The companies have been allotting remote work to employees since 2020. Although now most of them opened offices, employees are not willing to come.
However, it’s good news for the energy industry because the oil demand will surge due to the commute required. Even the aviation industry will get a boost. But due to the surge in the Covid-19 cases in the US, the complete reopening has been pushed ahead. For example, Microsoft had a complete reopening planned on October 5th but due to the increase in Covid-19 cases that has been postponed.
So, when companies are still allowing work from home, how are they going to track the productivity of such employees? The companies have to reopen offices in three phases where the first phase, is calling only essential employees to work, and the second phase consists of requiring workers to attend offices in shifts to maintain social distancing. In the last phase, the offices ask all the employees to work from premises but, i.e. having a hybrid workforce.
These are the ways managers can be trained to handle remote employee tracking:

• Installing project management software: But how to track productivity when employees are still working from home on at least some days of the week? Companies can ensure that such employees install some software on their PCs, like a project management tool.
  

  It’s the job of the managers to handle the project management software, and hence corporate learning is required.

Most of such software has tools that can allow managers to create task lists and their deadlines, and they can then execute work for employees. Such software also has a time tracking tool through which an employee can be monitored the time devoted to a certain task. If an employee is not working on a certain task, then he can be asked for the delay. A manager can get to know how many hours an employee works during a day and hence overworked employees can be advised to take rest.

If the manager notices that an employee is underperforming despite his working time showing otherwise, something is indeed impeding his performance. So the former can ask him and then schedule his teaching session with the IT team.

• Key performance indicators: This way, employees know how much they are required to perform.
• Complete understanding of work profile: The workers must have complete clarity about how they must contribute to the job. For example, how much work they are supposed to do in a day. Employees must know if they have to attend meetings or not because some of them might not be required to do so? The workers must have knowledge of Core hours when they have to be online regardless of their work timings. So, during such hours, employees talk to each other about conflicting work issues.
• Using cloud-based collaboration tools: These tools are cloud-enabled, so employees don’t need to install them too. Best of all, they have an IP restricted feature so that no one outside the team can access them. A collaboration tool that requires corporate learning for managers and clients must have a chatting feature enabled so that discussions can happen on time. There should be facilities to share files on chat and through emails. In-file annotation is another extra facility so that the team members can share a complicated file highlighted with notes and understand it better. However, for employees to master all these features, corporate training is important.