How Can Employee Monitoring Be Helpful?

How can Employee Monitoring be helpful for an organization facilitating their employee with remote-based work? 

Everyone who has ever worked in the corporate world knows that it is easy to clock in daily from 9 to 5 and get nothing done. Until computers became the office norm, you could stare into the cubicle void all day, pretending to work.

A lot of digital companies’ work is easier to track now because it is screen-based. You’d be able to switch between Facebook and PowerPoint while the manager seems to have a drive-by. But from your device, you can’t hide your passivity. It recognizes what you do.

Before you start tracking your employee during office hours, you should have answers to the following questions:

• Why employee monitoring software?
• How can employee monitoring be helpful for your organization?
• Will employee monitoring help improve the efficiency of your employee?
• Pros and Cons of using an employee monitoring tool

Should The Employer Track Device Activity?

Many businesses could raise this question as they work to maintain their businesses running through the pandemic of COVID-19. The pros and cons of workforce tracking tools must be thoroughly weighed by businesses. In particular, businesses need to note that workers are typically unaccustomed to being watched, and if they don’t understand how being monitored can benefit their business, they may respond adversely.

Organizations should note that surveillance will allow workers to show their hard work and competitiveness. Also, it is much less likely for younger employees to care about managers getting access to their data.

Around half of the staff are not monitored when at work by workforce tracking tools. In general, according to our study of 500 Australian employees, there are pros and cons to workforce surveillance. Companies need to consider how employee surveillance can adversely impact workers’ productivity and recognize that tracking can inspire them to do productive work as well.

Top 7 Reasons to How Can Employee Monitoring Be Helpful

Employers must have a good view of what their workers are regularly operating. Companies use employee tracking software to assess employee productivity. Your confusion about how employee monitoring is helpful for your organization will be clear with the benefits of employee monitoring.

While these tools can increase efficiency, they can also have negative consequences, especially employee morale. Before deciding whether or not to use this program, it’s important to know the benefits of employee monitoring. Here are the reasons why employee monitoring is helpful.

The following points are the benefits of employee monitoring.

Evaluate Your Employees’ Productivity

Have you asked when at work you’re most productive? In an employee tracking system, this sort of information can quickly be evaluated and documented. The hours of the day when you are most effective can be consciously seen and studied. To assess the performance and job production, this method offers you parameters. Schedule your workday to solve critical job challenges in the morning and leave lengthy sessions for the afternoon if you are more effective in the morning.

Protect Company’s Assets

We always speak about protecting the company’s money, but an individual’s assets are just as risky. When workers use their computers for business activity, this risk accelerates. For example, by clicking on a malicious connection in their work email, an employee may become a malware target when browsing the server from their personal computer.

Get Access To More Flexible Working Environment

Tell ‘hi’ to the office remotely. A ten-month call center analysis showed a 15 percent improvement in employee satisfaction while working from home in a new study by Stanford University. When an organization releases efficient software for workforce tracking, workers get more access to the chance to work from home. This results in a decrease in daily driving hours, and because of a quieter and more relaxed working atmosphere, workers report becoming more efficient.

Help Separate Employees’ Personal Life From Work Life 

“Checking email after work is bad for your health.” as Fortune magazine points out. In a recent Worker’s Options Survey, 69 percent of Americans reported checking their work email outside of normal hours. This leads to an imbalanced career and personal life, leading to “psychological, gastrointestinal, and cardiovascular problems.” Strong management keeps workers responsible for taking positions in the workplace and encourages them not to do so. A supervisory system will help to strengthen the separation between work and personal life.

Also, as a solution for the organization, we look at personnel monitoring. It induces staff to feel as if they are ‘being spied on’ or not trusted. That’s not the answer here. Use these seven ways to reassure your workers that the strategic change is advantageous when incorporating an employee monitoring scheme in your business.

Be Safe From Imprisonment And Fines

Threats to computer protection are real and are increasingly growing. When it comes to computer protection issues, staff will certainly be reckless. Without intent, they may illegally exchange financial records by email with an outsider or click a connection in a malicious email without knowing. Several of these acts will lead to personal penalties. By avoiding negligence in these activities, operating with an employee management system will potentially save your bank account.

