How to Know If Remote Employees Are Actually Working

One of the greatest challenges of remote work is determining how to know if remote employees are working. Regardless of whether your company has just started to embrace remote work or if you already have a fully remote team, productivity monitoring is probably on your mind.

While it’s important to know whether work is being completed, monitoring employees can damage trust. On the other hand, trust and transparency are precisely what make remote work possible in the first place.

This means that you need a way to detect problems without having to rely on secret checks. One way to do this is by paying attention to signs like missed deadlines and slow response times, and then verifying these with tracking methods employees know about already.

In this guide, we’ll go over signs that might indicate an employee isn’t working, the detection methods you should avoid, and how to verify concerns in an ethical way.

Here are a few common signs your remote employees might not be working:

Lower quality of work

It’s not uncommon for an employee to complete all their tasks while still producing poor quality work. This might involve frequent mistakes, output that seems obviously rushed, or tasks that are forgotten or neglected.

If you have one or more employees who are consistently delivering low-quality work, have a conversation with them to clarify expectations and offer support.

A dip in efficiency

If an employee suddenly becomes less efficient, you’ll want to check whether their current remote setup supports their productivity.

For example, some employees might have too many distractions at home, which affects their efficiency. In this case, providing a coworking space stipend might be an easy way to help them become more productive.

Chronically late or absent

Employees who are frequently late or miss meetings are likely disengaged and potentially unhappy in their role.

Instead of disciplining them immediately, it’s often better to have a one-on-one conversation to understand the underlying cause of the behavior.

Chronically unresponsive

If you have an employee who often fails to respond to messages or calls during work hours, it’s crucial that you make it clear what your expectations for communication look like.

For most remote teams, this means responding to most work-related messages within 24 hours.

Spending too much time in meetings

Making your team spend too much time in meetings is one of the surest ways to hurt productivity.

This is easy to fix: create a meeting policy that outlines how many meetings per week employees can have and set guidelines that discourage having unnecessary meetings.

Remote employee monitoring software can help you verify employees are working, but it’s important that checking in on them doesn’t do more harm than good. Avoid these methods under any circumstances:

• Screen recording. Recording employees’ screens ultimately shows that you don’t trust them, regardless of your intentions.
• Keystroke logging. Apart from making employees feel like suspects, keystroke logging also rewards the wrong thing: typing instead of thinking and planning.
• VPN and login audits. Checking connection logs can only show you whether an employee was online, but not whether they were working. All while eroding trust in the process.
• Disabling idle-time notifications. Idle-time detection shows you when an employee hasn’t used their mouse or keyboard for an extended period of time. It’s usually paired with notifications that let employees know when they’ve been idle for a while. Hiding these notifications from employees and then confronting them about their idle time days or weeks later will only make them feel ambushed.

Remote work can sometimes make us feel disconnected, especially for managers concerned about remote worker productivity. Before you worry too much about your remote team’s productivity, let’s look at some statistics:

• Hubstaff data shows remote workers engage in deeper work with fewer interruptions. They spend an average of 4.55 hours on focused work daily compared to 3.72 hours for in-office workers. This results in remote employees experiencing 22% more focus time each week and 18% fewer interruptions annually.
• 86% of the remote employees surveyed said they would consider their productivity good or excellent.
• Remote employees are also happier, a statistic that bodes well for work-life balance and overall employee health. 71% of remote team members say they’re satisfied with their job, compared to only 55% of those who work on-site.
• A US-based study showed that companies saw a 35% increase in employee performance when teams went remote. 85% of companies confirmed that flexible remote policies improved their overall productivity.
• Of course, remote work isn’t perfect. Around 43% of hourly team members admit to committing time theft.
• Without time tracking software, managers have no way of knowing when team members clock in and out or how productive they are during the day.

There are three specific signals that can help with tracking remote worker productivity. Let’s go through each one:

• Do time and activity data show a consistent pattern? To understand whether an employee is working, start by analyzing time and activity data across several consecutive days and make sure to keep context in mind (e.g., stretches of low activity might mean thinking, reading, or attending calls). This is where idle time detection can help.
• Are deliverables landing on time? If an employee is delivering quality work without missing deadlines, then logging fewer hours isn’t necessarily a problem.
• What does the employee say? If an employee shows low activity, underdelivers on assignments, or misses deadlines, have a one-on-one conversation to understand what’s causing their poor performance.

If you're setting up ongoing tracking for a full team rather than checking one concern, see how to track remote employees.

If you’re managing just one remote employee, you can use a fairly simple setup. Have them use a remote employee time tracking app with a manual timer they can start when they’re working and stop when they’re not.

Opt for software with an idle-time detection feature that alerts the employee when they’re not using their keyboard or mouse for an extended period and asks them to keep or discard their tracked time.

Finally, review their timesheet weekly. If you notice a pattern of timesheets not aligning with the delivered work for several weeks, have an honest one-on-one conversation to understand what’s going on.

Hubstaff makes it easy to verify work through:

• Activity data. Time and activity tracking, along with app & URL usage data, show how employees spend time at work. Employees can review their data at any time and even remove time entries if needed.
• Idle time detection. Hubstaff’s idle time tracking feature notifies employees when they’re not using their mouse and keyboard for an extended period and asks them whether they want to keep or discard the tracked time.
• Automated timesheets. Hubstaff turns time tracking data into timesheets automatically. Employees can review their tracked time, adjust entries, and leave notes before submitting a timesheet. From here, managers can approve timesheets with a single click.

Instead of relying on vanity signals like Slack status, Hubstaff allows you to evaluate remote employee productivity without micromanagement, based on the time they spend working and the results they deliver.

When employees can see the same data managers see, verification turns into shared accountability. Both sides work from one source of truth.