Monitoring of Employees: Pros and Cons
Monitoring of employees is a procedure of understanding what tasks your team members are doing, how long it takes for each member to complete a task and how actually they are doing their task. This whole process of monitoring is one of the best ways to maintain productivity, keep track of working hours and most importantly establish accountability.
When it comes to monitoring of employees on remote teams, it’s almost impossible to know what everyone is working on. In a remote team, employees are scattered in many places, and surely you don’t want to pay your employees to do their personal tasks during work hours? To prevent such situations, and to ensure proper administration and management it is best to use employee monitoring tools.
In this article, we will take on the balanced comparison of the pros and cons of employee monitoring to help you determine if it is worth doing or not. We’ll also highlight a monitoring tool, and then give you a few tips on conducting ethical surveillance in the workplace.
What are the pros of monitoring of employees?
Boost Employee Productivity: It is a clear fact that your employees do better work when they know they are being monitored. And also you won’t know how productive your individual teammates are unless you monitor their productivity. Workers become more efficient and conscious of their actions and work, as they know their work is monitored and will be evaluated by their managers. With the help of employee monitoring tools, you can get daily and weekly reports outlining:
- The hours your employees worked.
- The applications they used or the sites they visited
- Fair analysis of what your employees have been doing throughout working hours.
On the basis of records, company owners or managers would be able to evaluate the employees in the best possible manner. It also helps you to identify employees who are not performing well, the reason behind their low performance so you can work on improvements with particular employees.
Plus it is also a great tool for employees to access their own productivity stats to help them for self-correction and any further improvements.
Increased Security: We are referring to the term security in a broader sense which includes IT security, legal security and also employee security. To protect your organization from any malicious act or any security accident, it is best to stop your employees from accessing illegal websites, illegal programs, or conducting any other illicit activities with company property just simply by monitoring their behavior.
This software allows you to view saved documents, websites visited and messages sent with company property, like computers and mobile devices. It also monitors company files, account information and client data, thus this whole prevention system can protect your company from insider threats or suspicious behavior just by simply installing a monitoring tool.
Cost Effective: The pricing of employee monitoring software varies depending on the features it provides. But the majority of the monitoring tools set their price by the number of users and the number of licenses you need, which typically costs a certain amount per user, per year. Most services are hassle free, easy to conduct and do not charge an additional fee unless you ask for upgrades.
Implementing employee monitoring software is a money-saving tool, because with the use of it, employees are productive during the time you’re paying them for, and you are more likely to get your money’s worth as an employer.
More Transparency: Every manager struggles with keeping their team in-sync, and as remote work becomes more and more popular, it can be quite a challenge to unify a group of people. This monitoring software provides you ways to connect with everyone, with the access to data from each and every employee. With the use of these tools you can get a granular view as well as a high-level view of what’s happening.
For example, time-tracking tools monitor the number of hours your team works and how often an employee reports late to work office. Access to this data will help you determine employees’ productivity efficiently and take the necessary steps for further maintenance.
What are the cons of monitoring employees?
Even though there are more positive results, there can be some serious unintended consequences to employee monitoring as well—many of which you can probably forecast with employee monitoring.
Privacy concern: Most employees may get worried that their organization is monitoring them even during their non-work hours. They fear that their private activities are being recorded and that their passwords are at risk.
To avoid such conflict, it is best to let your employees know the features of the monitoring tools you are using, the purpose of it and the control they, as an employee, have over what gets monitored. Once you help your employees understand this, they’ll be more willing to comply with it. It is also best practice to start monitoring your employees only after getting their consent to do so.
Too much access can be dangerous: You also have to remember that most people prefer freedom and less surveillance. Too much surveillance can hurt employee morale and instead of making employees more productive it can have the reverse effect.
You can resolve this issue by informing your team upfront about the monitoring software being used and that you are following standard workplace policy, in which you respect their privacy and you will not misuse the software to collect any personal data.
Better administration means, better results
In short, employee monitoring is very useful in maintaining a peaceful environment within the workplace, if you know how to balance it properly. What if you could get all the pros of employee monitoring tools, without any of the cons?
Well the good news is, it is totally possible to get a hassle free unparalleled monitoring service. CloudDesk lets you choose unique settings for each user on your team, which many employee monitoring tools don’t yet offer. CloudDesk is an employee-friendly tool that enables end users to turn the monitoring feature on or off. The tool offers website and app monitoring features plus screenshots, and board admin customizations including proactive alerts which will help you to determine and aggregate productivity metrics as well as a fair amount of insights-driven business reporting. To make your monitoring beneficial for both employers and employees, try CloudDesk for seamless management.