Collect Real Evidence To Support The Case In Annual Salary Raise

This year, are you asking for a wage increase? A tracking device can assist personnel in this effort to support their case. Using data and analytics in a concrete and quantifiable manner to view the event. Display that from one year to the next, the average job efficiency has improved, indicating that you are a productive worker. Get a raise for that.

Get Effective Feedback From The Manager

This program shuts the doors on questionnaires with uninformative ‘poor to excellent’ standards that are frequently issued during annual evaluations of employees. Instead of preparing for the periodic evaluation to resolve issues, you can periodically check workers and alter habits at the moment. With tracking tools, actual, concrete examples of great success and places to improve can be given to workers.

Concerns About Introducing Employee Monitoring Software

While all sorts of monitoring and analytics tools are helpful to employee efficiency and business development, it seems that with a dose of reservation, all parties view its implementation in their working environment.

The explanations for this are numerous:

• Judicial questions
• Protection of sensitive data
• Privacy Policy
• Distrust

Whether based on prior knowledge or outdated evidence, it would be unethical for a business and its leaders not to thoroughly analyze and remove any of these issues before adopting tracking tools.

May Violate Employees’ Personal Data 

With the introduction of surveillance technologies, the privacy of personal information is another big problem. Workers who have had to switch from corporate machines to theirs when operating from home may be especially apprehensive, as they may be curious where the tracking ends and how much of their personal information the program would capture.

For that reason, diverse sections of behavior tracking applications have varying functionality and protection provisions, from those vulnerable to malware infestation of personal computers to those with stringent security measures in place.

Also, market leaders such as MobileSpy pay great attention to the safe storing of worker records, both on the premises of the customer company and on top-of-the-line cloud servers, where the company grants access to customers who are company staff. When selecting a tech vendor, you must seriously weigh these considerations.

Intrusion In Employees’ Privacy

Initially, the word “computer activity monitoring” raises bad emotions, with workers worried about the boss or even the tech vendor endangering their privacy.

What is being tracked, why, and in what way, as well as the intent behind such a decision and the impending consequences, is definitely what comes to mind first.

As a boss, it is up to you to be fully open on all employee accounts, maybe as early as you enter the process of selecting the right program. It will help to show that you have no negative motives for using screen tracking tools by including the workers in the assessment process, opening the way for their approval of the company’s decision, adding positive criticism, and mentioning affinities between different choices.

Creates Distrust Among Employees

Surveillance of some sort will increase morale and commitment concerns between the company and its workers. Some staff is starting to doubt their professional ethics and usefulness in the workplace, while others look for a slacker who has taken this to everyone. Their interaction with leadership will also come into doubt.

Companies facing these challenges will overcome them by explicitly specifying the intent of the tracking software, its drawbacks, and the goals that the organization aims to accomplish for it.

By sharing the workers’ insights with your staff and using the data to impact your business practices critically, you and your team members will minimize mixed emotions about these resources and openly use them according to their advantages.

Can Cause Legal Issues

The regulatory element of employee supervision and setting common boundaries on what employees can do and under what conditions are both interests to workers and businesses alike. There are various drawbacks and prerequisites to surveillance in different countries or world regions. In terms of monitoring employee behaviors, wherein what manner, and for what reason. No matter how large or small the business is, toeing the line is a delicate operation.

For your colleagues, you need to be open to keeping within the legal borders. This includes notifying workers on time of the plans to incorporate behavior tracking applications, encouraging your employees to give their consent to monitoring, managing the information in line with regulations, and using the information obtained fairly and justifiably.

Does employee monitoring increase productivity?

Definitely Yes! Monitoring the employee will help to increase productivity. Though employee monitoring may look like a terrific approach to boost productivity, it is the best one. By using an employee monitoring tool, you can figure out ways to make both employees and the office more productive. 

