Employee monitoring encompasses a wide range of tools nowadays designed to track employees activities and time. Its popularity has skyrocketed due to its use as remote workers monitoring tools, but many companies are starting to use it to keep tabs on all their workforce.
Benefits
The reason why employee monitoring has gained so much ground is because it brings numerous benefits to the table. A tool like Controlio can track key metrics such as app and web usage as well as the time employees spend on various tasks.
From that data, Controlio will then calculate a productivity score. This score can be used as a yardstick to determine how productive each employee is, and alert you if it starts to drop and you need to take action.
The overall data captured by Controlio will let you identify if time is being wasted, and help you determine the effectiveness of your work processes as well as whether or not there are any bottlenecks that need to be addressed. It will also enable you to evaluate any improvements that you make or training that you provide.
In fact, Controlio’s features will also let you monitor employees more closely should the need arise. It can capture emails, IM messages, file transfers, keystrokes, and also be used to capture screenshots of your employees’ screens at fixed intervals – and you can get more information about it via the link.
While you may not need these features to monitor productivity, they can help in other ways – especially when it comes to data security.
Legality and Ethics
As beneficial as employee monitoring can be, it does raise questions – both legal and ethical. On the legal front things will vary depending on what jurisdiction you’re in, but in most US states it is legal to monitor employees on work computers or connected to a work network.
Some jurisdictions (like the EU) have greater protections regarding employee privacy however, and may require that you obtain the consent of employees beforehand.
From an ethical standpoint, your main goal should be to ensure that you do not infringe on the employees right to privacy. To do so it is always best that you make sure you notify them that you’ll be monitoring them and obtain their consent. Additionally it would be best if you avoid monitoring any areas that may be too personal – such as personal emails, social media, or IM apps.
Having a clear and comprehensive employee monitoring policy can help address some of the legal and ethical issues. On top of that it is always a good idea to try to limit your monitoring to only the areas and activities absolutely necessary to fulfill your goals.
Conclusion
All said and done there is no denying how beneficial employee monitoring can be – as long as it is done right. By taking into account the legal and ethical angles you can protect your company and ensure that you don’t run into any issues that are too bad.
