employee productivity tracking methods?
 

I need to hire some people to bang away at social media, porn boards, tube submissions etc. I can't imagine having to sit over someone's shoulder all day monitoring them and I can't figure out how to track their work except through traffic generated, which doesn't always tell the whole story.

Anybody have a good solution?

Do a day in that role. See what you are able to accomplish on average. Try to create a metric then based on that. That way you know what's realistic. Most likely you will have to lower the bar unless it's just really easy stuff.

Commission =]

Create an odesk account and tell your employees to sign up as an employee, than "hire" them for your projects and the odesk software will monitor their desktop with screenshots to make sure they are working along with progress reports they need to fill in if required.

This one, costs about 10% extra but you can babysit or check on problems.

Have them log their work on a daily basis? This way you'd know how long it'd take them to do a task.

There is this program i have installed at the office called...employee spy? something like that, i'll check it when i get to the office.

Basically it's a client/server app. Server runs on your computer, client runs on your employee(s) comps and basically tracks window focus. You get a pie chart and shit showing what window had focus what % of the time. Won't nessesarily help in your case, but in mine for instance I started looking for something like this because I had a worker that was spending all day sitting on a remote desktop to his house rather then working. Walking past his desk at a glance it looked like he was working, but he was getting nothing done...

www.Manictime.com ........nuff said.

bDok's advice is on track. Either you or another employee of yours should do just that, for a few days. As one becomes familiar with each site and the required task, it takes less nd less time to get it done. Different employees have different ways and time intervals to report to me. Some provide daily reports, while others provide weekly updates. Consider paying a fixed sum of money for completing a fixed set of tasks.

Good luck.

yeah they can be devious. Hit me up on icq with the name when you get it.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

BDok's advice is good. Also set goals and look at time/money in vs out. When you fall behind by more than say 20% over your intended goal be it a timeline or completion within a budget, you'll know it may be time to pull the plug on the employee or the project.

just msged you the url to it.