Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring: In today’s fast-paced environment, if your staff is aren’t productive, you have little chance of surviving. Thus, this leads to the question: how do you calculate the level of productivity among your employees? Your staff may put in long hours for your business, but can you track their productivity throughout the day?
It doesn’t matter how much time they spend with you in general; what matters is how many productive hours they provide to your company. So, should you keep track of how much time your staff spends working and how much time they spend not working? Yes, you must.
Some companies have decided to track employee behavior to learn how employees interact with clients and coworkers and how much time they spend on the job. However, concerns have arisen with the shift toward monitoring regarding privacy regulations. While working on employee monitoring, there comes a question regarding the finest line between observing someone and violating their privacy? Thus, sometimes it’s difficult to define the line while dealing with employee monitoring; if the practice gets too pervasive, there is a chance your company may lose some vital personnel or significant revenues.
Today, in this article, I am speaking about the pros of tracking employees‘ active time and you will learn how it may affect the organization’s overall performance. Along with the cons of working in an environment with employee monitoring Software. Compared to benefits, there are very few disadvantages that can easily be counted on fingers. Yet these disadvantages can lead to affect the overall performance of the company.
Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring
Pros Of Employee Monitoring
Among many pros of employee monitoring, workforce productivity and the organization’s performance have been the most highlighted ones. Moreover, we now know that, when an employee monitoring system is used correctly, an organization can get these benefits:
- Employers can use it to assess company operations. As a result, the team becomes more engaged.
- Employee retention costs are reduced.
- Transparent data is provided.
- Safeguards against data loss
- Management that works
Effective Management
Data-driven insights will help you construct a more efficient workforce by identifying your employees’ strengths and flaws.
Seeing where individuals struggle and excel offers you the ability to distribute their duties more effectively. We know that matching your team member’s abilities and skills to the proper assignment is quite critical and allowing them to perform their best work can be challenging!
It’s just as challenging to recognize team members’ flaws. Employee monitoring solutions that focus on behavior data can help you stay pinpointed. Thus, members of your team require more training or coaching.
You can notice that someone is taking an exceptionally long time to complete an assignment. Make contact with them. And see if they can easily understand how to use their tools. Moreover, discover if they understand how to set up tools or not during training sessions. Investing in your worker’s professional development is one method to boost team engagement and satisfaction.
Unlock/Untapped Revenue from a Fully Engaged Workforce.
It is well acknowledged that approximately 70% of Americans in the workforce are disengaged with their jobs. And the other 40% of Americans are not involved in any way.
With employee disengagement being such a big issue, it is the responsibility of an organization to use tools that help them figure out employees’ behavior, likewise who’s disengaged, why they’re disengaged, how much it’s impacting their business, and what they can do about it. Strategic growth manager Shaley McKeever called active disengagement the silent killer in a post on Recruiter.com.
Does that make you feel uneasy? It certainly should! She says that an actively disengaged employee is not only unhappy and not doing their job effectively, but they also act out their misery and “undermine what their engaged peers accomplish.
Unfortunately, when employees are disengaged, they are usually unconcerned about the company’s goals or performance. They merely come to work to be paid.
Can you estimate how much the American economy loses each year because 67 percent of the global workforce is disconnected? You were correct if you guessed $350 billion!
Behavior analytics will reveal who on your team is disengaged or on the verge of being disengaged. Data, for example, will reveal how much time employees spend on non-productive apps. If you plot the data in a graph over time, you can observe whose productivity has grown, dropped, or remained constant. If necessary, you can meet with the team member using this information. This way, you can find out what’s going on and how you can assist.
Financial Development
Unproductive employees cost American firms $650 billion every year. Implementing worker analytics can help you reduce this loss. In addition, there is productivity tracking software. Successful and data-driven companies use the insights provided by monitoring software to boost productivity, revenue, satisfaction, staff retention, sales, and efficiency.
Take, for example, the restaurant business. According to MIT research, when eateries began monitoring their personnel, income climbed by 7%. What is the explanation behind this? As far as we can determine, says research scientist Andrew McAfee, performance increased simply because individuals started doing their jobs better.
Furthermore, the sorts of data gathered by employee monitoring software enable you to make more educated business decisions. You may discover that you have too many staff working on a single project.
Why not give a couple of them a new project to make better use of their time and the company’s resources? Alternatively, determine whether whatever program (that you’re paying for) isn’t getting much use. Stop squandering money by getting rid of stuff you don’t need.
