The perfect way to monitor employees in the Workplace

Better Have a Look: How to Monitor Employees in the Workplace

In the midst of a global pandemic, monitoring employees in the Workplace has become more prevalent than ever before. However, there are some obvious laws and ethics for monitoring employees in the Workplace, without invading their privacy.

In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the most pressing concerns that employers have regarding employee monitoring along with workable solutions that could save both the employer and the employee from potential consequences and legal liabilities.

Moreover, we’ll also shed some light on selecting the best surveillance software for your company that will ensure you get employees’ activity controlled well.

Before we start off with the complete anatomy of employee monitoring, here’s a quick overview of what it means to monitor staff and why employers feel the need to do so.

1. What Does it Mean to Monitor Staff?

Workplace monitoring or surveillance is the simple act of surveying and observing employee productivity and engagement. Employers do so to protect trade secrets and monitor corporate resources. Monitoring allows the employer to track employee engagement and identify lowered-productivity with responsibilities related to the Workplace.

From keeping track of the total worked hours to ensuring timely submission of the assigned tasks to boosting productivity and ingenuity in the Workplace, there are multiple reasons as to why employers would want to implement employee monitoring. However, if not done the right way, workplace privacy and employee monitoring practices can have severe consequences and even liability risks in some instances.

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2. What Are the Benefits of Employee Monitoring?

Here are a few ways in which employee monitoring can be beneficial.

• Improves productivity

When the productive time of employees gets monitored, employees will ensure that they put in more effort to be productive. This would push your employees to work towards improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your company.

• Indicates employee performance

Your employee’s performance can also be measured accurately when their productive hours are accounted through employee monitoring. This way the employees who genuinely work hard can be rewarded and the ones who are not being productive enough can be addressed.

• Effective corporate policy creation

When accurate data of productive and non-productive hours are available, you can create efficient corporate policies. How long should a break be in a day or how many productive hours in a day is necessary can be determined by employee monitoring.

• Minimum payroll conflicts and errors

Accurate tracking of productive working hours reduces or eliminates the errors and conflicts due to payroll issues. Since proper data would be available to you, you can create accurate payrolls for your employees with minimum to no error. In case of any confusion, you would have a solid proof of total productive working hours of each employee.

• Improves ROI

According to a research, your business can suffer losses amounting to almost $100 billion per year due to long break hours since you are paying employees even for the non-productive working hours. However, with an effective employee monitoring system in place, these losses can be minimized to a great extent. This way your employees would become more productive and that would, in turn, improve your business’s ROI.

3. How Do you Monitor Productivity in the Workplace?

The following ways of monitoring can be used to monitor your employees and maintain productivity in the workplace.

Email monitoring

As long as the business strikes a balance regarding its corporate concerns and the employee’s personal life, it has the lawful right for virtual internet and email monitoring in the workplace, like Gmail.

Live chat monitoring

The practice of live chat monitoring is much similar to email monitoring. The employer usually tracks live chats across multiple social platforms. Plus, the employer can also view the people involved in the conversation.

Screenshots

Though it may be hard to consider it factually true, however, it is legal! The activity includes time to time screenshots so administrators can stay posted on who’s working on which project.

Webcam access

In case you were concerned about how to monitor employees working from home. Here’s the answer, monitoring through webcam can allow you to view if the employee is at his desk or not.

Search history tracking

It’s no longer difficult for the employer to browse through the employee’s activity in the modern age. From accessing files to viewing the search history, the modern employer has access to pretty much every activity that takes place within the workspace.

Tracking via keystroke logging

This sort of tracking is also known as keylogging which records and tracks the keys captured on the laptop, allowing the employer to review the keys struck on the keyboard.

In part 5, there is a specialized monitoring tool present to you that can cover a majority of the above functions. You can choose the functions to use according to your requirements.

4. Is it Illegal for Employers to Use Software Programs that Monitor Employees?

A simple and straightforward answer to it is yes, employers can use surveillance software to monitor employee activity. With the internet chock-full of monitoring software, you can choose anyone you think would fit the purpose.

However, since nobody would want to be watched all the time, you must survey employees with their consent. You can refer to the following regulations for appropriate monitoring of employees.

• According to the Information Commissioner’s Office(ICO), employees should be aware of the company’s monitoring policy. Besides, interfering with the employee’s personal matters is always discouraged and can lead to an ethical offence.
• When surveillance is imposed upon employees, it is more likely to bring job security and fear concerns to the prominence.
• For instance, monitoring toilet breaks and tracking whereabouts will only build up fear and distrust, consequently making the company suffer loss.
• Furthermore, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act says, businesses can legally track all sorts of verbal and written communication of the employees only if they have a valid reason to do so.
• Also, the company can conduct video surveillance in the workspace except for restrooms and prayer area.
• To keep employees from frivolous browsing, employers can also deploy computer monitoring software. However, in the case of a data breach, the company may end up with severe legal liabilities.

As far as your monitoring is justified, it’s perfectly legal to deploy surveillance software across the boards. If you intend to monitor your company’s employees, the following method recommends you try.

5. A Recommendation for Employee Monitoring Tool

MoniVisor makes for a great Workplace surveillance software that eliminates the habit of procrastination by getting the tasks done when they are supposed to be. This is an incredible tool that has been designed specifically to cater to the needs of the employers. Try out this tool now and reap major benefits of effectively managing your workforce.

Features of MoniVisor

• Monitor social medias like WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook
• Read all mails from someone’s Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, without account info.
• Track all the browsing history from all the mail browsers like Chrome, Microsoft Edge, etc.
• Take instant screenshots from the target computer without any notification.
• View all the typed keystrokes
• Track app activities with the display of duration and app names.
• Check login activity to know if some strange account has beed logged in.
• View file activity
• See print activity to know exactly what documents have been printed.
• Record connecting USB activity

Advantages of using MoniVisor

• It supports over 20 useful employee monitoring features like email intercepting, WhatsApp chats reading, and screen capturing, among many others.
• After being installed on the computer, it works in incognito mode and stays 100% hidden.
• Makes remote monitoring possible from any device or place.
• Syncs all the recorded data in real-time.
• Supports data export features as well.

How to use MoniVisor

Step 1: Using a valid email address, register for an account on MoniVisor and purchase a plan that seems suitable to you.