For a lot of people, employee monitoring has a lot of negative connotations, but that is the wrong way of looking at it. As a business owner or manager, you want your employees not only to do their jobs but also to do them efficiently and be engaged.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting highly engaged employees. After all, low employee engagement costs companies $450-500 billion each year. You can avoid that in your business thanks to employee monitoring.
There are a lot of ways your business can benefit from employee monitoring, so let’s go through some of them.
Giving your employees a good work-life balance
Sometimes it can be hard for employees to draw the line between their professional and personal lives. This is even more prevalent in companies that allow remote work, which are the ones that use employee monitoring software the most.
But with employee monitoring, you can hold your workers accountable for working outside of their designated work hours. If your workers know you’re tracking when and how much they work, it will be easier for them to take a step back from their responsibilities.
It’s important to give your employees a healthy work-life balance seeing as how 33% of employees who have a good work-life balance say they plan to stay in their current jobs.
Helping with security
While this isn’t something a lot of people think of first when talking about employee monitoring, if you keep an eye on your employees, it can tremendously help with business security.
A security breach can lead to many issues, including financial loss for the company, reputational damage, and legal concerns. And a lot of businesses that experience security or data breaches run into these types of problems because one or multiple employees leak valuable information.
When you monitor your employees’ communications, you can easily detect if any type of security breach is being planned. And if a breach does occur, you can find the culprit and take legal action against them without having to look for the guilty party for months.
Additionally, if your employees know they’re being monitored, they will be less likely to do something that will hurt the business.
Improving and evaluating productivity
Did you know that remote employee monitoring improves productivity? If your employees know their work is being monitored, they are more likely to put more effort into doing their tasks.
Not only will they be more productive, but they will also have ready access to their productivity levels. An employee monitoring tool can record and analyze productivity data and help you determine at what time of the day each of your workers is the most productive.
Not everyone has the same productivity levels throughout the day. While someone might be at their highest productivity levels during the morning, others work best in the afternoon. And with productivity stats, you can adjust your employees’ working hours to get the most out of everyone.
Providing more accurate feedback
Your employees do what they think is best, but their definition of best might not be the same as yours. But they can’t change their behavior and working habits unless they have proper feedback from management that tells them what they’re doing right and wrong.
Using yearly reviews to address any concerns you might have isn’t a good way to solve every issue your employees are dealing with. But when you use employee monitoring software, you can easily find areas in which each employee can improve.
Best of all, you can give them feedback as soon as you notice something that needs to be improved. This can help you create an improvement strategy that is based on data and can be implemented multiple times a year, not just during yearly reviews.
A couple of downsides
Employee monitoring comes with many benefits, but there are still two main issues with it.
The first is that some of your employees may feel like their privacy is being taken away. But if you explain all the benefits and reasons why you want to use employee monitoring software, most of them will be on board.
The second is that there will be more work for the managers who need to sort out all the data provided by the software. But sometimes, it’s necessary to put in a bit of extra work if you want to reap the rewards.
Final thoughts
Employee monitoring software has grown in popularity over the past few years, especially since remote work became more present than ever. If you’re still having some doubts about keeping an eye on your employees, get rid of the stigma and enjoy all of the benefits employee monitoring provides.