You can monitor the internet usage of your employee. And if your employee spends most of the hours on random online activities than on productive work, it is a huge loss for you. So, by using the employee monitoring tool, whenever you see your employee spending time on random stuff, confront him and advise him to pay attention to their work.

Will employee monitoring help improve the efficiency of your employee?

Since employees know they are monitored, they will be extra conscious and pay full attention to their work. And for the management team, remotely monitoring their employee’s activity will aid in promptly resolving the data theft issues. Furthermore, employee monitoring eliminates data loss issues, which helps you save both time and money. A person’s efficiency is greatly affected when they spend all of their time at work.

Pros of Employee Monitoring

Increase Security

When you start monitoring employees, you can view their activities. You can access their tasks, their records, and their actions. If any employee does something that threatens a company’s security, you can quickly identify it and act against it. Hence, employee monitoring can help to identify security issues and decrease security threats.

It helps to track the performance of each employee

In a large business, there are a lot of employees. So it is hard to keep track of every employee, which results in employee mismanagement. In such cases, employee monitoring comes in handy.

Using employee monitoring, you can track the performance of every employee. You can view the tasks they have done, their time invested in work-related activities, their punctuality, and their dedication. Thus, you can quickly evaluate employee performance.

Increase in Work Performance

When employees know that you are monitoring them, they focus on their work more. They try to invest their time more in work-related activities and try to increase their performance. They take less break time. It increases competition among employees about who can perform better.

Reduces non-work-related activities

Non-related activities do not contribute to work productivity, like using social media, text messages, calls, etc. An increase in such activities leads to an overall decrease in the company’s productivity.

Employee monitoring can solve this problem by keeping track of employee social media activities, call logs, text messages, and even their GPS location. When employees know you are tracking them, they focus more on work-related activities.

Regulate employees’ misconduct

Any employee misconduct, like harassment, bullying, abuse of power, etc., inside the company, can tarnish its reputation. It also increases the employee turnover rate. Companies have to minimize such activities to make their work environment safe.

When employees know their employer monitors them, they become less prone to harassment and abuse of power. So, it promotes a safe working environment in a business and decreases employee turnover rate.

Protects company’s information

A company is always in fear that their employee might leak their information. A company contains valuable information that helps them boost its performance and stay one step ahead of its rivals. A company’s competitors are always trying to access this information.

It’s hard for a company to decide which employees are loyal to be trusted with valuable information. One wrong move and all the secrets are out, and it’s all over for the company. This type of situation is precisely where employee monitoring comes in handy.

Employee monitoring keeps a record of employees’ activities on their devices. You can also track their geo-location and capture images of that area. Likewise, you can get access to text messages, files, and documents, even the deleted ones. So if your employee sends your company’s file to someone, you can easily track the information and take action. Thus it protects the company’s privacy and data.

Cost-effective

If you use employee monitoring apps to monitor your employees, then usually, it’s very cheap. Most employee monitoring apps are cost-effective, and you can easily install them on the company’s devices. The cost-benefit increases when you compare the monitoring app cost to an actual individual to monitor the employees.

Cons of Employee Monitoring

Violation of Privacy

When you use employee monitoring on employees, employees feel like you are violating their privacy. The employer can access every task they perform, every text message or file they send. So sometimes, it can feel like a hostage situation.

Decrease in Productivity

When someone is recording every task done by you, you can start to feel conscious. You can feel like somebody’s watching you every single minute. So it can affect your thinking capacity subconsciously. And when you can’t think properly, you can’t work correctly. Thus your work gets affected and decreases productivity.

Legal Issues

Some monitoring apps can be illegal in some areas. So before you install any spying app on your employees’ device, read the privacy policy and terms and agreements and state law carefully. Contact your legal department to understand the legal issues that might occur if you install the app.

Invasion of Personal Life

When you install an employee monitoring app on your employees’ devices, it will record work-related and personal activities. If your employees use the same device in their home at work, you can access all their private calls, text messages, browser history, social media, etc.

It will diminish the line between the work and personal life of the employees. Therefore, your employees might feel like you are involved in their personal life. An employer should provide a separate device to their employees for work-related activities to handle such a situation.

