In the past, employee monitoring took place in person. Managers or supervisors would be able to lay eyes on those working directly under them to ensure that they are producing the highest quality of work. However, the digitization of work has allowed people to work from home or adopt remote work practices. These evolutions have rendered traditional modes of employee monitoring useless as there isn’t anyone to keep an eye on in the office. There have been leaps and bounds in the field of producing software for employee monitoring to ensure the continued productivity of the workforce and we will explore how the evolution took place and what this means for future generations.
Early days of monitoring employee productivity
As mentioned above, employers or supervisors had the advantage of being able to monitor their on ground staff to ensure that they are meeting their key performance indicators but this practice was quickly pushed into oblivion when Covid-19 swept the world and people were forced to adapt to new working cultures of working from home and without a supervisor breathing down their necks. Of course, this isn’t something that happened to all industries, especially those that required human labor, especially in terms of logistics, construction, and the hospital.
But even as the pandemic was wrangled under control, employees did not flock back to the office and companies had to change the way that they managed their employees. Some companies offered a hybrid work model while others continued with the stream of working from home, giving their employees the flexibility and freedom to work at their own discretion, which led to an increase of remote monitoring software being released to the public.
How do remote employee monitoring software work?
Depending on the software itself, there may be some differences between what these software track but on a general level, it should be able to track the time put in, collect data from keystroke or mouse movement, as well as what other software the user is running to ensure that they are indeed working and not mindlessly browsing the internet or gaming, for that matter. Other software may also enable employers to go through their emails or collect data from social media, location, and other forms of what is currently seen as an invasion of privacy.
Is there a better way to track employee’s productivity?
Remote work relies largely on trust, but the truth is that some people work best sitting 8 hours straight in front of a computer while some may find that they can concentrate in shorter bursts, maybe 2 hours in one sitting over the course of the day, even working until late at night. One of the key indicators that an employee is doing their job is to look at their results rather than what they needed to do in order to get there. If an employee is clocking 12 hours a day and producing something that an employee can get done in two hours, who then, is more productive? In this day and age where mental health and a healthy work life balance is touted as being more important than being corporate slaves, it should be noted that quality should always come before quantity and judging the end product would be miles more conducive to a healthy and sustainable workforce and insisting that they put in a particular amount of hours for the sake of seeming busy.