The moves to remote or hybrid work schedules requires employers to rethink how they can maintain some sort of control over their employees who are not physically present in the office, but they need to do so without damaging the relationship between employer and employee.

In considering “How much visibility is necessary to ensure success without encroaching on privacy and trust?” in Fast Company, Gabriela Mauch, a vice president of software company ActivTrak, makes  a series of recommendations for establishing what she calls “a visibility strategy that preserves and elevates trust with employees.”

The first two are to consider why visibility is key to address specific challenges and to determine what visibility you need as well as what you don’t. She calls these “being essential design guidelines for defining the business challenge and collecting the data.”

Before leaders establish a visibility strategy, they need to have a good reason to need visibility. Workplace burnout can be an issue as well as “process efficiencies.” In both cases, she reasoned that a lack of visibility leads to a lack of providing the necessary support to identify and correct these problems if and when they arise.

In determining what visibility data the company needs to collect, as well as what it does not need, she argued that they should be related specifically to the challenge in need of a solution. For example, if an employer wants to understand the hours worked by a team or person, he or she should isolate that data specifically, such as how many hours that team or person works at a particular time period and for how long. Such specificity can isolate any issues that may have arisen, allowing them to be addressed.

When communicating with employees about the organization’s visibility strategy, the focus of Mauch’s other two recommendations, the employer should be transparent, she argues.

Thinking carefully about the company’s approach to communication and its impact on the organization, Mauch offered two dimensions of approaches: deployment and data collection detail. The first dimension ranges from the employee having no knowledge of the data collection to full transparency.

“When leaders opt for transparent deployment and privacy-mode data collection, organizations stand the greatest chance to sustain and even elevate trust across their workforce,” she wrote. “In this case, employees are far more likely to feel a part of the solution.”

When taking action to remove barriers to benefit employees, “the credibility of your visibility strategy is only as good as the data you put to use,” she wrote. These data cause leaders to glean insights that enable them to take necessary actions to remove barriers.

“Leaders who leverage insights to support their employees make it clear why visibility is essential in today’s highly digital, distributed, and dynamic workplace,” she wrote.