Employee Monitoring

Image Credit: Photo by Venveo on Unsplash

Employee monitoring services provides the business owner or manager with the capability of recording employee interactions with clients as well as ensure their effective use of time. When used exclusively for the purposes related to business, there is practically no ethical qualms about it.

Employee monitoring is a reasonably efficient way of finding out whether a specific marketing strategy is working, or the interactions are appropriately conducted. There are other products that can also be used in conjunction with it, such as outbound call and live chat tracking products. However, employee monitoring software opens up endless possibilities for abuse of the information that becomes available to the person in charge of monitoring. It provides access to an employee’s phone logs, social media activity, e-mails and chats. While there is not supposed to be any personal activity during worktime, there often is, and the vulnerability of the digital trail that it leaves is further erasing the border between personal and public spaces.

The full list of features that employee monitoring software may include:

  • e-mail
  • computer screen snapshots
  • phone use
  • internet use
  • app use
  • keystroke logging
  • audio and video surveillance

By rating employees’ efficiency, the business owner can easily evaluate the need for a raise in salary, or, conversely, negotiate the need to improve the performance, alter the team makeup and so on. There both pros and cons to the process.

PROS

  • Less wasted time
  • An average of 90-270 minutes is wasted per 8-hour workday
  • Fewer errors
  • Catch the mistakes at early stages before they lead to destructive consequences
  • Better employee insights
  • Reward the most productive employees with a promotion, warn the least productive ones
  • Increased security
  • See whether an employee is endangering your business, or whether they are in danger
  • More transparency
  • Remote work can now also be monitored
  • More efficient delegation
  • Every employee’s strengths can be used in the right place
  • Less administrative work
  • Much of the administrative duties can be automated
  • Flexible reporting
  • Easily generated reports with different parameters

CONS

  • Negative effect on morale
  • The mistrust and suspicion generated by the monitoring are not conducive to employee efficiency
  • Increased stress
  • Stress levels rise when employees realize that their activities are being continuously monitored
  • Subjective lack of privacy
  • The world is already growing less and less private by the day, and being monitored at the place of employment takes out a great deal of privacy out of life
  • Higher employee turnover
  • Many people prefer to work at a place where they are not constantly under scrutiny, so they may want to change their workplace
  • Legal and ethical issues
  • There are constant discussions, both legal and ethical, on the issue of an employee’s personal boundaries at a workplace.

The range of apps on the market is rather extensive, and includes such highly rated apps as Time Doctor, ActivTrak, DeskTIme, Virtual Logger and Clever Control. Regular spyware apps, without the slant towards employee monitoring, but the ones that can be installed on the phone of, basically, any person whose phone you have access to, like MSpy or FlexiSpy, can also be used, particularly on company-owned phones. In combination with the specifically employee-monitoring apps, these give even the most suspicious employer the control they want over the employees during their time at work.