Whether your company operates within the in-office setting or remotely, you are surely expecting certain productivity levels to be upheld. The question is how to make them happen?
One of the recently more popular solutions to this particular problem certainly is introducing employee tracking software in your company infrastructure, but there is more to it than that. To achieve sustainable results, you must also maintain open communication, set clear goals, and give rewards when they are due. In essence, create a healthy business environment. Here is how to go about it.
1) Talk to the Employees
If you're entertaining the idea of implementing any new type of supervision in your company, then you must have a good reason for it - you've noticed a lack of results, the customers are becoming dissatisfied with your services, the end-of-the-year balance is lower than you expected.
While high-quality employee monitoring software can help your staff organize their time and tasks better, which translates into more productive work, these may not be the results you end up with if you don't explain the reasoning behind introducing such software to your employees.
If the company is struggling, the staff should be made aware of it and the corresponding strategy moving forward.
State the current issues clearly and how they affect the company, and with it, all employees. Analyze the underlying causes for the change in circumstances, but make sure not to put blame on employees for some of the less than desirable results.
If you believe that introducing staff productivity software can turn things around, explain why and how to the employees. Moreover, state how you envision it to work, what the goals are, and what the possible repercussions of undesired behavior are.
2) Set Clear Goals
Part of the process of implementing a monitoring solution is to set clear expectations and goals for all employees.
In that sense, it's particularly important to state that employees of all levels - managers and their team members alike - are obligated to have their workstations monitored during office hours. That means that rules apply to all employees regardless of their position in the company, thus creating a fair working environment. Moreover, having direct access to insights from employee tracking software can be easily and effectively analyzed if the data is complete and applicable to everyone in the company.
Additionally, it's crucial to lay down expectations for the future period including the type of behavior that is expected from employees in terms of the number of negotiated working hours (and breaks), the corresponding pay, and the core hours (for distributed teams).
However, more important than the number of hours worked is the projected level of productivity and the workload effectiveness that is accomplished during that time. If everyone has access to employee monitoring software, it provides them with the opportunity to access their own workplace productivity, influences their accountability, and ultimately drives them to make the work changes necessary for increased efficiency.
3) Analyze, Evaluate, Act
No tool can change the behavior of employees without human feedback. Instead of aiming the productivity results against your staff, analyze them systematically, and create a strategy with possible solutions for improvement within the set timeline.
By analyzing the entire organization's productivity levels in an objective and wholesome manner, you are able to leverage that information against market fluctuations and competitive development. In that sense, introducing meaningful change into the company culture rather than just employee tracking software can represent the difference between a failed project and alienated staff and creating a productive new direction of the company.
Continuously gathering objective information about employee efficiency also provides a good basis for fair performance reviews. That way, all evaluations are based on objective data, relevant for all, and void of all subjective influence. Moreover, conflicts between team members are reduced to a minimum and the stress of periodical examination can be significantly diminished when employees' working habits are evaluated continuously. Ultimately, any position and changes in duties based on objectively gathered information are merited and deserved.
How Does Employee Tracking Software Work?
The basis of all employment monitoring tools is tracking time spent working as well as the corresponding efficiency in task resolution. While they all give an accurate image of employees' comings and goings by measuring the time elapsed between when workers check in and out of work, measuring productivity is performed via several methods.
The most commonly used one is by tracking keyboard usage and mouse movement frequency, leveraging them against proprietary algorithms, and displaying visual and numerical representation of worker efficiency.
To back up that data, staff productivity software can also capture employees' screens while working, or even record their presence in front of the computer via camera. For those working in the field, tracking employee location via GPS is also a frequently used method that ensures they are moving in workplace sanctioned locations.
With some top of the line tools, managers are able to label various types of activities as productive, unproductive, or neutral based on the employee's or entire team's nature of duties. This allows for gathering more relevant information, as well as getting meaningful alerts for long periods of "inefficiency" or inappropriate use of web and app resources.
Furthermore, quality employee monitoring software also adheres to all necessary industry or regional legislation and keeps customer companies compliant, while also protecting their and employees' privacy.
Conclusion
Implementing monitoring solutions must be accompanied by the intention to make meaningful changes in the working environment that have the goal of increasing employee productivity and driving company growth. Therefore, choosing the employee tracking software that fits your company's needs is as important as clearly communicating the way it should become part of the workplace environment, as well as what the reasoning behind it and expectations for the future are.
