The case of an employee who scheduled to work from home and went out on that day is a complicated one, and it should be carefully addressed by the company’s managers. This necessity is explained by the need to prevent the improper role model from being adopted by her colleagues and eliminate the corresponding risks. The optimal solution would be to directly talk to Sheila and ask her to inform the company of the reasons for her absence while referring to the complete inactivity in the specified period of time. The failure to provide a sufficient justification for this incident would lead to the reduction of pay for this day and the warning on possible negative consequences for her employment in the future. Meanwhile, the business owners should not only examine this individual case but also develop measures for everyone to follow.
Thus, the controls, which can be put in place to ensure that this situation does not happen again, include several methods. First, the managers should introduce “productivity tracking tools” for employees working from home in order to trace their activity and avoid misunderstanding in this regard (Kratz, 2017). Second, they should use “regular check-ins via videoconference,” which can be an excellent complement to the above approach, allowing to discipline people (Kratz, 2017). The combination of these tools will be beneficial for keeping virtual workers active in the long run (Kratz, 2017). In this way, the probability of events similar to the one of Sheila will be decreased, and the employees will clearly understand the presence of monitoring instruments adopted by the company. Eventually, the communication between the parties will improve, and the responsibility will be evenly shared between them.
Reference
Kratz, G. (2017). How to handle 8 types of difficult remote employees.