Since the Covid-19 outbreak, employee surveillance has been in trend among organizations. Have you ever wondered why? You will get this answer in this article. But first, let me ask you, What is the most crucial factor for the growth of your business? The answer is – Its employees.
Employees are the most valuable assets to a company, and an organization’s survival depends on the productivity of its employees.
Your employees may work hard throughout the day, but how can you be assured that they were productive? Because it is not important how much time they are dedicating, but the productive hours are what matters for the growth of your business.
That is why employee surveillance is so important. Monitoring and tracking employee’s activities have many benefits for the organization and the employees as well. That is why it is crucial to know all the aspects of employee surveillance. In this article, we will discuss what employee surveillance is? Why is employee surveillance important? Employee surveillance law you should know about and the best practices. Let’s get started.
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What Is Employee Surveillance?
Employee surveillance is the practice of monitoring your employee’s activities in the workplace during office hours. It is the best way to strengthen security and improve productivity. Employee surveillance includes keeping a tab on clock-in/clock-out time, breaks, task management, productivity, efficiency, and other activities during office hours.
Employee surveillance is an essential factor for implementing and creating a productive and healthy workplace. But it is also a very challenging task. That is why many organizations and employers use employee monitoring software (like EmpMonitor) to monitor their staff rather than performing it manually. We will discuss employee surveillance methods later. But first, let’s discuss the importance of employee surveillance.
Why Is Employee Surveillance Important?
Employee surveillance plays a vital role in the growth and success of the company. You discover many things about your employee’s behavior, strengths, weaknesses, and a lot more. It also gives you exposure to the crucial insights that may affect your position in the market. All the insightful data that you get from employee monitoring helps you build a proactive workplace. Here are the benefits of using employee surveillance system:
Increased Productivity:
Increased productivity is the most prominent advantage of employee surveillance. Employees tend to be more productive when they are being monitored. They work on the assigned task and complete it within the given time frame rather than scrolling through meme pages. Ideally, employees should be disciplined and focused on their job, even without monitoring them. But unfortunately, not every employee has a strong work ethic and is determined to do their job.
You Get To Distinguish The Areas That Need Improvements:
When you monitor your employees, you get to know the areas that need to be improved. Some employees may be struggling with something but not say anything about it. You can pick out the difficulties and assist them with their problems. It will encourage the employee to be more productive and help you build healthy work relationships with your employees.
Better Resource Management:
All the data and insights you get from employee surveillance helps you make informed decisions. Collecting and analyzing crucial data plays a vital role in running a company. It helps to understand which projects or tasks require more attention, and you can allocate your resources accordingly.
Helps You Prevent Insider Threats:
There is always a chance that intentionally or unintentionally, employees take any action that may cause harm to your business. Maybe someone might open a phishing email, access any prohibited websites, try to access unauthorized data, or do any other activity that may compromise your data safety. But when you are monitoring your employee’s activities, you can identify incidents and take reasonable action when such incidents occur.
Efficient project management:
Employee surveillance helps the manager to specifically monitor different stages of the projects. It also helps to make efficient decisions to tackle any issue or do modifications to bring better results and ensure deadlines are met.
Enables prompt response to requests:
An essential aspect of maintaining a satisfying workplace is attending to the requests of employees promptly. If an employee has an emergency at home and has to go immediately, they would appreciate a quick turnaround to their request. With employee surveillance apps, employers can see such requests as soon as they are posted and act on them accordingly.
Helps supervisors to generate objective, accurate feedback:
Constructive feedback is vital to employees’ ongoing development. Feedback clarifies expectations, helps people learn from their mistakes and builds confidence. With the employee location tracking system, managers can provide real, tangible, and correct performance analysis to the employees. The feedback will be more meaningful and accurate when armed with real-time statistics related to the employee’s attendance, project status, and so on.
According to Harvard Business Review, recognizing employees is the easiest way of boosting their morale. Make it timely. Do not wait for monthly meetings or annual performance reviews. The OGO survey respondents reported an average of 50 days since they last felt recognized in any way at work. That is way too long. Good things are happening all around you. You should notice them and seize any opportunity to acknowledge them.
What Are The Employee Surveillance Laws?
Government and state privacy laws give the template to employers as to how far they can go with their employee surveillance programs. In some cases, employers do not have to inform employees they are being monitored, depending on their state and local employee monitoring laws. Some regulations do require employee consent.
“As a general rule, employees have little expectation of privacy while on company grounds or using company equipment, including company computers or vehicles,” said Matt C. Pinsker, adjunct professor of homeland security and criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Some points to be considered while finding legal precedents for surveillance
- If employees are working on company-provided equipment. They agree that these devices will be used primarily for business purposes. In this instance, the employer has the right to monitor communications on the company-owned devices — but not without following some ground rules.
- Most importantly, employees must be notified that monitoring is taking place on their devices. It means that employees have every right to know what type of monitoring employers are using, why, and how they will store and use the data.
