How to overcome control problems in Remote working using

effective Management Control?

Well today huge number of employees are working from home due to COVID-19 &
implementing effective control strategies has become increasingly important today. Control
techniques or strategies should be productive & engaging from employer as well as employee
perspective. The role of HR in remote working is crucial & plays an important part where not
only they have to see productivity but also employee well-being & better emotional aspects of
the employees as well.

Well employers have come up with several plans to implement control in remote working, but
effective techniques to implement these are:

 Research on changing employee behaviour during changing times: Two-way dialogue

between employees & employers always help, in other words whenever the work environment
changes, it is found absolutely necessary to identify if the employees are satisfied or not.
Challenges faced by Employees should be immediately dealt with & rectifying them, it gives
more authority & control over their employees.
 Focus on organizational values more often: A research conducted by Mckinsey & company
found that employee misconduct increases by 33% during remote working. For controlling
this, remind employees of where to report the misconducts & what actions it would lead to if
code of conduct is not followed.
 Use more objective based short goal planning: While it is implicit that during remote
working it becomes really difficult to track employees & their work. To counter this,
immediate managers should set weekly or bi-weekly goals which can be objectified & can be
tick boxed if done or not. Sync up with immediate team members should be increased so that
proper information can flow amongst members & goals planned could be tracked.
 Output should matter more than processes: Focus needs to be re-shifted to getting work
done on time & output quality from process based. As employees might juggle between
personal & corporate commitments, it is best seen that employers should be more flexible in
their approach & should focus on output rather than processes. Even if they are not able to
join a meeting 10 am in the morning, that is absolutely fine, but are they completing their
work assigned on time? That is of more importance. So overall the metric to judge work
should be output based rather than process based.

 Innovation Encouragement: Increases importance towards productivity can help indirectly in

leveraging control in remote working setup. If employer encourages employees for brining
new innovation to products or services, it will not only increase the productivity, but also
indulgence at the same time with the employer. Other employees also feel encouraged by
watching others innovating & it also create a competitive environment to try something new &
 brings employees closer to the organization & let them have a better control in remote working
setup.

Big employers like Cognizant, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon have already started
implementing above strategies & are seeing better results in remote setup environment.