9 Main Purposes of Employee Monitoring
According to a 2021 study, 79% of employees stated they are okay with some form of tracking in the workplace. As an employer interested in deploying monitoring software for your company, what can you achieve using these tools? What can you monitor, and how will it benefit your business?
Employee monitoring aims to optimize staff workflow, improve resource management, and develop better delegation practices. Employers can set realistic expectations and make informed decisions by tracking employee behavior on company-owned devices. It also helps with cybersecurity.
In this article, you’ll learn about various purposes of employee monitoring. Also, I’ll explain in great detail how these tools will help your business in the long run.
1. Improve Employee Workflow
These days, businesses are opting for a hybrid model where employees can work from the office and home. This means you’ll need to ensure your staff works together efficiently, regardless of location.
It’s essential for employees to remain focused as any bottlenecks during the work day can cause significant delays to project deadlines.
For instance, an employee takes longer than expected to complete a specific task in the project pipeline. As a result, the project is delayed, affecting your brand’s reputation with clients.
Without monitoring, it’s next to impossible to know why there’s a holdup with the task.
Fortunately, this won’t be a problem with employee monitoring software. Installing it on their work devices lets you know exactly what they’re up to.
Are they actually focusing on finishing their tasks on time, or are they doing something else that isn’t work-related and is affecting their productivity?
Employee monitoring software also helps improve workflow by identifying bottlenecks when your team is working on a project. You can identify which tasks are causing a delay by tracking their activity on company-owned devices.
For instance, if your team takes the entire workday to complete a specific job that could’ve been completed in a few hours, it might be time re-optimize.
Once you know the bottlenecks, you can devise strategies to tackle them. Rather than implementing a blanket solution, which may or may not work, you can use a tailored approach specific to the situation.
Low productivity doesn’t just make tasks and projects take longer to finish. It can also affect your reputation among clients, which in turn will affect your revenue.
2. Establish Realistic Goals and Expectations
The problem with goals is that if you don’t set them up properly, they can create many problems with your team. For example, you may end up overworking your employees as there’s not enough time to achieve their targets, which can affect their motivation.
Not only will you see a drop in productivity over time, but it will also decrease employee retention. Also, it can affect the quality of their work, as they’ll be rushing to meet deadlines.
One benefit of employee monitoring software is you can track how long it takes to complete various tasks within a project’s deadline. After you complete several projects, you’ll have a clear idea of how much time your team will take during each phase of the project.
This allows you to create accurate deadlines for future projects. You can ensure your team has enough time to complete the project. Also, there won’t be a drop in the quality of the work as it prioritises focus over deadlines.
There’s also increased clarity between employer and employee. They’ll know what they should focus on every workday.
Another benefit of having realistic project goals is the relationship between your brand and your clients. You can deliver what you promise by providing accurate timelines, which you know your team can achieve, strengthening your relationship with your clients.
3. Better Human Resource Management
Have you ever dealt with a project where you had to constantly extend the deadlines as your team could not handle the excess workload? Not only does this hurt their morale, but it can also result in burnout.
Another way employee monitoring can help your business is through better human resource management. As I’ve highlighted above, it tracks everything they do on their work device during office hours.
With this data, you’ll have an accurate estimate of how much time your team will take to finish a specific task. When you take up a new project involving more work that you know is more than what your team can handle, you don’t have to extend the deadlines or overwork them.
Instead, you can plan accordingly and ensure a fair distribution of tasks across the team. For example, as part of your company’s operating strategy, you can hire freelancers and contract workers during the crunch portions of the project.
They can assist your team in staying on track with the project’s expected timelines.
4. Augment Delegation Practices
Knowing to who you should assign various key responsibilities is essential for your business. But how will you know who can handle what, especially if you’re working with a new team? This is one of the areas where employee monitoring shines.
Tracking software will come with various features that’ll help you understand your team from a micro and macro perspective. For instance, you can assign similar tasks to two employees and see how they perform. Based on their performance, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses.
This affects employee productivity as you can assign tasks depending on their skill sets. If you identify an employee who excels in a specific task, you can delegate that activity to them. This decreases how long it will take to complete the task, which is beneficial if you’re looking for a quick turnaround.
You can also improve your team’s efficiency by recognizing who cannot handle certain types of workload. Or, you could give them these tasks, in order to improve their skill sets.
Also, some team members may struggle with particular workloads, so once you identify who’s having problems with what, you can assign senior staff members to assist them.
5. Protect Against Cybercrimes and Data Theft
Did you know that the cost of cybercrimes is expected to increase to $23.84 trillion by 2027? This is a staggering increase, as the figure stood at $2.95 trillion in 2020. What’s the reason for such a massive increase in the cost of cybercrimes?
Well, one factor is that more people are working from home. When employees are not at the office, monitoring what they’re doing during work hours becomes much harder. Are they visiting unsafe websites on your company’s devices? Or are they opening links from unknown senders, which puts your company at risk?