Employee Monitoring Software

We can use employee monitoring software to track employee tasks and activities to regulate their performance. Employee monitoring software controls all user behavior on smartphones, blogs, emails, and networks at work, among other items.

It also includes insider vulnerability reporting, third-party vendor tracking, data failure protection, risk control, regulatory and regulatory features in top-ranking solutions’ monitoring suites, in addition to simple employee surveillance.

Features of Employee Monitoring Software

Some of the features of this software include:

Real-time Employee Tracking:

Employee tracking software maintains track of all employee behavior through more than twelve device items, including web/apps, keystrokes, emails, and network use. With OCR, you can even read on-screen text. Depending on the monitoring criteria, build monitoring profiles for staff, classes, or agencies.

User Behavior Analytics:

This software consists of a feature called Intelligent Behavior Analysis. Intelligent behavior analysis may detect malicious behavior and deviations that signify a departure from the usual behavioral baseline. Insider behavior is detected using dynamic risk scoring and vulnerability screening before it becomes a significant threat.

Insider Threat Detection:

Get alerted right away if the employees are engaging in harmful behavior or if insider attacks are present. Before sabotage, data leakage, or fraudulent attempts, automatically block any adverse activity, lockout the user, or take remote device control.

Policies and Rules Engine:

With hundreds of pre-built rule models, task classification lists, and data categories, you can get started right away. With an intuitive, visual rule editor, you can build your policy and laws. To quickly describe the specifications, use natural English, regular expressions, and sample conditions.

Productivity Optimization:

Define the applications and websites that are productive for your business and get detailed feedback about how your workers use them. Through practical vs. idle time review, you will find out who the laggards are and the top performers. Build a continuous feedback loop to enhance and change the organization’s operation by monitoring plans, tasks, and employee engagement rates to increase overall productivity.

Audit and Forensic:

Employee Monitoring Software can provide effective audit, and forensic tools including video logging of all audio recordings, session recording, employee operations, immutable records, warnings, and optional OCR scans. They have a large array of forensic data that you can use to pinpoint the root of an insider attack.

Third-Party Vendor Management:

Employee management features protect third-party providers and remote users with access to the sensitive infrastructure. This feature gives you more leverage over vendor management and third-party SLAs, as well as a lower risk of cyberattacks.

Compliance Management:

We can use this software to build operation and schedule-based rules to help with various enforcement needs, including audit trails, restricting unauthorized login, preventing unencrypted file transfers, monitoring, and more.

Top 10 Best Employee Monitoring Software

There are many employee monitoring tools out there in the market. You might be in confusion about picking the best one. So, here are my top picks for the best employee monitoring software. I highly recommend you check the legal terms and privacy and policy agreements before installing any software.

• Teramind
• EmpMonitor
• Time Doctor
• Veriato Cerebral
• ActivTrak
• Controlio
• FactoHR
• InterGuard
• StaffCop Enterprise
• VeriClock

Conclusion

Employee surveillance could sound like what a company would do only if its workers were not trusting. But employee monitoring can be helpful in so many ways. With the installation of surveillance equipment in your business, however, various advantages come. Some of these incentives are not only beneficial for you; they are benefits for the workers themselves instead. As a person, it’s impractical for you to have your eyes and ears all over the workplace all the time. It makes more sense, then, to use a staff tracking system. It will let you know at any time what is going on in your business.

If you want to improve the relationship of your workers, you should notice the mistakes made by employees.  Rethink them at a later and easier time instead of finding them out immediately. Especially if they are not serious at the immediate moment. 

The habit of pouncing on an erroneous employee will inspire anxiety and clumsiness if the employee becomes self-conscious and insecure about making errors. This could limit his productivity and may also inspire resentment among the workers towards their superiors.

If you are searching for a tool to track your employees, I have a good recommendation. One of the best employee monitoring applications now is MobileSpy which can be very helpful for managing your employees. With its wide range of amazing monitoring features, it can be an ideal application for your workspace. Signup now and try the free version before you commit to the premium one.