Does employee monitoring software boost productivity?

One of the main goals of software for monitoring employees’ work is to increase productivity. Although it might not seem like it at first thought, numerous studies have proved it. Additionally, we were able to see some great results here at CloudDesk by speaking to our clients and performing our own in-house experiments.

The majority of workers in the U.S. think otherwise. They say employee monitoring software wouldn’t affect their productivity, according to a survey. A few workers also expressed concerns about their employer having access to their personal data. But a survey also found that 90 percent of workers are open to their employer having visibility into their daily productivity.

Despite the easily available employee monitoring software options, monitoring comes with a great deal of risk to the companies that adopt it and threaten to endanger the trust between employers and employees. That’s why employers need to be cautious when it comes to deploying them and choose the software wisely. 

When an employer decides to monitor its employees, it is important to do so in a way that respects its employees:

• Choose your performance metrics carefully by involving all relevant stakeholders.
• Be transparent with employees about what you’re monitoring and why.
• Think about what kinds of rewards can be used to motivate and boost relevant numbers, not just enforce surveillance to discourage inefficiencies.
• Believe that your best workers will not always be able to perform best all the time — especially under present circumstances.
• Monitor your own systems to ensure that people of color, gender, or religion are not disproportionately affected.

Many employers already started thinking about this, they don’t want a traditional employee monitoring software which will only track employee’s specific actions. They didn’t want to create spyware that puts video surveillance on employees and record their keystrokes. So when we started working on our software we took into account the issues of privacy and culture while creating an atmosphere of mutual trust between managers and employees. We have developed an ethical and trustworthy employee monitoring tool – CloudDesk. The application works in the background, and reports only when an employee is working. Employees can decide when their activities should be monitored. When an employee decides to be on break their activities are not monitored – which allows them to maintain privacy regarding the usage of non-work-related activities.