Generally, employee monitoring is an empowering method to enhance workforce efficiency by offering better visibility into not just when but also how. Moreover, whether your workforce is remote, hybrid, or office-first, employee monitoring always helps in improvising productivity.
Conventional employee monitoring has long been linked with oversight and surveillance. This could lead to legitimate concerns among both employees and employers.
According to progressive organizations, employee monitoring is essentially a gathering method for highly significant productivity metrics that contribute to productivity, efficiency, and employee engagement. Employee monitoring, when done effectively and transparently may shine a light on a variety of aspects, including technology, process, and people.
In this article, we’ll cover the basics of employee monitoring software and discuss different types of employment mounting.
To begin with the basic definition, typically Employee monitoring is a way of activity monitoring used by enterprises for a number of objectives:
Also read: benefits of employee monitoring software
What is Employee Monitoring?
Employee monitoring is the use of technology to observe and track employees’ activities in the workplace. Employers may use employee monitoring to track employees’ productivity, and time on task, or to ensure compliance with company policies.
The reasons include:
- Preventing and detecting expensive data breaches
- Increasing employee engagement,
- Optimizing unproductive operations.
Modern employee monitoring solutions have recently demonstrated greater possibilities for complete workforce analytics along with other opportunities such as staff productivity coaching. Businesses may use these contemporary technologies to improve employee performance, increase employee engagement, and eliminate process inefficiencies.
Organizations are now capable of boosting worker productivity and profitability while monitoring and analyzing the work behavior of employees work. This approach may be used to analyze employee monitoring and workforce activity data to uncover trends, and correlations across teams, patterns, departments, and groups in order to get insight into business processes and how to improve them.
Moreover, this activity data can cover program usage, time spent on non-productive tasks, and the most productive time of day for each employee. Employee monitoring provides businesses and workers with a comprehensive view of how work is done in and out of the office, contextualizing workforce activity data and delivering insights such as boosting team, personal and corporate productivity. Your mission is to figure out who, what, where, and when as it can help you get a little bit simpler to determine the target.
Types of Employee Monitoring
There are a few different types of employee monitoring:
Overt monitoring
Overt monitoring is when an employer closely observes an employee’s every move. This type of monitoring can be very intrusive and often makes employees feel uncomfortable. Overt monitoring is usually used in high-security workplaces, such as prisons or military bases. However, there is a growing trend of using overt monitoring in the workplace, even in low-security environments. This is where employees are aware that they are being monitored and there is usually a sign or notice informing them of this.
Covert monitoring
One common type of employee monitoring is covert monitoring. In this type of monitoring, the employer hides cameras or microphones in the work area in order to spy on employees. This type of monitoring can be very effective in detecting employee misconduct, but it can also be very invasive and may lead to employee privacy concerns. This is where employees are not aware that they are being monitored.
Passive monitoring
Passive monitoring is the process of tracking employee behavior without their knowledge. This type of monitoring can be done through video surveillance, computer tracking, or phone recording. Employers use passive monitoring to keep tabs on employee activity and to ensure that they are following company policy.
There are a number of benefits to using passive monitoring. First, it is a cost-effective way to keep track of employees. Second, it can help identify potential security threats. Finally, it can be used to improve employee productivity.
However, there are also some drawbacks to using passive monitoring. First, it can be intrusive and violate employees’ privacy rights. Second, it can lead to employees feeling uncomfortable or paranoid. Finally, it can be difficult to track employee activity over long periods of time.
Conventional Ways of Doing Employee Monitoring:
What is Employee Monitoring? Employee monitoring is not a new term, it has been done in the past in various ways too. Thus, changes in technology have made it possible to track workers’ activity in a speedy and variety of ways.
Over the past few decades, most of the employee monitoring had been done locally in the offices. Thus, making us realize what a difference a generation can make in very little time due to technology.
This enables the companies to rethink how and why employee monitoring is implemented and used.
We’ll also go through some of the more traditional methods of employee monitoring before moving on to a more current approach.
Email and Internet:
We believe that employee monitoring is based on two cornerstones of employee work, i.e. the internet and email. We all know the importance of the internet and understand how important the internet is for increasing productivity as long as it is utilized correctly and efficiently.
The major goal of doing this is to figure out how the team uses the internet and determine if there is any other effective way to enhance it. Thus, businesses should always be concerned about data breaches and cybersecurity. Hackers are clever! Every day, they come up with new ways to obtain data.
Although the usage of email has decreased due to the increased volume of alternative communication technologies, thus, still, we cannot neglect the fact that knowing email communication and usage may still help with worker productivity and efficiency.
Computer-related tasks
Some of these tools enable businesses to monitor desktop application activity in the same way that internet monitoring does.
The information gathered may be presented in very thorough reports that show how much time people spent doing productive work, when they were on the computer, and which programs they used the most.
Keylogging
Keylogging is often known as keystroke logging. This is also one way to monitor employees. As in this method, the tool records the keys pressed on a keyboard in sequence. Moreover, these employee monitoring apps can also take screenshots when predetermined keywords are entered.
However, there are also significant disadvantages to keystroke tracking. As for some organizations and people, it is believed that doing such recordings can lead to infringing on employee privacy. Also, it is known for being utilized for malevolent purposes. This is because keylogging creates employee privacy issues. Thus, considering the increase in employee privacy concerns, all the modern keylogging doesn’t use this approach.
Moreover, they also think that keylogging has no practical benefits due to open communication and a transparent workforce productivity plan. They think it doesn’t add any value to today’s approach of doing employee monitoring.
Telephone
You know that message you get when you call customer service to report a problem with your router? For quality and training purposes, this call may be recorded.
Congratulations to you as for now, you also become a participant in employee telephone monitoring by being on the call! In this way, the organization is keeping track of your conversation and enabling the user to participate in improving the organization in many ways.
Furthermore, it is a method used by enterprises to enhance quality. Hence, through this technique, a corporation takes charge of quality assurance and ensures that its personnel while giving excellent customer service.
Tracking using GPS:
Last but not least our types of employee monitoring are tracked using GPS. So, this type of tracking method is specially designed for the people who work in operations specifically designated as an automobile. For such work, their performance has been monitored through GPS tracking.
Typically vehicle tracking may be beneficial to delivery, courier, and postal firms in order to assist drivers in using the most efficient routes. Moreover, this tracking system may also be used to validate delivery status, retrieve lost stuff, and ensure general safety.