5 Myths About Employee Monitoring you Should Disregard

If your team is commonly experiencing issues like missed deadlines, burnout or cybersecurity compliance issues, chances are you could benefit greatly from employee monitoring software.

However, many people are wary of the concept – doesn’t it come off as invasive or like you don’t trust your employees?

Not at all – as long as you follow some basic guidelines and remain honest and open with and supportive of your team.

To help you do this, we’ve compiled a list of five common misconceptions both business leaders and employees may have about productivity monitoring so that you can address them head-on.

Without further ado, here are some commonly believed myths about employee monitoring you should disregard.

1. Employee monitoring is invasive

It certainly doesn’t have to be.

In most cases, as software like this runs in the background, employees will soon forget about it altogether.

It tracks time spent on different applications and might also take periodic screenshots or screen recordings. It’s also more time-effective than traditional timesheets which are also prone to human error and bias.

So most of the time, chances are people won’t even remember there’s productivity tracking software running in the background of their work devices and they don’t have to dedicate brain space to tracking their time manually.

2. It shows a lack of trust in your employers

The ultimate goal of workplace monitoring isn’t to look over your employees’ shoulders at all times; it’s to collect and dissect data to help you all work smarter. It can help you better understand your organisation’s workflow and understand your teams needs and habits.

This way, you can offer employees feedback and support based on objective data.

This is simply not the case, and to help drive that point home, we always recommend being very upfront and honest about why it is you’re introducing tracking software to your organisation.

We always recommend that you’re not overly restrictive about internet use on work devices, as this can easily communicate to employees that you don’t trust them to manage their own productivity even if they send a personal email here or there or if they go on social media or a news website for a few minutes every now and then.

You should make sure to let employees know this verbally as well as including it in your employee handbook.

3. Only the employer benefits from productivity analytics

It’s not just the managers who can reap some serious benefits from productivity management software.

In fact, employee monitoring software can motivate everyone and provides a more objective view into employee productivity.

This means you can more easily recognise and reward employees who go above and beyond their role even if they don’t shout about their own successes. This way promotions and raises go to the people who truly deserve them.

On the flip side, productivity tracking can also help you recognise disengaged or burnt-out employees.

This way, you can work together to get to the root of the problem, whether that’s workload, insufficient training or something else.

What’s more, employee monitoring can also prove very useful for providing corroborating evidence if workplace discrimination, bullying or data theft ever raise their ugly heads within your organisation.

Just having this software in place can discourage people from engaging in this kind of behaviour, and managers can catch on faster if these things are or become an issue within your team.

4. Workplace monitoring software is only useful for remote team members

Using employee monitoring might make managers more comfortable with remote work, meaning greater flexibility for everyone – another perk for both employees as well as employers.

Your work will be accurately logged wherever you’re working from, giving an objective view of the work you’ve done.

This helps to assure managers that productivity doesn’t suffer when people work from home.

That being said, it’s not just remote employees whose work you should be monitoring if you choose to get employee monitoring software. After all, seeing the back of someone’s head as they sit at their work computer is, and never was, an accurate representation of their productivity.

Using employee monitoring software even with office-based employees helps to get a truer image of their work habits and productivity and can also help bring to light any potential compliance issues – something eyesight alone could never help you with.

5. It’s an invasion of privacy

In the majority of cases, workplace monitoring is completely legal in the UK, though employers are instructed to tell their team about it.

However, this doesn’t mean you should take endless freedoms with your employees’ data.

Done right, employee monitoring doesn’t invade your team members’ privacy. The key here is, once again, transparency.

Let your employees know what you’ll be monitoring and what you don’t care about.

Your team members shouldn’t have to worry about you reading their emails or raising an issue with the occasional quick check-in on social media. After all, nitpicking like this is unlikely to improve your team’s productivity and could easily lead to resentment and a poor team culture.

Respect and transparency should be the two leading values in your process of implementing employee monitoring software.