually wouldn’t give a new employee sole, unrestricted access to megadollars and you wouldn’t micromanage microtransactions of a 10 year manager. Delegate with risk management, e.g., common-sense. If a person starts making big mistakes, then you take non-nuclear corrective actions/find out what’s going on. On the other side, if someone improves, reinforcing actions are possible.

> some employees are taking an advantage of being remote.

Would be interested in what you're measuring or observing to support this.

I worked remote for 10 years.

Two things come to mind: - Work Backwards: Determine what the results are that you expect are reasonable, discuss and agree with each employee what those results are, and then check back periodically to see where they are in achieving those results. Being remote means exactly that you have to trust them to be committed and diligent in doing their work. Each employee is in a different environment, different time zone, different family situation. Trying to apply a common behavior pattern will just frustrate you.

- Manage it in the front end: When hiring, specifically look for people who are self-motivated. Yes, this can be difficult to judge in an interview or two, and again, especially remote, but there are markers such as what they've got on git hub, patterns of completing prior work, excitement they exude for technology, expressions of curiosity towards your products/services, entering constructive solution mode when presented with problems, and others.

Above all, good luck!

> With below 10 team members, everybody was working 24/7

Wut?

> Anything you can recommend?

This isn't a technical problem and trying to solve it by completely invading your employee's privacy is a fucking horrible "solution".

    With a team of 20, it is now difficult to keep an eye on people

Don't worry, whatever tool you find should definitely help solve your "too many people in the company" problem.

Erm... why the hell do you care about them working? You should care about them producing results. Even more so if the team is remote. Results should be much easier to see than the process of working, since they are already delivered to the company anyway.

> The ideal tool will be super simple and take screenshots few times a day. Anything you can recommend?

That sounds like an incredibly bad idea. That's something the cheapest-rank freelancer websites can do (they are hated anyways, but people have little alternatives), you don't want your employees to feel like that. If they don't reach the results expected of them, address that, not when and how they do it.

Thank you all for your answers.

Few things to add: we are very technical co-founders, dealing with 'people' is something we are still learning.

Also, the trouble is with customer support, not dev team.

But I see what you all saying, and I do agree, this is not a great solution. It is new to me, to try to monitor employees, I had never had any issues of this kind. On top of that the problem is really with one or two employees, so making the entire team suffer is silly.

We will talk to those employees and probably just monitor the productivity with weekly goals etc.

> we are very technical co-founders, dealing with 'people' is something we are still learning.

Maybe employee 21 should be someone with people skills. Successful and productive teams and companies focus on people, not on tech.

Hi Kull. I’ve tried numerous solutions out there and while none of the ones I’ve tried coompletely satisfied my requirements I’ve found ActivTrak to be the most reliable product. There may be better products I haven’t found but for small to medium sized teams this might fit.

https://activtrak.com

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