Digital Employee Monitoring: Good Idea - or Bad?

While a lot of the remote workforce that jumped in population after COVID is back in the office, many workers still work from home. Employers around the world have changed the way their staff goes about maintaining productivity with the shift in how they operate. Remote work is very much here to stay. Organizations and employees can both benefit from the ‘work from home’ and hybrid work revolution.

One of the main drivers for supporting remote work is the cost savings for both employees and employers. Employee morale and productivity also can be higher when employers grant this flexibility.

Most organizations support some types of remote work. In their article, ‘Remote Work Statistics and How they Influence the Workplace’, Squaretalk shows us these numbers:

16% of companies are completely remote

40% support hybrid office/remote working

44% do not allow employees to work remotely

It’s important to weigh both the benefits and downsides to this new environment comprised of a largely remote workforce and hybrid work schedules. Employers worry about the Cybersecurity risks of remote teams – and rightly so. Managers can also find it more challenging to make sure employees are doing what they should do.

This new work environment has led to the rise of employee monitoring tools which have been received with mixed reviews from employees.

What is the meaning of employee monitoring?

Employee monitoring software tracks digital movements to show an employer what workers are doing on their computers. This can include everything from general clock-in clock-out tracking to taking screenshots of an employee’s computer several times per hour.

Tools like Hubstaff track many activities on a person's computer. The information is then sent in a daily or weekly report to the company.

Items that these tools can track are:

Time clock

Keyboard activity

Keystrokes

Mouse activity

Websites visited

Screenshots of the desktop

Apps used and how long in use

Some of these tools can be quite invasive, such as tracking the sounds and video of the employee. This tracking can be visible, so the employee knows about it, or hidden. It depends on the tool used and the ethical considerations of the employer.

While implementing this type of monitoring can benefit an organization worried about ‘productivity theft,’ it can also alienate good employees and greatly diminish trust and the general company morale. Before you set up this type of system, it’s advisable to consider the pros and cons.

What are the pros and cons of constant monitoring of employees?

Pros:

It Gives Managers Insight into How Employees Spend Their Days

Being able to track time by project is valuable, as it helps managers understand where employees are prioritizing their time. Knowing how much time employees spend on a project helps with ROI projections.

Trims Non-Work Activities During Working Hours

It’s not at all unusual for employers to be concerned about remote employees wasting time or goldbricking. A manager doesn’t want to pay someone only to find out the employee spent half their time watching television or cruising around Facebook.

Digital.com conducted a wide-ranging survey and found that about half of monitored employees spend 3+ hours per day on non-work activities. Employees are less likely to goof off if they know that their boss is monitoring their app usage and general activities.

It Tracks Time for Remote Workers

For smaller companies that work with fully remote teams, tracking tools can be convenient. Employees or freelancers can track their time at the click of a button. Employers can put an hour-per-week cap on time. They can also manage payments automatically through the app.

Cons:

Morale & Productivity Can Suffer

Would you like somebody looking over your shoulder all day at work? Nobody likes ‘Big Brother’ watching their every move. When monitoring is introduced, many employees feel like they’ve been put in a cage. Morale can plummet, and when morale goes, it takes productivity along with it.

Rather than completely focusing on work, employees’ minds can wander through various thoughts like, “If I think about this problem too long, is the tracking going to give me a low productivity score?” Or “What happens when I’m on the phone with a customer and not moving my mouse around? Will the tracking make it look like I’m not working?”

This can cause superfluous motions like unnecessary mouse clicking, changing web pages, opening and closing emails – just to ensure the tracker that the employee is being a good little worker bee.

Some of the logical feelings that employees can have when monitored are:

Betrayed

No longer trusted

Loss of company loyalty

Hurt

Treated like a number instead of a person

It seems almost laughable for management to say something like, “We’re all in this together as a team,” when you’re humming ‘Under My Thumb’ by The Rolling Stones.

‘Activity Monitoring’ Does not Equal Productivity

Many of these tracking tools send employees and employers activity reports that simply look at keyboard and mouse activity during a specific time.

What happens when the employee must solve a workflow issue and needs to use their brain, not their mouse? What if a salesperson is on the phone with a customer, not using their keyboard? Zoom calls bring up a similar issue. If you’re in a Zoom call, your mouse and keyboard aren’t being actively used as they would if you are typing.

Activity reports like this will not include this information. It will simply give a score of ‘X%’ based on keyboard and mouse activity. This is like chastising a construction worker whose ‘smart hammer’ isn’t logging the requisite number of hits – when the worker has actually been laying concrete for the last hour. Employers can easily be led to think a worker was goofing off when they were actually working hard. Work isn’t only comprised of typing, scrolling, and clicking

Costs Organizations Good Employees

According to tech.co, nearly half (47%) of tech employees surveyed stated that they would quit if their boss tracked them. Employers implementing monitoring can alienate good employees and make them feel untrusted. They can also feel unappreciated.

When you demote everyone to a number of keyboard strokes, you constrain creativity. Good employees often stay with companies where they feel appreciated and can grow. Once that’s gone, they’re likely to leave. Also, good employees show proof of their productivity simply by doing an excellent job.

Too Much or Too Little? Finding the Happy Medium

Here are a few things to think about when trying to find the right balance between tracking too much or too little:

What is really necessary to track?

Should you treat all employees the same?

What do your employees think about monitoring?

Are you trying to solve a problem that does not exist?

What features are unnecessary that you can turn off?

Is the tool giving you accurate data related to productivity?

Be Smart About Monitoring

Whether they’re in-office or part of the work from home crew, are employees handling their workload and hitting their goals? The smart employer will evaluate employees in ‘real time’ with real criteria. If a worker is maintaining or improving their level of productivity, let them do their job with little or no interference. Why rock that boat?

If an employee is lagging behind previous levels of productivity, then perhaps a ‘talk’ is in order as a first move. Beyond that, this employee would be a prime candidate for monitoring.

‘Office Culture’ has become something of a buzzword. Maintaining morale and office camaraderie is essential to a smooth-running operation, and unnecessary Activity Monitoring can have a negative effect.