Companies in the sales, maintenance, and pharmaceutical industries rely heavily on field workers. They serve as company representatives, market or sell orders, and visit clients on a daily basis.
Field employees can be difficult to manage as they are constantly travelling and working remotely. In addition, you have to assign and monitor their tasks, maintain their attendance records, track orders, and more.
Some organisations prefer to use obsolete methods like spreadsheets or voice calls to manage their remote employees. But this way of employee tracking is draining on the company budget, not to mention highly impractical.
But how to best manage your field workforce, you must be wondering?
Well, the best way is by implementing remote employee monitoring software in your business. It can simplify your field operations and lead to more efficiency in managing attendance, orders, tasks, etc.
But you have to opt for remote employee tracking software with some key features as stated in the following sections.
6 Key Features of Remote Employee Monitoring Software
Real-time employee tracking
Remote staff work out of sight of their managers, unlike traditional desk workers. As such, communication and performance monitoring can pose a challenge. That’s why the selling point of remote employee monitoring software is real-time visibility. Using GPS technology, the software displays the exact whereabouts of remote workers. You can use this data to:
- Track order sales and task performance in real time.
- Guide employees quickly and choose the safest, shortest routes for them.
- Review daily distance covered by staff and playback the routes.
- View the battery and network strength of staff’s devices.
Attendance management
Time theft and inaccurate attendance are common issues plaguing businesses with a remote workforce. After all, how do you ensure your employees begin work timely and don’t leave without completing their work hours?
Well, you can do so with remote employee monitoring software. It eliminates errors, prevents buddy punching, and reduces disputes related to attendance logging. You can link the tasks to attendance so employees can only unlock it and mark themselves present if they are at the task site.
Additionally, remote staff also have to upload voice notes or pictures as proof that they are indeed at the task site. The time and location coordinates of their punch-ins and punch-outs are automatically recorded by the software.
Efficient Task allocation
One of the biggest hurdles in managing remote employees is assigning them tasks. Plus, you have to ensure all employees are working to the best of their abilities. No one should be overworked or underworked. Here’s how you can use remote employee tracking software for optimised task allocation:
- View staff availability and assign tasks based on workload capacity.
- Allocate tasks based on employees’ proximity to clients.
- Add tasks in bulk or schedule them in advance.
- Manually set the priority of tasks.
- Add or modify tasks on the go.
- Let employees self-allocate or reschedule tasks.
Such software is also flexibly used as after sales tracking software. With it, you can track task and progress of after sales service delivery teams too.
Data Analytics
Remote employee monitoring software stores an incredible amount of data on its servers. This data can be used for historical analysis and report generation. There are several reports the software can create that can be useful from both managers' and employees’ perspectives. Let’s check how:
- Stoppage reports to view how long and how frequently employees halt at sites.
- Distance reports to check how much an employee travels. These reports can be used to verify the fuel expenses.
- Target vs. achievement reports.
- Employee and team performance reports.
- Assigned vs. completed work hours.
Order management
In sales or other product-based businesses, order management is required. Field employees visit clients to carry out sales and create orders. Remote employee monitoring software often comes with an order management module or can be integrated with CRM or Salesforce software. Here’s what the software can do:
- Create and sort orders into custom categories.
- Adjust product prices and discounts as per your needs.
- Maintain and update product inventory.
- Get real-time insights into the sales orders processed.
Expense reporting
Since remote employees often travel from place to place and visit different clients, they are bound to incur extra costs for food, travel, lodging, stationery, etc.
However, since these expenses are unavoidable and occur on company time, they need to be reimbursed to the employees. Remote employee monitoring software lets you:
- Sort expenses into custom categories.
- Put a limit on the expenses to prevent overspending.
- Authenticate the expenses with visual proof and geotags.
- Generate expense reports and identify scope for cost-cutting.
- Approve expense requests quickly and set up levels of approvals.
Conclusion
Remote employee monitoring software is essential if you want to manage your remote workforce more efficiently. Using GPS tracking technology, it can track employees’ locations and activities.
You can even know when and for how long they go offline. In addition, you get modules to manage attendance, orders, tasks, expenses, and more.
And what is the result?
Well, increased employee productivity, higher revenue, and better customer service, just to name a few. You can drastically transform your business with remote staff tracking software. But for better or worse, it will depend on the software you choose.
There are some key features every good remote employee monitoring software must have. TrackoField is one such software with all necessary field employee monitoring features. Be sure to check it out.
Source: What Are The Key Features of Remote Employee Monitoring Software?
