The term employee monitoring has reached a new height of popularity in 2021. We mean it seriously.
Employee productivity and efficiency directly impact business profitability and growth. Which is why monitoring employee digital activity is important to ensure that employees are maintaining a professional and efficient work environment. As businesses all over the world are shifting to hybrid mode, the concept of employee monitoring is also getting popular. Businesses are not capable of checking work activity of remote employees and on the other hand office employees may feel they are being too closely watched if you constantly want to know about work progress.
However, as technology has advanced, it has allowed businesses to view and understand employee work activity in the simplest manner for the better outcome. By monitoring employee computer activity businesses can easily overview how employees spend their time without drilling down into piles of data or micromanagement.
What is employee monitoring software?
Employee monitoring software also helps businesses to collect valuable data and helps to identify problematic behaviours in employees like spending too much time on social media or doing non-work related tasks during work hours. Businesses can use this data to understand employees better and also for their yearly performance review for the right pay raises and appraisal for promotion within the company.
Monitoring work from home employees requires an efficient software that can offer various features for businesses to measure employee productivity, track their attendance, assess their work behavior, ensure information security, prevent time theft and collect proof of hours an individual employee has worked. Let’s look at the most popular features of monitoring software:
What to look for when choosing an employee monitoring software?
There are hundreds of monitoring and time tracking softwares out there, and each of them comes with different features and pricing. Here are some of the features that you must look for in your software:
Time Tracking
Generally the core functionality of this feature is to capture working hours and keep the record in the timesheet. It gives employees the power to clock in and out with the touch of a button. Employees are in full control of when they are working and they can stop the timer for short breaks whenever they need. The software tracks how long an employee works, beside this the software also keeps record of active/idle time and break time, giving project leaders or managers a complete idea about how employees performed the whole day. Managers can use this data to create better estimates of deadlines and completion date and budget with greater accuracy. Time tracking is extremely important for every industry, starting from financial institutes to call centers, agencies, consultants, freelancers, lawyers, work from home employees and many more. Businesses can use the timesheet to bill clients or pay hourly employees with accuracy.
Screenshots
The screenshot feature gives you more control over employee work activity. The software captures random screenshots at regular intervals. You can set the frequency of the screenshot capture, all the captured images are saved in the cloud-based software and you can view them any time. The images work as a proof of work, which will help you understand whether employees are working on the right track or not. This is a powerful feature in determining employees’ productivity and gives a deeper idea about team performance.
Website and app usage
A statistic of salary.com says 69% of men and 62% of women admit that they surf the internet for their personal task during work hours. Being able to track what your employees visit while they are supposed to work can help businesses to address potential productivity concerns.
For example, if you find any employee spending too much time browsing shipping sites and failing to deliver tasks timely, you can share their tracking report to them to show them that they are not performing as per company expectations. Of course, some jobs require employees to spend time on social media and in that case screenshot capture will help you to identify whether they are actually using social media for work purpose or for personal purpose. So overall when you know which websites and apps they visited for work purposes, it gives you a clear idea about their work activities and you can easily measure their productivity towards their given task.
Location Tracking
Knowing the location of your employees is very important if they are working from a remote location. It will help managers to know where their employees are during their working time. Surely no one wants employees to work from a holiday location without letting them know. Remote employees are bound to inform you about their movement if they move from one location to another.
How to Choose the Right Employee Monitoring Software
Does our business need employee monitoring software? With global interconnectivity today’s business has been proven to increase output capacity with a team of globally distributed employees. Just because there are so many different types of software available in the market, it doesn’t mean you need to try them all. Narrow down your list asking these three big questions to yourself before you test any new software.
- Does this software have all the features to help my team to be more productive?
- Will it encourage my employees to continue working for my company?
- Will it help my business spot problems before they develop?
By assessing the answers and your business goals, you can build a highly-flexible employee monitoring policy to monitor and track work activity of your employees for better results. Your monitoring system can directly influence employee productivity, office morale and business growth.
