7 Ways How Employee Monitoring Software Improves Productivity
2019-12-03
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This issue has been around for decades, even prior to the advent of the Internet as workers had always been looking for ways to avoid emotional burnout and extensive work. While this is a natural tendency, it has a huge impact on the company’s bottom line.
To avoid distractions, one common strategy that many businesses apply these days is remote employee monitoring. A lot of them turn to employee monitoring software to increase productivity. This tool is designed to keep track of employee activities during their work time.
According to a report by Crowd Research, 94% of organizations in 2017 are using some method of monitoring employees.
Below is a rundown of how employee monitoring software improves productivity:
It Keeps Employees Focused
When employees misuse time at work, employee productivity suffers. Some of the most unproductive activities of employees are:
- Buying items online
- Visiting social media sites
- Browsing unrelated websites
You can reduce cyberslacking activities when employees know that their browsing actions are being tracked. They will more likely not to spend working hours on leisure activities when they are aware that an employee monitoring system is in place.
Some employee monitoring solutions also come with time trackers where you can choose to stop tracking time whenever employees are not using their computers for a certain time.
It Equips You to Set Goals
Employee monitoring software lets you set specific goals for your team. The psychology concept known as ‘The Zeigarnik Effect’ tells us that people remember unfinished tasks more than those already done. This makes them anxious about incomplete tasks. The goal-setting feature of most remote PC monitoring software can help you use psychology to your advantage.
It Increases Accountability
Open web access at work can be tempting for employees to engage in unacceptable behaviors. With an employee monitoring system in place, you will know if someone from your team is conducting themselves in an unprofessional manner, accessing unauthorized applications or sites, or leaking confidential company information. Data from Verizon show that insiders are responsible for more than a quarter of breaches that it studied in 2017. Using employee screen monitoring software, you can review data and use them for filing incident reports each time you notice an unacceptable or abnormal behavior.
It Improves Teamwork
In order to improve teamwork, as an employer or manager, you need to get a complete picture of how each member contributes to the overall success. With employee monitoring software in place, you can boost employee efficiency by identifying the strong and weak points of each worker and assigning responsibilities accordingly. This helps them function better as a team. At the same time, the technology enables you to see who among your team are the most productive ones and get an overview of how they complete their assignments so that others can follow suit.
There are apps that require an administrator to manually sort employee activities into productive and unproductive. More advanced technology, however, offers automatic categorization where the software automatically assigns categories as it gathers data about computer activities.
It Allows You to Track Employee Productivity on Mobile Devices
A growing number of employees now use their personal mobile devices for work. This can be both advantageous and disadvantageous to businesses. On one level, the bring your own device (BYOD) policies of employees can curtail operational costs and streamline work processes. On the other, however, the liberty to use their own personal devices may tempt employees to waste time on non-work related activities.
The best employee monitoring software can enable you to monitor the behaviors of your employees even on their personal mobile devices.
It Enables Personalized Performance Reviews
You can improve business productivity over the long run with employee monitoring software that can help you determine your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. This enables you to customize performance reviews.
Personalized tips and guidance provided to employees during performance reviews can boost the overall productivity of employees moving forward.
It Streamlines Business Processes
A lot of companies are now relying on the Internet more than ever to operate their businesses. Unfortunately, the online world is plenty of distractions which makes it more important to look out for how employees spend their working hours. Accounting for wasted company time can be challenging since wasteful activities can be easily ignored. You can boost productivity by using employee monitoring software to track how each employee spends company time. Aside from helping you catch bad employees who misuse working hours online, the tool also provides you with information about how employees:
- Access their computers
- Progress through assigned tasks
- Utilize particular software
These pieces of information can help you curb distractions. By reviewing past activities, you can quickly identify the applications and sites causing the most distractions. This will help you devise plans to deter your workforce from playing games while at work or engaging with irrelevant sites. In other words, employee monitoring software can help companies identify specific applications that drag down company efficiency and waste production time. Adjusting the services and applications utilized by employees can streamline processes and eventually boost productivity.
Should You Invest In Employee Monitoring Software?
Despite the ethical arguments against the use of employee monitoring software, doing so comes with a lot of value. Every company wants a focused, productive and efficient employees. Monitoring the internet usage of your employees can boost their productivity levels and productive hours. Keeping them away from distractions can help channel employee productivity during working hours.
Browsing social media, chatting, playing games, listening to music, watching online videos are detrimental to productivity growth. Occasional non-official internet browsing during coffee breaks and lunch hours is fine but too much of this can be damaging to the company.
Nonetheless, if you wish to maximize its benefits, you need to understand how it works. It will help you to determine the features you need and the most efficient way to implement it in your business.
Some of the most important features you should look for when choosing employee monitoring software for your company are as follows:
- Payroll. This is usually an in-built feature that allows you to create an easy payroll, based on your employee attendance and hours of work.
- Invoice. Time entries are useful in creating invoices, billing your clients accurately, and measuring the profitability of your project.
- Budgeting. The budgeting feature usually comes with time tracking. It allows you to see the underestimated expenses of hours spent on specific tasks.
- Attendance tracker. It should let you track employee attendance, remote work days, days-off and holidays.
- Work scheduling. It should enable you to assign members of the team to particular tasks, projects, and deadlines. Check out the following list of employee scheduling software solutions.
With these tips, boosting productivity and efficiency is streamlined with the right tools and strategies.