- Since some countries don’t have specific laws detailing workplace monitoring practices, the government recommends employers strike a balance between employees’ right to privacy and the company’s legitimate interests.
Also Read
Employee Privacy vs. Employee Productivity: How Employee Monitoring Software Keeps A Balance?
What Is Employee Monitoring Software: Its Uses & Importance Explained
Employee Surveillance Best Practices
A major aspect for organizational growth is dependent on individual productivity quota and for a long, employers have been trying to find efficient Employee surveillance models to ramp up their efforts to monitor employee productivity even before the covid-19 pandemic sent an unprecedented number of people to work from home. According to the 2018 Gartner report, 50% of 239 large organizations were monitoring the content of employee emails and social media accounts.
Tempting as it may be to implement monitoring in the service of protecting productivity, it also stands in stark contrast to recent trends of misusing data obtained from this model, and here we are introduced to the ethical point of Employee surveillance.
#1. Choose your metrics carefully by involving all relevant parties.
Choosing the right metrics to evaluate employees requires engaging all of the relevant parties in the process to determine those metrics, from hiring managers to employees who are being monitored. So they can provide their input for surveillance criteria and privacy
#2. Be transparent with your employees about what you’re monitoring and why.
Part of respecting someone’s privacy is that you take time to openly and efficiently communicate all aspects of monitoring with them. Tell your employees what you’re monitoring and why. Give them space and opportunity to offer feedback. Share their performance and also help to provide proper counselling to improve the parts that need attention. Studies have shown that transparency helps to increase employee acceptance rates and what they are comfortable with.
#3. Offer carrot instead of stick
Generally, with surveillance and monitoring, employees feel threatened to show their best suit forward but offering a carrot in place of a stick can smoothen this situation. By using an Employee surveillance tool you can figure out how to help your employees be more productive or reward them for their hustle.
#4. Decrease monitoring when and where you can.
The impulse to monitor is understandable. But as people return to their offices and even as some continue to work from home — look for places to pull back monitoring efforts where things are going well. It communicates trust to employees.
At the end of the day, your employees are your most valuable assets.
Treating them with respect is not only something they deserve. It is crucial for a company’s retention efforts.
#5. Using Employee Surveillance Apps:
Whether you want to keep track of your in-office or remote team, online employee monitoring technology may be the solution. An excellent employee monitoring tool should offer various functionalities like time tracking, distraction management, and features to differentiate between productive and unproductive activities.
Employee monitoring and productivity software like Emp monitor is the most widely used system to keep track of your employees today. It is because EmpMonitor provides the most direct employee monitoring experience compared to the other methods. It is the least invasive way to monitor your employees and can be used by in-office and remote work teams!
Types of Employees Surveillance:
There are various ways to monitor employee’s behavior and activity during office hours. And which type of surveillance you should use, depends on your industry and requirements. You might consider choosing the method that could lead to proper management and provide a better productivity performance.
Monitoring Based On App & Website Usage:
While monitoring an employee’s Internet usage it is evident to consider what job profile demands. For example, if a social media manager is accessing social media websites such as Facebook or Instagram. It may be part of its research work but can be easily misunderstood as personal web surfing. URL blocking and Web Filtering is another way of restricting Employees to access websites that are not part of their work profile.
With the help of EmpMonitor, you can see all the websites that employees access. It provides detailed reports on employee’s internet activity.
Screen recording and screenshots
The Hawthorne effect claims that increased observation equals increased productivity.
Many companies have taken a long time to shift to a remote work culture because of the very reason that a manager needs to be present in the same room to observe their Employees.
EmpMonitor aims to provide screenshots of Employees while working to get constant updates of the work. It can also take images of Employees through a webcam to ensure they are working on their specified task.
File Tracking and Time Recording
The general method to apply for better employee management and surveillance is a Time tracking system where Employees are in complete control of when they are working and when they need a break with just a touch of a button. EmpMonitor tracks employees’ clock in/clock out, office hours, active hours, productive hours, and much more. Employees can Efficiently see how much time they have spent on a specific task and the productive hours that they can share with their manager on a routine basis.
Keylogging
keylogging is the method through which each keystroke on a keypad is recorded in readable text format, which you can later review for efficiency. EmpMonitor keeps a record of all the keys that employee has types during the office hours.
Location Tracking:
Gps tracking and location tracking are also employed by companies generally in Fieldwork services to record whereabouts and any diversions if exist and also helps to estimate the arrival time of their services and to communicate with clients.
Conclusion:
Now, it is clear that employee surveillance and having an adequate employee monitoring tool are crucial for an organization. It gives the ability to track all interactions with the company. And all the data helps you detect suspicious activity, improve employee productivity, build a healthy workplace, and improve all the aspects of your business units.
In any enterprise, it’s important to know what’s going on with your team, and many businesses can benefit from employee monitoring. It especially applies for the businesses with remote employees, as it gives them a better grip on what team members who aren’t seen in the office every day are working on. With the help of EmpMonitor, you can easily perform all these tasks and make the workplace transparent and healthy. I hope it was helpful. What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments below!
