Managing Remote Workers

As we all know, Work From Home (WFH) arrangements became important with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, five years on, about a quarter of the US workforce still works from home. WFH appears to be here to stay, but it represents an employee management challenge. Since monitoring offsite effort is more difficult, the professions that tended to take advantage of WFH, at least initially, have been those in which constant monitoring has been less important.

Increasingly, firms are increasingly taking advantage of newly developed monitoring tools for remote workers. VPN Express reports that three types of remote monitoring have become common.: Online tracking tools (74%), Physical surveillance (75%), and AI-driven metrics (61%). These tools can mitigate moral hazard problems and make WFH available to larger classes of workers, but they may also undermine trust and, therefore, incentive pay schemes.