How To Measure Remote Working?

Since the pandemic, remote working has become widespread. On the one hand to respond to the health and safety issues of employees and on the other hand to adapt to the expectations of employees, who increasingly place flexibility in terms of working days and hours, as one of their main concerns.

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For some companies, remote working has become the norm and this has raised new issues for workplace managers, HR departments and team managers:

How do you measure and evaluate employee productivity and quality of work when teams work full-remote?

Bill Robert, co-founder of Wx, explains in this article how to count the real number of people working remotely, how to measure the quality of the work done, how to understand the way teams collaborate remotely and gives you the keys to optimize your organization at a time when remote working is more widespread than face-to-face working.

How to measure remote working performance?

To measure the quantity and quality of work produced by remote employees, several tools compatible with Microsoft Office 365 and the Google Workspace suite exist. You can use them, making sure that the tools you choose comply with the strictest data privacy regulations, such as the RGPD, but if you want to set up a truly efficient and sustainable organization for your company, these tools will not be enough.

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Just knowing the exact number of people teleworking is complex enough! And if you think it is easy, ask the HR department or even the IT department and you will quickly find out that they have difficulty in knowing the real number of people working from home.

When you want to plan a 100% teleworking - full-remote - organization, you need to analyze a number of more important parameters to effectively plan the production line of your teams in an efficient way.

The multiplication of devices used by employees and the democratization of work applications that divide work into multi-platforms also makes monitoring particularly complex. Today 90% of work is done online.

If you want to understand, qualify, how this work is done and how teams collaborate with each other, you will need to be creative, and this is where the analysis of the metadata contained in your collaboration tools will become particularly useful.

Metadata analysis of your collaboration tools?

Email messaging, shared calendars, internal chat and instant messaging,... are all examples of your company's collaboration tools.
Each of these tools contains what is known as metadata, i.e. standardized and structured information that makes it possible to describe the data contained in digital resources.

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By analyzing the metadata contained in your collaboration tools, you can analyze the digital interactions that take place within your organization and understand how teleworkers use the tools available to them to stay connected to each other and to complete their assigned tasks.

For example, you can understand:

Which team is the central hub of a project?
Are there isolated employees or teams?
....

You will be able to analyze the average time spent on tools, to see how long your employees have been working from the first email sent in the day to the last action taken at the end of the day.

Metadata analysis will also give you valuable insights into the collaborative aspect of work:

How much time do employees spend in video conferences and meetings?
How many participants are present in online meetings?
Is the collaborative synergy still present despite remote working?
...

Metadata analysis of collaboration tools is a goldmine of information for workplace managers or workplace strategists, as it allows them to evaluate the work done by employees in the home office in a quantitative and qualitative way and to use this information to propose a more efficient and productive work organization adapted to the needs of your company.

let's talk about your challenges!

To initiate a metadata analysis, meet our experts!

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