Many businesses rely on field employees, especially in the HVAC, MRO, and service industries. These employees often provide door-to-door services and have to be managed remotely.
But the challenge is how to track them when they’re miles away and constantly travelling.
Do you really want to keep calling and texting them for every minor update?
No, right?
As such, you need to implement remote employee tracking software. With it, you can monitor their location and activity progress in real time.
The software also offers powerful features to manage tasks, shifts, sales orders, employee attendance, and track productivity.
Let’s take a look at these features in detail below.
7 Must-Have Features In Every Remote Employee Tracking Software
As a manager, you have to identify your organisation’s goals and figure out the best way to achieve them. You don’t need software with tons of features, just the ones that are essential to your company.
Here are 7 features you must look for before buying remote staff tracking software.
Real-Time Employee Monitoring
This is the key feature of any remote employee tracking software. You have to be aware of employees' whereabouts if you want to manage them effectively. With GPS tracking capabilities, the software can locate the employees’ geo-sensitive location details along with current and past routes even when they’re offline.
Plus, it always displays the activity status, battery, and network levels on the dashboard. You can use it to generate stoppage reports or unreachable reports. These show where and for how long an executive was out of reach.
The software also tracks employees’ time. It shows how long they spent doing their daily tasks or if they took any unscheduled breaks. It can even let you playback employees’ routes and help optimize them.
Order Management
Many field businesses deal with B2B sales or customer service. Both jobs require maintaining a steady product inventory and managing field sales agents.
Now, you can adopt separate field sales monitoring software for your business or you can use an employee tracking solution with sales order management capabilities like TrackoField.
It’s better to have tasks, location tracking, and order processing in the same software. As a manager, you have to deal with a lot of variables, and it can be difficult to track them.
But with efficient order management, you can:
- Maintain an exhaustive product inventory.
- Let sales agents take orders quickly.
- Place ad-hoc orders.
- Automate and streamline the steps in processing an order.
- Create custom categories, offer discounts, and modify prices.
Expense and Payroll Module
Field employees often incur unavoidable expenses while on the job. These expenses are paid personally by employees and need to be reimbursed.
However, the organisation must also maintain complete transparency when paying the staff. That’s why accurate expense management is critical in any remote employee tracking software.
Managers can monitor employees’ locations and view their travel routes using the software. They can also generate distance travelled reports to verify the authenticity of fuel costs.
Other expenses can be verified by asking employees to upload visual proof in the form of receipts. Plus, the uploads are time-stamped and geotagged for further transparency.
Another related feature in the software is payroll disbursement. Field employees also need timely salaries, even if their activity and performance are hard to monitor.
However, remote staff tracking software can automatically calculate the accurate salary to be paid to the employees using the leave, attendance, and productivity data.
Task Management
In a field business, you have to manage several employees and assign them tasks. But you have to maintain and follow a schedule. You can’t have delays or variable workload distribution between employees. And there has to be enough flexibility to accommodate urgent tasks.
This sounds like a major challenge but it is a piece of cake for any good employee tracking software. Using it, you can:
- Assign tasks to employees in advance.
- Upload tasks in bulk and track them in real time.
- Allow easy ad-hoc task inclusions.
- Prepone or postpone tasks.
- Let field executives self-allocate or modify tasks.
- Optimise task scheduling using data-driven reports.
Attendance and Leave Management
It is difficult to manage the attendance of field workers. But not if you use GPS tracking technology and geofencing.
Remote employee tracking software simplifies the attendance marking process. It allows you to establish a geofence around a site. Employees can only log their attendance when they’re present in the geofence.
You can also link the attendance to tasks and demand visual proof for added security.
The leave application and approval process is also simplified. Employees apply for leave with a reason on their executive mobile app. The managers can approve or reject this on their TrackoField analytical dashboard. Both parties are immediately notified of updates to the process.
Data-driven Reports
A unique yet overlooked feature of remote employee tracking software is data analysis. It archives employee data securely and analyses it in various ways.
You can retrieve it during audit time or any disputes. Plus, employees and managers are both privy to the data for complete transparency. Here are the benefits of data-driven reports:
- Spot discrepancies or identify positive trends.
- Check employee performance.
- Generate employee target vs. achievement reports.
- Playback routes and optimize them to be cost-effective.
- View actual vs. assigned work hours.
Future-proofing and Accessibility
There is no point in buying software that will become out of date and useless after a year. Growth is the main objective of all companies, and you need to ensure that you implement the right software.
It should be able to adapt to the rising number of employees and changing company goals.
Also, your FSM software should be integrated with other workplace software for HR, payroll, or accounting operations. You don’t want to use multiple apps at a time for basic tasks.
Conclusion
Managing field employees can be a headache, but not if you use remote employee tracking software.
It can help you boost employee satisfaction, convert more clients, save time and money, and grow your company faster.
However, not every remote staff tracking software is built equally. There are certain features any good software must have. Without them, it’s just a glorified way of manual employee tracking.
These features include live-location tracking, remote attendance, and task management, fast order processing, and more. We’ve covered 7 such features that field employee monitoring software must have.
If you manage a field workforce, be sure to choose a software solution with all of these features, like TrackoField.
Source: 7 Key Features Remote Employee Tracking Software
