The Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring Software

Improves Productivity

It has been proven by several studies that employee productivity can be significantly increased with the help of employee monitoring software. For instance, this research by Pierce, Snow, and McAfee shows a substantial rise in productivity and business profits as a result of worker monitoring.

The reasoning offered by scholars suggests that monitoring makes productivity more profitable for workers, aligning their most rational behavior strategies with the firm’s goals. It’s also proven that people show more productivity and better results when they know they are being watched.

Such supervision might be extreme for office workers, as there certainly are less intrusive ways to stimulate employee productivity. However, remote work can be much harder to navigate, especially when workers don’t have much experience with organizing the working process at home.

Less discipline, more sources of distraction, and a comfortable atmosphere associated with leisure time can impact the concentration and productivity of employees. Not to mention more difficulties with coordination and supervision of the working process, which also play their parts.

Employee monitoring software serves as a powerful incentive to increase productivity and involvement on the workers’ part. In addition, it helps better understand what tasks take more time and effort, where better cooperation is needed, and where your workers struggle the most. This allows you to make the necessary adjustments to the workload that will boost your team’s overall productivity.

Results In Higher Levels of Security

Monitoring employee activity allows you to ensure better security both for the team and your business in general.

On the one hand, employee monitoring software creates a higher sense of security for workers as they know all actions are being watched. This lowers the risk of harassment, abuse, or mistreatment from co-workers. The incidents can be proven and acted on if someone’s boundaries are crossed or neglected.

Any mistakes or miscommunications in the working process are also easy to trace and analyze, which is helpful when disagreements arise. Overall, monitoring allows you to ensure the working environment is safe for everyone, and it also helps workers feel more protected.

On the other hand, you can protect your business from internal threats as you have access to the full data on each employee’s activity. The study mentioned above showed a clear correlation between employee surveillance and significantly reduced theft risks.

When any important data is accessed or suspicious communication is noticed, you can easily investigate with the help of employee monitoring software. However, using such software in the first place is highly effective in preventing your workers from such behaviors, as they know their actions can be viewed.

Better Team Coordination

The ability to keep track of your employees’ working process helps you better analyze the quality of their teamwork and optimize it to maximize overall productivity.

For instance, you can see how the workload is shared within teams and each employee’s input individually. This lets you see if there’s any disbalance when some workers put in more time and effort than others.

You can also track the working hours and see if any teams or individual team members struggle with their tasks more than others. Analyzing the performance of each worker, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, will help you create more well-balanced teams and distribute tasks in a way that maximizes productivity.

Personal relationships within teams are also meaningful. You can see which of your workers click better and work together most effectively. By creating teams where communication is well-established and working compatibility is the highest.

And, of course, such adjustments will also be very beneficial for your employees. When they feel that the workload is fairly distributed and like their team members, the working process becomes more comfortable for everyone, and productivity also increases.

Improved Employee Engagement

Employee monitoring software is also an effective tool for creating a team of highly motivated and engaged workers. It allows you to evaluate the productivity of each employee and see how involved they are in the working process.

Higher engagement means:

• Better results
• Creative solutions
• Helpful suggestions
• New ideas that help move your work forward and benefit your business

Employees that show less interest and commitment, on the other hand, can cost your business money.

With employee monitoring, you’ll be able to track if any of your workers often get distracted, communicate poorly, or show less productivity than other team members. This way, you can identify the weaker points in your workers’ engagement and take measures to increase it.

You can also see which employees are more engaged in the working process and provide them with more incentives to keep their work up. Overall, employee monitoring can help you improve efficiency and relationships with your colleagues, which will benefit your business.

Optimizes the Working Process

Analyzing the working routines of your employees and their approaches to daily tasks can help reorganize the working process more efficiently. In the long run, this can help increase your bottom line, and help grow your business.

For instance, you can see how much your colleagues rely on certain software and whether it really helps them in their job. This allows you to cut costs on apps and programs that are not quite essential for your business or look for better alternatives.

On the other hand, you can see where your employees struggle the most and look for solutions to improve their productivity. Maybe some workers waste a lot of time performing boring routine tasks when they could show better results if offered more interesting problems to solve. Or perhaps investing in another type of software would pay off by improving the overall efficiency of your team.

As you uncover and address the issues with your employees’ productivity, you can track how well the solutions you implement work in practice. Ongoing monitoring will help analyze the results of your measures and optimize the working process over a shorter period of time.

Benefits for Your Budget

Last but not least, investing in employee monitoring software will help you cut costs in other areas.

These savings come naturally from other benefits I’ve discussed above. Improving teamwork and engagement will bring up efficiency, increasing the profits of your business. Better security means protecting yourself from inner threats and financial losses while also guaranteeing a safe space for your employees.

Cutting off the applications that are not beneficial for you will reduce the costs on software and optimize your budget spendings. Improving the productivity of workers or firing employees that cost you money will get you a better team for better results and future development.

Knowing that they’re being watched, the workers are likely to show better performance and be more productive during their work hours, which means your revenue will go up. Overall, employee monitoring software pays off in many different ways and is a beneficial investment.