Employee Monitoring: How Modern Tools Enhance Team Performance

 

Covid-19 upended the norms of our lives in ways we could never have imagined. It altered the business dynamics across every industry and set new trends in motion. Companies were forced to rethink and reevaluate every strategy for cybersecurity, daily communication, and task management.

Working from home was an almost alien concept, but companies had no other option to ensure safety and work side by side. Remote work provided several advantages: flexible work hours, less absenteeism, cost savings, a wider talent pool, and a healthier workforce.

But it also introduced several challenges.

The pandemic boosted a new working model that comprised a distributed workforce. It required no physical presence, and employees could work anywhere and anytime. For many companies, this radical shift meant leveraging resources to embrace the changing circumstances.

The gold standard of success for any business then came down to productivity. However, the challenges that companies started to face when managing the productivity of a distributed workforce were:

• Fostering teamwork as most employees work at different locations
• Lacking in-person interaction can make employees fall away from company goals
• Distractions such as house chores, kids, and pets can directly impact their focus and performance
• Lack of trust
• Difficulty in keeping track of deliverables, particularly if the organization has a sizeable number of employees

Challenges like these made companies and businesses seek out solutions that would aid and abet in the monitoring process.

How Conventional Methods Make it Difficult to Monitor Employees

Employee monitoring has existed in some form or another for decades. However, conventional methods have several limitations. Here are some methods you might already be familiar with

Paper-based Timesheets

One of the most crucial aspects for an organization is measuring the time employees spend on specific tasks or projects. Keeping a timesheet is a traditional practice that tracks the time of individual employees and teams.

 

Many companies may use traditional methods such as paper timesheets or Excel spreadsheets. While these tools have been effective and beneficial, they come with a few caveats:

• No advanced features to make the time tracking process easier and simpler
• Limited accessibility
• Lack of integration and scalability that leads to irregular workflows
• The collected data is vulnerable to loss, inaccuracy, and human error
• Difficult to monitor employee work habits

Manual Clock-in Clock-Out Systems

No matter where an employee or team works, tracking their time is essential to ensure productivity and planning projects.

Traditionally, organizations use manual clock-in and clock-out methods. This involves employees punching in or out on a shared device or by their personal card or sheet.

One of the biggest advantages is that employees must be physically present to log their time. Also with proper security checks, the manual system makes it almost impossible for employees to clock in the time of one another.

However, physical clock-ins are severely outdated in this age of work automation. Time stamps and punch cards are of little use for a distributed and hybrid workforce. Apart from this major downside, there are other disadvantages, which include

• Employees may often forget to clock in and out, which results in manual edits that are time-consuming and data is not accurate
• The system only records time and provides no other insight to analyze employee performance
• No meaningful way to integrate the system into other project management tools

Direct Supervision

One of the oldest but rather a classic way to monitor employees is through direct supervision. Supervisors have to clarify job duties, communicate the company objectives, and observe employee behavior and performance.

Direct supervision mostly involves verbal communication and continuous efforts to ensure employees optimally fulfill their tasks.

This method has numerous benefits, but it might not work if you have a distributed workforce. With the employee not present, supervisors have little control and have problems with

• Evaluating behavior and productivity
• Coaching and mentoring
• Organizing meetings to discuss organization policies or work
• Employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction towards work

Modern Employee Monitoring Tools

To obtain a competitive advantage, companies are seeking ways to boost productivity and improve performance management.

In fast-paced, tech-driven workplaces, employee activity monitoring software is probably the best tool to analyze the performance of your workforce. The surge in hybrid and remote work has increased the demand for such apps.

Today, most managers keep track of their teams through a monitoring solution. However, the scope and extent of monitoring may differ from one app to the next. Some monitoring solutions focus on time-tracking, while others provide a more intrusive way to give access to employees’ emails and messages.

These apps have a host of built-in features to provide key insights into how employees utilize their time and do assigned tasks.

Email Tracking

It is no secret that emails are one of the biggest sources of sensitive data leaks.

Corporate theft is increasing due to a lack of purposeful email monitoring. Without a proper mechanism, your company’s blueprints, marketing strategies, future plans, and trade secrets can easily be leaked to competitors or the highest bidder. Lackluster email monitoring can even lead to millions in losses.

Sophisticated email monitoring can reduce the risk of insider threats considerably.

Few prominent modern employee monitoring apps even let you define certain email addresses and words you want to be notified about. The employees can leak confidential information through emails or click on links with malicious words. However, you will get an instant notification if they include the words or email IDs you specified as alerts.

Email monitoring aims to identify any unauthorized file sharing and meet cybersecurity standards. It can also be used to prevent using company email accounts for personal use.

Social Media and IM Monitoring

Social media apps are addictive and major distractions that cause unproductivity.

The problem with these apps is that employees can waste the key time of work hours. Besides social media, many employees are reported to use IM (instant messaging) apps. Due to the number of such apps, employers cannot track the interactions.

What could be looked to be a mere exchange of words, in truth, can be an employee harassing coworkers or sharing private company or employee information. However, the best way to cut down on social media usage is by utilizing the employee time-tracking features of a monitoring app.

Employers can use screentime analytics and web-history monitoring to establish how much time is wasted on social media apps. They can then use this information to create preventative strategies and policies for their workforce.

GPS

Distributed workforces can often exploit the remote nature of their job. Cases of time theft in the workplace are indicative of this exploitation.

For this reason, employee monitoring solutions include a GPS tracking feature. This feature helps provide employers visibility into where their workforce is during the day. This becomes especially useful if your workforce is always on the move – for deliveries or logistics.

GPS tracking usually also comes with geo-fencing. This feature particularly helps you keep your remote workforce in check. Setting up a geo-fence around where they work remotely can help eliminate any trips on company time and keep employees honest.

Call Logs and Recording

If your employees are not wasting time on social media, they will surely be occupied with calls on company devices.

However, companies cannot determine who they are interacting with and what they are discussing. Some employees may call their family or friends, while others may pretend to do the same but can secretly share company-related information.

Phone call monitoring is an essential element of workplace monitoring. A formidable employee monitoring app should provide insights into call frequency and duration. This data helps you take proactive steps to cull wasted time in the workplace.

Rounding Up

Employee monitoring solutions are becoming the go-to solutions for employers creating efficient workforces. They are an evolution of the manual tracking solutions employers have used for years.

The transition from manual techniques can be jarring. Yet, monitoring apps provide a solid platform on which companies can scale for the future. This is because the workplace of the future is data-driven, and workforce analytics can help companies of all sizes radically transform.

Such insights are only gained through robust employee monitoring solutions. Without them, you will see companies only begin to fall behind. Indeed, modern employees do not like spending time tracking and prefer automated solutions to such problems. This is why adopting an employee monitoring solution sooner, rather than later, is so important.