Valuable tips to monitor employees without compromising their privacy

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has compelled organizations to make their employees to work from home. This required them to monitor effectively their employee productivity. According to reports, 50% large corporations in 2018 monitored their employee social media accounts and email content, who they met and how they used their workspace. Employee monitoring became important to ensure increased productivity during this troubled times.

There are several valid reasons to monitor your employee activities during work hours’ even if they are working from their home. However, every employer/manager needs to walk the tightrope to avoid treading n employee privacy and personal life.

Tips to follow

  • Be clear and transparent on what and why monitoring is necessary: As an employer, it is your duty to communicate frankly and honestly with your employees. Inform them the reasons for the need to monitor their day-to-day work activities. Allow them to give their feedback. Share monitoring results with them. With greater transparency, you can expect your employees to increase their acceptance rates.
  • Choose carefully your metrics by including relevant stakeholders: Making quick judgements can be easy based upon the numeric scores offered by a software piece. It might only result in making ill-formed decisions and unnecessary surveillance. Employee efficiency to measure should rather be based upon tracking necessary and relevant things only. Hence, engage all relevant stakeholders to know the metrics like supervisors, hiring managers and those who are to be monitored.
  •  Present circumstances may not allow even the best workers to render excellent services: With the current times being quite unique, it will be factually and ethically wrong to differentiate between employees based on performance. In this case, the performance appraisal software can come in handy to record the performances of the employees so they can be rewarded later when the time is right. Several issues at home might cause trouble to talented and hard-working employees. Strike useful conversations with them that should focus more on providing creative solutions and not threats. Client URL –
  • Provide carrots and sticks: The truth is using surveillance or monitoring software is rather tied to submission and compliance. Hence, the monitoring tool should not be used to promote oppression method. Rather, it should be used to encourage your employees to do much better and increase overall productivity. Employees are sure to feel motivated to complete their assigned tasks and achieve their set targets if their work is rewarded rather than getting punished for non-performance. Also it discourages inefficiencies.
  • Reduce monitoring as and where possible: It is necessary to monitor your employees working from their respective homes. However, with many returning to the office to work, you should look for areas where you can reduce monitoring efforts if things go well. It allows employees to feel that they are trustworthy and wanted.

This tutorial can provide you with more valuable information on how you can monitor your employee work activities without compromising on their privacy.