In the news today was a funny yet disturbing story about a top notch employee who outsourced his own work to China.
The employee himself made a couple of hundred thousand dollars working as a software developer, but he wasn’t actually the one doing the work. He paid a firm in China $50,000/year to do it all for him. While his Chinese counterpart was working, the American employee surfed the web.
In an article on Inc.com entitled How to Lead Without Being There the author discusses how important it is to allow employees to take on some leadership roles and that relinquishing control to some degree is requisite to grow a business.
I thought there was an interesting parallel here to leading remote employees and since we were just getting into the topic last week, now I’d like to delve a little deeper.
Could remote employees actually lead to a more productive workforce?
This week is National Telework Week and employees all over the country are pledging to park their cars and work from home. The country is expected to save over 5 million pounds of pollutants during this single week!
Timesheets.com wants to encourage even more businesses to participate by helping businesses plan their management strategies.
More and more businesses are hiring telecommuters as more and more web-applications help make jobs mobile. The Internet has enabled small businesses to take advantage of serious savings by employing these remote workers.
The cost of leasing an office, powering it, networking it, furnishing it, ect. is expensive for just a 5 employee operation. Just think what a business could save by eliminating all those costs.
However, managing remote employees has its unique challenges. Employers need a way to keep track of their employee’s time on the clock even when they’re not around to monitor them. In the past, many telecommuters have used spreadsheets or the body of an email to report their time. Now, web based applications offer a more accurate, real-time way to track time. It’s almost like remote employees are popping round the office to punch the clock before heading home to work.
The following are some of the problems a real-time web application like Timesheets.com can solve.
