<strong>What is Digital Employee Tracking Costing You in Productivity & Morale?</strong>

Employee productivity is crucial regardless of the industry in which your company operates. After all, it’s what keeps your company running like clockwork. A productive workforce is efficient, focused, and well-organized, ensuring your company’s customers are satisfied. Unproductive staff, on the other hand, will slowly eat away at your profits, affecting your bottom line. So, how do you keep track of employee productivity throughout their work time? 

Digital employee tracking is an excellent tool for business owners to monitor and evaluate employee performance. According to GlobeNewswire, the global market for employee monitoring tools was valued to be USD1.12 Billion in the year 2021, and there is an expectation that it will get to USD2.10 Billion by 2030, with a CAGR growth level of 7.2%.

Employee tracking software functions as an all-seeing, invisible supervisor. It records almost everything a person does on the computer during working hours, from keystrokes to websites visited. They offer ready-to-use reports on each employee’s productivity and payroll calculations, essentially saving the manager’s time.

However, some drawbacks cost you productivity when using employee tracking software. You will find this later in the article. 

What is Employee Tracking Software?

Digital employee tracking software are tools you can use in your company to monitor, track, and manage the performance of your employees. It provides real-time information on employee productivity and the time it takes to complete assigned tasks. This grants you the data required to assess your team’s efficiency levels, whether freelancers or remote workers. 

Employee tracking is vital when managing on-site, remote, or hybrid teams. Firms frequently use practical monitoring tools to keep track of employee behavior and time spent on the job. Efficient monitoring methods increase workforce productivity, decrease administrative work, improve cyber security, and allow the business to grow.

It also assists employees in managing their workload to achieve the best results possible while allowing managers to track their direct reports’ use of software applications and measure employee presentation to improve employee performance.

The most obvious purpose of this software is to track employee productivity. How much time do they devote to work, and how much do they devote to watching funny videos on YouTube? Do they actually put enough effort into the work process or take coffee breaks every ten minutes? Employee tracking apps are specifically designed to answer these types of questions.

How Digital Employee Tracking Might be Costing You in Productivity

Tracking employee productivity can greatly benefit your company and team, from creating a more engaged workforce to increasing profits. While these tools can increase productivity, they can also have a negative impact on employee confidence. It can foster a culture of distrust if done incorrectly. 

Here are a few ways by which the usage of employee tracking tools can negatively harm productivity:

When it affects morale

Morale is a person’s emotional and mental state. It can also refer to a person’s or a group’s sense of purpose and confidence in the future. When we talk about workplace morale, we’re referring to how your employees feel about the company, their work, and their part in it. The stigma around employee tracking is associated with a negative impact on employee morale. Many employees interpret the use of using monitoring processes as weaponizing the workplace. 

As the manager, you must be open and honest with your employees, assuring them that they are not being punished. Create a policy highlighting the benefits, encouraging buy-in, and providing ample notice of the changes.

When it becomes a threat to employees’ privacy

Another potential disadvantage of implementing employee tracking is that employees may feel their privacy has been violated. Employers collect a lot of data on what employees are working on and how they spend their time by tracking employee productivity. This could give employees the impression that they are constantly being watched and that their managers do not respect their privacy. 

What this does is that they can get distracted when thinking about it. Nobody likes being watched, and employees more so. This leads us to the third point… 

When it builds distrust

Another potential way employee tracking software affects employee productivity is that it creates feelings of distrust. Using digital tracking tools can make employees believe their bosses do not trust them. Trust is an integral part of the workplace; without it, many issues could crop up. 

Managers can alleviate these feelings by demonstrating how effective employee tracking tools boost productivity, balance workloads, and prevent burnout and distractions. They should also demonstrate how monitoring data can be used to negotiate promotions and wage increases by becoming a solid reference for employee performance.

Make Employee Monitoring Do Your Work!

Employee monitoring can be transformative for a business when done correctly. When used correctly, the benefits of employee monitoring far outweigh the drawbacks. Even better, those disadvantages can be overcome if you approach employee monitoring from the right perspective. 

Contact us at Digital Crisis today to learn more about implementing cloud tools to improve your company’s productivity.