When handling sensitive information like credit card details about your customers, data leaks can severely cost your company. You might have to pay fines and deal with lawsuits, which can be expensive.
With employee monitoring, you’ll always know what your staff is up to during work hours. It’ll tell you all the websites they visit on the devices you provide. If you find anything suspicious, you can inform them about the dangers of visiting such sites.
It can also help against data theft, especially by current and ex-employees. If some of the staff are disgruntled, they may attempt malicious or illegal activities. For instance, they can share your company’s trade secrets or other sensitive information with unauthorized individuals.
If your clients or customers get wind of this, it will damage your brand’s reputation.
With employee monitoring, you’ll clearly know what the employees do on their work devices. For example, you can set up the software to take screenshots and screen recordings at random moments. You can review them at the end of the workday and check for suspicious behavior.
6. Enhance Hiring and Termination Strategies
Employee monitoring can also improve your strategy for hiring and terminating employees. When you get new members to your team, you’ll want to know if they can handle the workload.
Employee monitoring enables this as it can give you a proper time distribution for exactly how employees spend their time in the office.
Depending on the data you collect, you know whether to scale down the workload for new hires.
The same information is also beneficial when it comes to terminating employees. The data tracked via employee monitoring will give you a clear idea of how many hours in a workday employees focus on completing various tasks.
You’ll be able to identify poor-performing employees and give them a grace period to pick up the slack. If they still don’t work on improving their productivity and efficiency, you’ll have all the data justifying why you have to terminate them.
7. Reward the Right Employees
Without employee monitoring, it can be challenging to identify who did what in a project. While your employees may provide various claims about their work, there’s no way to be sure that what they say is true.
If workers don’t get recognition for their efforts and hard work, it can result in lower morale and motivation. This can cause productivity to take a hit, which in turn will impact project deadlines.
One of the primary purposes of employee monitoring is to track the efficiency and productivity of every team member. You’ll know how much time they spend on various tasks. At the same time, you can verify whether they were genuinely working on hitting their targets or slacking on important goals.
For example, some employees could log several hours of work every day.
However, when you review the screenshots and screen recordings, which is one of the many features of Wolfeye Remote Screen, you might notice they don’t really get any work done.
On the other hand, you’ll be able to identify the real high achievers in your team. You can reward them for their efforts, which will positively impact their morale.
When employees see that you notice their efforts, they will be more motivated to be productive during work hours.
It’s not necessary for the rewards to only be monetary. You can use your collected data during performance reviews to promote the best team members to higher positions.
Again, this lets employees know what they should do to climb the ladder of success. In other words, there is a clear path to promotion.
8. Identify Skill Gaps
One of the reasons why project timelines can get skewed is because of skill gaps. If you don’t take adequate steps to address their weaknesses, their performance won’t improve. While you can hire new team members, finding the right candidate can take a lot of time.
Sometimes, you might not even find the right candidate and will have to make do with the current talent pool.
Not only will your team have to cope with having fewer members, but they’ll also have to deal with the increased workload.
Rather than letting go of employees who are behind on the curve, you can give them opportunities to improve.
For instance, the employee monitoring software will help you identify poor-performing candidates. You can then do a deep dive and understand why they cannot achieve their targets.
Armed with this information, you can host (or suggest) workshops and courses to help these employees bridge the gap in their skill sets.
By working on themselves, they will become invaluable assets over time. Employee training can also be cheaper that outrightly hiring highly skilled workers. In addition, it inspires loyalty among new employees.
Similarly, you can use the data you record to provide constructive feedback to your employees. The next time you have a performance review, you can share your notes on how they can improve.
9. Protect Your Employees While They’re Online
Online bullying against your employees, especially if it is done by those who work in your company, can cause considerable damage. It can erode the trust between various team members while reducing their performance. If left unchecked, it may result in the affected employees leaving your company.
With employee monitoring, you’ll know if online bullying is taking place along with who is participating in these activities. You can set up alerts with specific tools that will send notifications when they use specific keywords.
This can also help protect against sexual harassment. You can set up triggers to notify the human resources department and validate accusations by reviewing on-device footage.
Sources
- TalenTeam: Importance of Monitoring Employee Goals and Performance
- Clutch: How to Monitor Employee Performance
- DeskTrack: How SMART Goals are Enabled by Employee Monitoring Software?
- DeskTrack: What is Employee Monitoring Softwrae & Its Importance?
- Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM): Managing Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance
- Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM): Employee Monitoring Tools Gain Traction
- Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM): Should Employers Use Software to Monitor Remote Workers?
- ActivTrak: What is Employee Monitoring? The Complete Guide
- ActivTrak: Pros & Cons of Employee Monitoring
- Hubstaff: Everything You Need to Know About Employee Monitoring
- Harvard Business Review: How to Monitor Your Employees – While Respecting Their Privacy
- GlobalNewswire: Global Employee Monitoring Software Market Size To Reach USD 2.10 Billion By 2030 | CAGR Of 7.2%
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