Do You Need To Be Careful About Employee Productivity Monitoring?

Since 2020, the term “productivity monitoring” has been one of the most searched topics on Google. After the pandemic, most businesses started working remotely. And because of that, it became a big challenge for business owners to manage employee productivity.

Not to be worried, companies have managed to get control over their workforce while also keeping in check the productivity standards in their business using employee productivity monitoring tools and software.

How Does Employee Monitoring Help Improve Productivity?

Now organizations are set up to work more flexibly, where employees can either work in the office or remotely, reducing office peacocking. This all became possible because organizations have access to employee productivity monitoring solutions that can keep track of overall work progress in their business.

However, this has also created a concern about the privacy of the individual that seems to be at stake with employee productivity monitoring. Employee monitoring is a great tool that could really help you to manage and improve workforce productivity.

But it can also cause extra stress on your employees when they try to give out their best performance from the fear of getting monitored. It also creates distrust between employees that may eventually result in burnout. Though employee productivity tracker has become a need today when walking in this tight rope becomes feasible when an employer respects the privacy of their employees while monitoring their productivity.

Bring Transparency In Employee Productivity Monitoring –

Sometimes employers don’t want their employees to know about the implementation of monitoring. The reason could be to avoid the chances of internal threat activities. However, being not transparent about productivity monitoring can lead to even more complications based on the legalities of the resident country.

Although in most countries, employee productivity monitoring is legal. Employees still hold the right to protect their privacy (In case their private data is monitored by others). There have also been cases reported where because of stealth tracking, people have misused the monitoring data to blackmail people.

That is why most companies inform their employees prior about their screen monitoring software policies. That way, employees can also be aware that their performance is getting tracked and give 100% to their work.

Carrot & Stick Motivation –

Often many organizations use Carrot and stick method to motivate their employees. It means that when your employees do a great job, you reward them (offer a carrot) and when they make mistakes, make them pay for what they have done (give a stick).

From what we have seen so far, our observation tells us that this method encourages employees to improve their performance and get rewarded. Employee productivity monitoring will help you to know whom to give a carrot to and whom to give a stick to. And by doing so you can also make your employees cautious enough to avoid making mistakes. That would result in reducing work inefficiencies of employees.

Set Realistic Expectations –

Often seen that, with the growth of the business, employer expectations may also grow exponentially towards their employees. However, things become ugly when the employer starts making unrealistic expectations and pushes their employees to achieve that. Such action may result in creating a negative influence on employees, causing employee burnout and turnover issues.

It’s essential to set realistic expectations from employees. And depending on their stress levels, it’s also necessary to get some slack so they can recover well. There could be a chance that even your best-performing employees may get overburdened with work and not give their 100% all the time. In such a case, make sure to help and support them so that they always be ready to give their best effort for your business.

Delegation & Control –

As you realize the abilities of your employees, you may delegate them appropriate responsibilities. And this would help you manage your workforce in a better way, where you don’t have enough hands to take control of everything. A team with a well-balanced delegation fosters team building. And it also makes employees feel more valued. You can create team leaders and managers and let them monitor their team productivity. With this process, you can make your team responsible for their own doing, while it also creates a sense of responsibility as a leader and a team member.

However, in this process, it is essential to select the right person who can handle the responsibilities well. Based on their abilities, you should judge whether that employee is capable enough to lead their team or not. Also, giving the delegations doesn’t mean that you won’t have any control. With EmpMonitor, an employee productivity monitoring system that you can use to deputize your peers. And also, as an admin, you also hold the access to check on the activities of all your team whenever you want.

When to Monitor & When Not –

Sometimes monitoring too much can be irritating for employees as well. As we have seen, even the employees of tech giants companies like Google and Amazon have retaliated against some strong monitoring policies that seem like a bit more excessive action. That’s why nowadays, most companies are trying to implement fair monitoring policies in their firm.

At the end of the day, if your employees are not happy with their work tracking system, you won’t expect any good results in terms of productivity. As an employer, you should understand that employee monitoring is not like a police inspection where you can treat employees like a culprit until you find a real insider with some evidence.

In case you find something fishy about insider activities in your firm, that’s the point where you need to raise the baton and take the necessary measure to find the wrongdoer.

Select Your Productivity Metrics Carefully-

Simply relying on numbers may not give you the result you might be looking for. For example, if you monitor the email records of an employee, simply the quantity of reading and writing emails doesn’t denote productivity. To gauge real productivity, you need to consider several factors like the login-logout time, office hours, screenshots, keystrokes, etc.

EmpMonitor gets you a perfect solution for that. It calculates productivity based on all crucial factors and provides keystrokes and screenshot data that you can check to ensure productivity. It has this feature, using which you can add some selected tools and applications as productive for an employee. And based on the employees’ activities, it tracks the real-time productivity of employees.

Wrapping Words-

Employee productivity monitoring has a huge role in today’s workforce management. However, while managing workforce productivity, it is also essential to be careful and not create any policies that may cause the disengagement of employees. As an employer, you must treat your employees well and tell them before about the monitoring policies of your firm.

Definitely, it is possible to monitor employees’ productivity while respecting their privacy. And we really hope that the tips shown in this blog post will help you achieve that. In case, you have any further queries, mention them in the comments section.