There is a right way and a wrong way to monitoring your employees. Take a look at some of the vital points you need to know.
When you start a business for the first time, it’s easy to slip into bad habits. After all, you are working with a small team, and everyone knows what they need to do – all of you will muddle along and get where you need to be.
However, things get a little different when you start hiring employees. Productivity and timekeeping become bigger issues than they ever were before. You have to consider things like illness, vacations, and instilling a company culture.
So, the big question for startup owners is: how are you going to deal with it all? The solution is to start a process of monitoring your employees and communications, but there is a right way – and a wrong way – to go about it. Let’s take a look at some of the vital points you need to know.
The Startup Owner's Guide To Monitoring Employees Click To Tweet
The pros
Monitoring employees has several advantages for business owners. First of all, it helps reduce waste – and fraud. You can see who is being productive or who is wasting time by visiting their social media accounts, doing a bit of shopping, or taking part in more nefarious activities.
Monitoring staff also protects business owners against litigation. It’s clear evidence that you have been acting in the right way – consider email security, breaches, and accidental misuses, which could all have an adverse impact on your business.
Tracking also helps you learn about your employees, and generate a certain amount of trust with employees. Consider using a free trial of Pingboard or another HR employment tracking system to get a good example of the benefits monitoring software can bring.
The cons
There are, however, some disadvantages of monitoring employees. Many people feel resentful when their every move is tracked, and they don’t like being watched. It’s understandable – after all, would you like your every move to be seen by others?
So, while monitoring can bring about an element of trust, it can also injure that key employer/employee relationship. There are privacy laws to consider, too. You may need to get consent for monitoring your staff before proceeding, and failure to get that allowance could lead to severe consequences.
It’s also easy for systems like these to be abused – who is watching the people watching the people? And who is watching them?
The right way forward
As you can see, employee monitoring can be a useful tool, but it won’t take much for you to take it too far. Most employees will be happy enough for you to track their sickness records and have access to their work emails and telephone calls.
But the chances are that if they feel your policies are invasive, they will be incredibly unhappy. It means you could lose employees – good people who are fantastic at their jobs – so it is critical to think carefully before investing in a program. Ultimately, it all boils down to your business environment and the cost-effectiveness of using a monitoring program.
Do you track your employees at work? If so, why not get in touch and let us know about the systems you have in place? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below!
