There is a growing body of research that suggests employees who work from home are less productive than those who work from the office. Some of this productivity gap may be due to self-selection, which is to say that more productive employees prefer to work at the office. Studies are also finding that work-from-home is leading to the atrophy of internal networking and serendipitous interaction that can result in benefits to the business.

Nevertheless, employers may have to adjust to a new world in which a substantial portion of their workforce is doing their jobs from home for at least part of the week. This reality makes it incumbent upon managers to find ways to manage and measure employees’ productivity when work is performed outside of the manager’s immediate line of sight.

Ways to Enhance and Monitor At-Home Workers’ Productivity

Employee productivity is measured differently for different roles. For instance, productivity may be measured as the number of calls satisfactorily resolved per hour for customer service reps or the quantity of data input per hour for a clerical role, while customer-facing roles may measure increases in customer satisfaction rates or sales.

For managers supervising and evaluating the output of a work-from-home staff, they will need to implement processes and standards relevant to their business and departmental function. Here are some ideas for doing that.

1. Set measurable goals. Businesses often refer to this as establishing key performance indicators, or KPIs. It’s a business truism “that which cannot be measured cannot be managed.” Make sure you establish KPIs that are relevant and realistic.
2. Track deliverables. It is easy to lose sight of a project’s progress or anticipate bottlenecks amid all the daily distractions managers face. Creating project plans, developing milestones, and regularly monitoring individual and group progress should keep everyone productive, regardless of where they work.
3. Communicate regularly. Managers should ensure they communicate in a clear and transparent manner, whether it’s discussing company/departmental priorities, establishing employee workloads, answering questions or reviewing KPIs with their staffs.
4. Compare productivity statistics between the work-from-home staff and in-office staff to identify potential lower productivity issues.
5. Mentor remotely. Because mentoring often happens through informal, in-person interactions in the office, managers should set up remote mentoring sessions for younger staff to help them climb the learning curve faster.

At its core, work-from-home is not some novice managerial challenge. Instead, it simply heightens the need for managers to be better at what they do—providing direction, training, leading, motivating and managing workflow.  Employees, though, must also do their part in making such arrangements more sustainable … here are six tips employees can implement to successfully work from home.

Please reference disclosures at: https://blog.americanportfolios.com/disclosures/