How to Monitor Employee Productivity Ethically

Managing the performance of your employees can be a tricky task. After all, you want to ensure accountability and high-quality work but you know how annoying it can feel to have the sense of your boss constantly standing over your shoulder. 

However, being able to strike the right balance is an important part of running any business – especially with more and more workers starting to work remotely. You need to be able to build and maintain trust with your employees – this will help to support your company culture – but you also need to monitor productivity. 

Monitoring productivity is key if you want to know the strengths and weaknesses of your organization, and you’ll also need to have a clear image of employee productivity if you want to provide effective feedback to help your team members grow their skills and capabilities, as well as track training progress. 

So, how can you monitor employee performance effectively and ethically with your remote team? Keep on reading this comprehensive guide to find out more.

What Is Employee Monitoring?

There are lots of different ways in which employee monitoring can manifest itself and this will entirely depend on your specific business context. In ventures with large, multinational workforces and remote teams like in enterprise collaboration, this will largely be using employee monitoring software. 

Indeed, digital employee productivity tracking software is becoming commonplace given that most people conduct their work online or using digital tools. This can range from measuring idle times while employees are working to monitoring and scanning employee emails. Here are some of the common examples of activity monitoring: 

• GPS tracking
• Computer monitoring 
• Video surveillance
• Web activity tracking

The common element is that it’s all about staying on top of employee activity to make informed decisions about how productive they are at work. This will help you identify and reward good practice and provide support to employees who are struggling to reach expectations around productivity.  

Why Is It Important to Monitor Productivity Ethically?

We all know that employee productivity monitoring is done with the best of intentions – after all, we wouldn’t dream of deliberately making our employees feel like they’re under extreme levels of pressure or that they’re being spied on. However, this is exactly the result of employee monitoring when it is done poorly, 

This has a hugely detrimental impact on your company culture. Failing to conduct your productivity monitoring ethically will drastically reduce the amount of trust that your employees feel – they might feel that employee privacy is being disrespected or that they aren’t being treated as responsible professionals. 

Not only is this the opposite of the sort of inclusive and caring environment that any boss should be striving for, it can even negatively affect the outcomes that you’re looking to improve. That’s because anyone knows that a happy workforce is generally a productive workforce – if your employees feel anxious or stressed, their productivity will diminish.

All of this isn’t a reason to stop monitoring employee productivity – after all, they’re still needed as a crucial part of quality assurance in any organization. Instead, it means that you just need to make sure that you’re conducting your employee monitoring solutions ethically.

How to Monitor Employee Productivity Ethically

So, how can you make sure that you’re making the most of employee time through the use of productivity monitoring while also acting as ethically as you can? Here are our top tips for monitoring employee productivity ethically. 

1.   Communicate Clearly and Transparently

If you want to maintain employee engagement and acceptance when implementing productivity monitoring, it’s important that you clearly and transparently communicate what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it, and exactly why you’re doing it. 

This means that you should be completely open about the data that you’ll be tracking – a great way to do this is by also granting each employee access to their own data as well. This will transform monitoring from an imposed act to one that is a collaborative search for improvement. You might want to include this in your onboarding program.  

Be as clear as possible that you’re monitoring people to help them to improve, rather than to find any faults in their work. You might want to explicitly frame it in this positive way by including rewards for positive work. This will also likely lead to a more productive workforce, as rewards are obviously a great way to incentivize high performance. 

Another way to use communication to improve employee buy-in is by explaining how monitoring works for all levels of your organization. If your employees are able to see that even their bosses have productivity monitoring in place, they’re going to be much more likely to see its overall purpose and usefulness. 

2.   Utilize Internal Audits

You should remember that there are lots of different types of employee monitoring – being able to hold your employees accountable isn’t just about using employee productivity trackers that monitor their actions digitally. Instead, you should think about how you can use internal audits to improve productivity in your organization. 

This is when you collaboratively check and review your company’s practice and compliance. Let’s say that you’ve introduced a new contact centre software – you might use an internal audit a year after its introduction to ensure that all employees are effectively following any company standards that you asked them to follow when using the new software.  

Incorporating time management techniques for remote work into these audits can also help assess how efficiently employees are adapting to remote work environments.

An internal audit will consist of meetings with managers and employees, and you also might want to include some form of reflection and self-assessment. This can be a great way to conduct monitoring in a more low-stakes way as it’s not about directly observing what your employees are doing.  

Internal audits will still allow you to stay on top of any issues regarding areas of improvement and weaknesses, without any of the worries around employee privacy. However, you’ll need some more active monitoring if you want to measure certain aspects of productivity, so these audits are unlikely to be used alone. 

3.   Use Technology Precisely 

If you want to have a holistic picture of employee productivity, it’s important that you use a selection of employee monitoring systems. While internal audits are a less intrusive way to get a view of the big picture, most productivity monitoring will use technology to monitor things such as idle time and email messages. Additionally, integrating social media tools into your monitoring strategy can provide insights into employee engagement and potential distractions.

This sort of monitoring can only begin once you’ve established an inclusive culture in your organization where employees trust that you’re monitoring for the right purposes – so remember to follow our first tip! 

To ensure that you’re being as ethical as possible, you should use this technology precisely by moving backward from the intended outcome. If you want to make sure that employees are effectively communicating in external interactions, for instance, you should only monitor emails that are leaving the organization.  

You should also establish clear boundaries when it comes to monitoring data. Try not to monitor employees when they’re using personal devices, even if those personal devices are being used for work purposes. You should also keep strict protection of employee data when you’re monitoring, just as you would with any other form of personal data.  

Integrating project time tracking into your monitoring strategy can provide valuable insights into how time is allocated across various tasks and projects. By implementing project time tracking, you can better understand productivity trends, identify potential bottlenecks, and allocate resources more effectively. This data-driven approach not only enhances productivity but also fosters a culture of transparency and accountability within the organization.

Finally, the best – and most ethical – use of productivity monitoring tools is when they are designed to be employee-friendly. Some tools have a mutual agreement feature, meaning that employees can decide the times when they are being monitored. This is a great way to boost employee engagement with your monitoring procedures. 

4.   Build on Your Findings 

Ultimately, there would be no point in any monitoring of employees’ productivity if you’re not going to use any of it productively. You need to be able to build on your findings to produce genuine actionable insights that can help bring your organization to the next level.  

This is sometimes directly built into the digital monitoring tools, with features such as a processing payroll tool that you can use to link productivity monitoring to pay rewards. This will show your employees that you are using the monitoring for a clearly positive purpose on the level of the individual employee.  

You should also use the data that you find to improve productivity across your organization. This might be by identifying excellent practices from one employee and sharing them with others. You might also use your findings to adapt your onboarding and training so that improvements to productivity are embedded into your workforce going forward.  

Ultimately, you need to make sure that you can point to positive outcomes when it comes to employee productivity – if you don’t act on your findings, there’s no ethical justification for employee monitoring. 

Ethical Employee Monitoring – A Crucial Consideration

There’s no doubt that it’s important to stay on top of your employees’ actions and practices when they’re at work. This is especially significant in the world of remote work, where you need to adapt your practices to include digital monitoring in order to ensure quality assurance.

However, it’s crucial that you consider how to achieve employee productivity monitoring while remaining ethical. That’s why we put together our top tips, including being clear and transparent with your employees and only using digital tracking when it’s truly necessary. Start to make your employee monitoring more ethical today!