We have come a long way from the time when monitoring employees involved a manager looking over their shoulder to make sure work was getting finished. Today, that employee monitoring may involve elaborate software with a form of intelligence. It is an automated way to watch and analyze your employee's behavior during their paid working hours. Different kinds of working conditions will require different kinds of tools for tracking employees.
Here are ten of the reasons why you should invest in tracking software:
1. Social Media Activity
A large percentage of posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, and other social media platforms happen during the day (usually while the employee is at work.) Employers do not want to pay an employee to use their social media accounts while they are at work.
2. Employees Who Surf the Internet
If you have spent any time on the internet yourself, you are aware about how time can get away from you. Monitoring employees for using company time to conduct personal business on the internet is another helpful way to eliminate wasted money and time.
3. Attendance Recording
Tracking an employee's physical presence at work may be done through a system that logs them in when they come to work and out when they leave. If a large business uses this system, they may only monitor staff availability.
4. Idle Computer Time
You can see if an employee has logged in, but what you may not be able to tell is if they are performing their work tasks. Measuring idle time on their computer can give you information about employee actual work time.
5. Manager Control by Distance
If you are on a holiday, or a business trip, employee monitoring software provides you with a way to see remotely the business routine and situations in the company. This is helpful information when you cannot physically be in the office.
6. Working Schedule Flexibility
There are positions that require creativity and flexibility both in completing projects and work schedule. Electronic monitoring of time spent on projects and completed project milestones give you a picture of the productivity of the employee in a flexible work situation.
7. Monitoring Money Waste
It is possible for a creative (yet dishonest) employee to trick you as an employer if they can persuade a co-worker to log them in when they are not physically at the place of employment. Successful corporations are beginning to monitor and calculate payroll based on productive working hours. Only the active time of a monitored employee is included into the working hours report.
8. Overtime Data
If your company pays for overtime hours, you want to make sure the monitored data is true and reasonable for those logged in employees. Heavy workload is not the only reason why overtime increases. Sometimes it is due to unproductive hours, poor employee attendance, abuse of time by the employee using the internet, and other reasons.
9. Software Usage Abuse
Two tasks that a manager is responsible for in their job is to save their company money and raise productivity. One way you can do that is to monitor employee use of licensed (and usually expensive,) software usage. You can eliminate costs on unneeded software costs if your employees are not using it to increase productivity.
10. Monitoring Productivity
When your staff is aware that they are being monitored in these areas, productivity tends to increase. They do not want to be called out for wasting company time and money. This in turn increases their ability to self organize and self discipline.