How to Motivate Employees
Motivated and engaged employees are the backbone of any successful organization, whereas a disengaged or demotivated team can quickly lower the company’s entire output. This is why it’s all the more important to find strategies to keep your employees motivated.
You can motivate your employees by implementing employee monitoring software. Using this software, employees and management can work together to improve productivity, ultimately boosting motivation.
Continue reading below for more information on how you can motivate employees using monitoring software.
How to Use Monitoring Software to Motivate Employees
You can maximize the benefits of employee monitoring software by using it to boost your employees’ motivation. Here is how:
Being Transparent
The first step in introducing time monitoring is to ensure that everyone on your team knows you’re doing it for the right reasons. The most obvious benefit is a rise in profit margins, but many employees may not realize how monitoring might personally benefit them at first.
You should be open and transparent about your expectations for the tool, as well as how it might help them in developing their skills as working professionals.
Explain how employee monitoring helps to maintain a two-way trust system, in which they are held accountable for the results they produce on a daily basis, and you are kept informed about their performance levels and ensure that they are rewarded appropriately.
You can help members of your team realize the benefits of employee monitoring and how it can help them with their own professional goals by providing them with financial incentives, offering opportunities for professional growth, or gamifying the process of tracking time.
Providing Individualized Feedback
Your team might not be motivated to work hard until you establish a plan to give them individualized feedback using your monitoring software. This is because employees wish to be recognized for their unique contributions. Everyone wants to feel like their efforts are being noticed and that their success is being evaluated based on their own merit.
All it takes is a bit of individualized feedback each week to keep your team engaged and encouraged to work harder to achieve their professional goals. You can create a shared sense of purpose by praising outstanding work and drawing attention to specific accomplishments, both as individuals and as a team.
Setting Meaningful Objectives
You can develop unique strategies for each team using the individualized feedback you provide. These strategies can be packed with suggestions for how the team member in question can improve and make more meaningful contributions at work.
There are many people who want to climb the corporate ladder and prove themselves, so it’s a great method to motivate them to take concrete steps toward their goals.
Furthermore, making sure that everyone’s personal goals are relevant and in line with the team’s overall objectives is a great way to keep everyone on the same page.
Can Employee Monitoring Demotivate Employees?
Monitoring employees can undoubtedly boost your employees’ performance, but if done wrong, it can have a devastating impact on their motivation and do the exact opposite of what you intended to do.
This can happen in three ways:
Stress
Employees can experience higher levels of stress if they believe you are continuously monitoring their activities. Being monitored can also place a significant amount of pressure on an individual to appear productive and important to the organization.
Shifting Priorities
Implementing employee monitoring software also carries the risk of employees becoming overly concerned with how they appear through the software rather than actually performing better in their jobs.
They may also start focusing on metrics like the amount of time spent on productive apps and websites rather than the more critical aspects of their job, such as efficiency and quality.
Lack of Trust
Implementing employee monitoring software can also create animosity among employees, ultimately creating a negative and hostile workplace environment. This usually happens when the implementation is not done carefully.
When employees believe they are being monitored due to your lack of trust, they can develop a negative attitude about their jobs and the work that they perform. This kind of mindset can, in turn, greatly impact productivity.
How to Curb the Risks of Employee Monitoring
One easy way to avoid all three of the above risks is to be upfront and transparent about the tools you use to track employees’ computer usage. This means you must explain to your employees that they will be monitored, as well as provide a breakdown of the information that will be monitored and the rationale behind it.
Knowing how the monitoring tools operate and that you won’t have any unreasonable expectations can help remove a significant amount of the stress that comes with being monitored.
Additionally, it can help employees refocus their attention on things that are actually important to the organization.
Moreover, there are other strong arguments in favor of granting employees access to their reports, with the goal of increasing transparency and decreasing stress. This way, you can help employees understand that the purpose of employee monitoring software is to support them in increasing their productivity, and they will feel just as motivated to perform well as they did before.
Final Thoughts
So, while employee monitoring software can work as an incredible tool in increasing your team’s motivation, it’s important to be aware of the risks of implementing these tools. Being transparent about the implementation can go a long way in reducing these risks.