A guest blog by Pratik Salia
The demand for employee monitoring is constantly rising along with the growing adaptation of work from home culture.
Even after the pandemic restrictions began relaxing, enterprises across the globe are vacating offices to save on rent while allowing work-from-home. Many organizations were into remote work before the pandemic hit businesses. Irrespective of industries and businesses, the pandemic has had a drastic impact on everyone’s lives. Businesses already dealing with the pandemic repercussions are now facing plenty of challenges, including work-at-home distractions with employees, lack of focus and real productivity, fear of not getting enough output, and hesitation in employees to approach colleagues leading to burnout.
It’s been more than a year now that remote work is transforming the way organizations work. With all eyes on how the future of work will look, the main focus is putting people at the forefront, managing new workplace dynamics, ensuring the efficacy of long-term remote work, and emphasizing employee work flexibility virtually while preserving the company culture.
Businesses need to find solutions that cut manual efforts, make the employee experience seamless, and allow employers to stabilize their entire organizational workflow. One solution to make things clear in today’s hybrid work model is to synchronize leveraging AI-backed technology. This approach suggests that businesses redefine their flexible workplace policy with cloud-based employee monitoring tools so that they can streamline work processes from the comfort of their home. Cloud-based employee monitoring technology can help to enable remote effortless team collaboration while considering employee behavior analysis.
How did remote work accelerate the need for employee monitoring?
In the beginning, remote work bolstered many perks for employees. However, this was not the case for employers who experienced less productivity in their employees. Employee monitoring has become prominent because when employees are not working in a physical office, it becomes harder for management to track their work schedules. When supervisors cannot see how their employees are working or get direct reports, they struggle to trust employees even if employees perform on a satisfactory level. These trust issues and misinterpretation of tasks lead to micromanagement, poor employee experience, and dissatisfaction among everyone. Thus, in many scenarios, to avoid the bulk of these conflicts during remote work, companies would benefit by ensuring that their entire remote workforce is centralized and in sync with each other.
While some companies are transparent about employee monitoring, others might go the extra mile to monitor their employees. When companies are transparent about monitoring employees, they can be more trustworthy. Employees can be receptive to get monitored as long as there is a clear purpose for it and ensures job security with no hidden motives.
With the transition to remote work, some companies want to capture more personal data, process it, and use it for long-term strategic planning. Some businesses want to ensure that their daily workflow is focused on responsibilities in alignment and away from distractions. Trust is the key to establishing a productive remote work environment and a great employee experience. To gain that trust, these companies have to be more practical and approachable in their monitoring ideologies with employees.
Employee monitoring tools are seeing a surge after the stay-at-home orders.
Many companies have invested more in technology during the pandemic that could upgrade their remote workflow and scale business growth. They have become more data-driven. With the data details collected from employees, employers can leverage that data to create better decisions across all their functions and operations. Besides monitoring productivity, employers have to ensure data and network security of employees’ devices and connections so that their work does not stop due to cyber-security threats. One of the biggest challenges is employee engagement and collaboration. A highly engaged employee can be more productive, put more effort and work inputs, and be better equipped to meet deadlines.
Employee time tracking and monitoring tools are emerging as a long-lasting solution for many enterprises to enable and take absolute advantage of. It is usually the most direct form of monitoring when implemented with transparency between employers and employees. Employee monitoring software encompasses the capability to track ongoing projects, distraction management, and features to differentiate between urgent and non-work-related activities. Employee monitoring tools give employers an in-depth analysis of everything they need to know about their employees for better decision-making during remote work.
Benefits businesses can get with employee monitoring software.
While on the surface, cloud monitoring seems like a threat or lack of trust from the companies toward employees, it can be useful in a variety of ways. Employees can be more productive and improve time management with the data collected by employee monitoring software. Let’s discuss some of these benefits:
Maximize time-management
Time wasting is a common practice in physical offices, and now it can be seen more prevalent during remote work. Mismanagement of the working hours can affect overall efficiency. Employee monitoring software helps supervisors know about the time spent on non-work-related activities or employees sitting idle. It simplifies time accuracy through productive or unproductive analytics.
Optimize management reporting
Manual reporting rarely provides the accuracy and time spent on particular tasks. For employees, it can be an additional activity to exert more effort and fill in timesheets. Thus, they tend to avoid performing those tasks that do not add value to their work. This generates a big question about the accuracy of timesheet management and effective reporting. Employee monitoring software enables flexibility to create automated timesheets and streamline workflow.
Improve individual productivity
Employee monitoring tools or cloud monitoring helps employers understand the work criteria of every employee. This helps to make every employee accountable for their own tasks and increases their accountability towards work. It helps employees to keep track of spending a longer time on non-work-related tasks. It can help to take active steps to minimize time spent on wasteful activities and enhance productivity.
Allocate work requirements
It is difficult to show how certain employees or teams dedicate their work hours to particular tasks. It is hard to estimate the overall time that teams would require to complete tasks. There is no clear data based on work allocation that accurately defines the role and contribution of employees. Employee monitoring software makes it easy for employees to reallocate tasks based on detailed insights of teams or employees’ spare capacity.
Enhance employee engagement
An employee monitoring tool is not only limited to monitoring activities but also improves employee engagement. It provides the flexibility to collaborate with other team members easily to know about task progress in real-time. Equal allocation of tasks and automating manual activities will increase transparency, leading to greater employee engagement levels.
Employee monitoring shaping the future of the workplace
At this juncture, businesses need to reevaluate their communication strategies and technology they can effectively implement during remote work. For a better employee experience, employers will benefit by intentionally communicating with their employees and helping them understand employers’ challenges, the changing needs, and exploring alternatives for improvement.
Work from home and cloud-based employee monitoring will soon become a new norm rather than an exception for businesses. While paving a seamless path for remote employee monitoring, user activity monitoring software will provide plenty of advantages, including efficient time-tracking and productivity monitoring. Therefore, cloud-based employee monitoring can help to strengthen the future of remote work while balancing business interests, employee well-being and supporting the company culture.
At ExecutiveBound, we would love to hear from you. What are your thoughts regarding employee monitoring? What is your perspective about the pros and cons? You can reach us at info@executivebound.com. Leave us a comment and connect with us at www.callwithginny.com.
Thanks to Pratik Salia for his guest post.
About the Author: Pratik is an experienced professional with a demonstrated history of working in startups & conglomerates. He’s skilled in Operations, E-commerce, Customer Experience, ABM Marketing, B2B Marketing, B2B Brand Positioning, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Market Research, and Management.
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