Safety and Security
Breach victims are more likely to be large corporations. This is due to the businesses’ size and the greater risk of human mistakes leading to attacks such as opening phishing emails by accident. Equifax, the consumer credit reporting service, had almost half of America’s names, social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and driver’s license information stolen.
Internal threats do exist from time to time. After leaving a firm, 87 percent have taken corporate information and papers with them.
In all of its forms, employee monitoring gives managers a clear picture of what employees are doing and when they are doing it.
The data logs also serve as your company’s black box in the event of any security breaches or legal difficulties.
Cons of Employee Monitoring and How to Address Them
Wow! We already know the importance and benefits of employee monitoring. Businesses always seek ways to grow productivity and revenue. Thus, employee monitoring is a good option, yet there are many disadvantages to employee monitoring tools. However, there is a slew of fantastic advantages the companies propose using this system! But still, some cons are holding you back from getting started with these employee monitoring tools right now? Thus, you might have ideas about how to cope with a perception problem.
See and set the goal of evaluating your employees’ activities. You should create a business culture in which everyone can give their best and collaborate as a team, not spy on them. However, your team might not perceive it that way at first, but you can see the cons as resulting output in the long term.
Hence, these are the highlighted cons:
Employees’ Privacy
We believe that privacy concerns can be a major issue when employee activity is monitored. People use work computers for personal reasons and want their activities to remain secret. Also, the concept of someone monitoring their every action” is unappealing to many people.
Though it sounds very spooky! But you cannot deny the fact that the privacy of any employee should not breach. Thus, your organization must assure and convey to your employee that their privacy is extremely important and it should not be taken for granted under any circumstances.
Make sure you already know that you’re not looking at employee personal data, but you’re analyzing it. For instance, personal information such as passwords, driver’s licenses, passports, and social security numbers aren’t interesting to you.
Employee Faith
The other important issue that goes parallel to privacy and which individuals have with monitoring is the issue of trust. If people believe you are spying on them, they may experience resentment and unhappiness, leading to disengagement. That’s a bit counter-intuitive in terms of your objectives.
Employee support may be gained by proving that you are monitoring for the right reasons. Don’t track only for the sake of tracking, and don’t be intrusive until necessary.
The ideal approach is to be open, so make sure your staff understands that the monitoring system is simply used for analysis.
Stress Levels have Increased
A person may automatically work more, take fewer breaks, and be concerned about their productivity if they are aware that their actions are being recorded. All of this might cause your employees to become more stressed, resulting in a reduction in morale and employee turnover – the exact opposite of what you want to achieve!
You may assist assuage these concerns by taking measures to clarify the sorts of data you’re collecting and why. Follow through on your plans to exclusively utilize the programs for analytics-related tasks. Don’t mistreat your tools like the boss discussed in an article presented in Psychology Today.
Where this supervisor would repeatedly display a notice to an unproductive data processor. While adding a note that You are working less hard than the person next to you.
Legal Implications:
Legal Consequences and Risks
When you opt to monitor your staff, you accept a certain degree of a legal risk. Employers can lawfully track employee behavior on work equipment under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA). However, each state has its employee monitoring regulations, which may be more stringent than the ECPA. You must ensure that you comply with all federal, state, and local monitoring regulations before installing any monitoring solutions.
Even if local monitoring rules are followed, it’s possible to over-monitor your personnel, which has its own set of problems. If you watch too closely, you may get access to personal employee information, such as private messages, medical data, and sensitive financial information. You are then in charge of safeguarding those critical bits of data and information. If you don’t, and the information is leaked, you risk damaging your company’s image among potential workers and clients, as well as facing legal action.
Indeed, if you’re not careful, your surveillance operations might land you in court. While you have the right as an employer to monitor your employees through various techniques, your employees also have a reasonable right to privacy.
Surveillance that is intrusive, deceptive, or intrudes on workers’ personal life may be considered a violation of their right to privacy. A breach of confidentiality might easily result in a lawsuit being filed against you or your company.
Time and Resource Costs
Employee monitoring involves time and money. You’ll need to research to locate the best monitoring tools, draught a new policy, and then put it into action in your company. After you’ve set up the system, you’ll need to focus on fine-tuning your tracking and management procedures to get the most out of it.
You’ll also have to go through all of the data you collect, which is especially important if you want to utilize it to better your firm. Spending time, money, and energy on employee monitoring may divert your focus from more critical duties or initiatives.
Hence, there may be a lasting shift in your workflow depending on the tools you use and how involved you are. It may be worthwhile in the long run, but there’s no way to eliminate the costs of staff monitoring.