
Ask HN: How to monitor activity of remote employees? - kull
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&#x2F;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.<p>The ideal tool will be super simple and take screenshots few times a day. Anything you can recommend?
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nherment
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

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ohjeez
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...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-remote-
workers/9781491995129/)

~~~
dailyvijeos
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.

~~~
ohjeez
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.

~~~
dailyvijeos
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.

------
11thEarlOfMar
> 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!

------
stephenr
> 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".

------
al2o3cr

        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.

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dozzie
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.

------
detaro
> _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.

------
kull
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.

~~~
gregjor
> 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.

------
dikaio
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](https://activtrak.com)

