We work from home. How do IT companies control their remote employees?

Pauline Gankovich, director of service and  "Bitriks24" in Belarus :

- We have been remotely since March 16 due to the coronavirus pandemic . We use our own time tracking software. When we left home for work, we introduced a new "feature". If the employee has not set the "Break" status, the system monitors long-term "downtime" and asks him to briefly report.  

We believe that adequate measures are needed, but there is no need to go overboard. For example, in China, there are cases when people are forced to drop their geotags and selfies to managers 3-5 times a day.

Perhaps such methods are popular due to the low culture of telecommuting - both in entire countries and in individual companies. It is difficult for business owners to instantly move all processes online if they did not have such experience. They are concerned about the protection of corporate data, legal issues. In Belarus, only a couple of months ago they amended the Labor Code and legalized remote work. 

I also observe that some of our employees have a longer working day. I think this is a temporary effect - people need to get used to the new regime, learn to distinguish between personal and work time at home.

The teams did not revise the KPIs - the company's tasks and projects were not affected, everything is going according to plan. Our telecommuting and business management service is located in one of the few growing markets today.

Alesya Chumakova, PR specialist, Wowmaking: Computer questions

- We have been working remotely since March 17. The organization of teleworking took literally one evening. Helped employees to deliver home computer equipment and peripherals, if necessary. Only a few people continue to come to the office, whose work is connected with paperwork or the life support of the office.

For more than a week, no decline in efficiency was noticed. Work in our company is organized in small teams of 7-8 people. If earlier all working issues were resolved immediately on the spot during a discussion in the office, now in the morning and in the evening the teams hold online meetings and discuss tasks. Most of the calls are made via Google Hangouts. 

As always, our employees track their working hours in Jira, nothing has changed here. For us, the main thing is closed tasks and the achieved result, so we don't see any sense in keeping track of the time spent at the computer. If one of the employees has a noticeable decline in productivity, the manager discusses the reasons with him.

During the time of remote work , our corporate chat has changed the most. Instead of photos from the office, photos of the home environment, pets, encouraging pictures about the fight against coronavirus began to flash. We hope that we will be back to the office soon and will further strengthen our relationship within the team by playing table tennis, kicker or talking over a cup of coffee.

Cotvec Company (BES Innovation LLC) :

- For the third week we have been working in the mode of partial "remote". In total, the company has over 130 employees. We organize the process of transferring employees to a remote form of work quite smoothly. This was done to minimize risks and losses, primarily in the quality of services provided to our clients. Taking into account the specifics of the sphere (fintech), we are limited by a rather serious framework of information security, so some of the employees remain in the office, some come on request. 

There is no need to apply strict control over the tracking of the working time of our employees, since the correct management processes have been implemented, which guarantees the quality of the work performed. But, of course, we control the timing of tasks and projects in JIRA and Redmine. By and large, everything is the same as in the normal operating mode of the Cotvec company.

Heads of departments note that at this stage, the productivity of employees has not changed. Everything is in the normal mode: no tasks are sagging, everything is going according to plan. Oddly enough, but the lack of live contact also brought positive moments in this difficult period: no one distracts developers, which means that tasks are completed faster, analysts and testers formulate their questions as clearly as possible in order to avoid lengthy correspondence and get the correct answer. For managers, this is a zone of growth and development of management and adaptation of employees to new, albeit temporary, realities. Leveling up soft skills and optimizing a new process. Those. in general, productivity has remained the same, but the load has subsided a little, and this opens a "window of opportunity".