If you want to run a business to achieve your goals, then you have to make sure that your employees are effectively using their business time.
By using employee tracking methods, a company or business can track its employees’ activities and duties with workplace-related tasks.
A business can estimate the productivity of its employees by implementing different tools. It will help you to monitor attendance and security, and get proof of times worked.
Now you might have lots of questions in your mind. We will try to clear all of your doubts in this article.
What is employee tracking?
Employee Tracking is a process of activity monitoring that is applied to help stop misusing time that is very valuable for your business. It motivates the employees to work more efficiently and also helps to optimize ineffective workflows. Utilizing employee tracking tactics will help you to reduce business risk and become more successful.
Employee monitoring provides businesses with an overall vision of how tasks are performed in and outside of the office. This method will inform you of the number of times consumed on less productive or unproductive tasks performed by employees.
It also shows you the most productive time of the day for your employees. This system will help you to identify any inappropriate use of digital assets and pilferage of your work value chain. Tracking team members makes it possible to separate efficient and competent employees from incompetent ones.
It is possible that irresponsible and unmonitored employees might misuse the company’s resources. To prevent this kind of issue the activity tracking software provides a great solution to increasing your company’s productivity and work efficiency.
Employee activity tracking software allows managers and admins to track and manage employees’ real-time user activities. It also helps to capture behavior data or information on business networks, related devices, and tracked workspaces.
After you’ve finished reading this article, you will be ready to decide if employee tracking is appropriate for your business. Further, you will learn which method to pick, and how to execute it in your business.
Why do you need employee tracking?
There can be various reasons why you should choose employee tracking. First, this can help to defend your business from the act of misguided employees. Employee tracking can also improve affirmative compliance with regulations and secure workplace data.
Employers should also be informed of the potential challenges of implementing employee tracking systems.
It can damage employee performance and build negative morale inside your organization. In such cases, your employees might become suspicious that someone else is lurking above their shoulders and feel violated.
They might become wary that their personal information such as religious and political views, intimate affairs, and medical difficulties might become exposed to unwanted people.
“Authorized should respect the difference between tracking and surveillance”, says Andrew Walls, security and risk analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc.
Best Employee Tracking Tips for Entrepreneurs
Now let us share some excellent methods that’ll support you to track employee productivity in a simple way.
1. Have a Plan
Keeping everything easy and simple is necessary to reduce your stress level. To achieve this objective you can start using this software or simply can maintain a spreadsheet to track your employee activities.
Small planning will add great value to this process. For example, you should first determine whether you’re going to follow projects or individual employees at your business.
Every representative/employee has his or her own work pace, and personal path to utilize opportunities. A good tracking system follows a particular employee’s activity and allows you to examine his or her work rhythm. Your plan should include whether you want to explore this work rhythm as well.
2. Use in-house tracking software and tools
Nowadays different types of software and technology tools provide managers with immediate access to employee tracking opportunities. This software is generally operable in both small and large screen devices.
There are many products that abound for tracking people’s movement, computer activities, and networks. To decrease the potential of work-related inefficiency, and pilferage of sensitive company data, you can use this type of software to notify you of any irregularities in the process.
3. Tools to monitor employee external activities
While it’s simple to monitor the work hours and actions of employees serving in the office. Things get further complicated for somebody who requires to travel outside the office to perform their job.
This is where the employee GPS tracking app comes in handy. GPS-based employee activity monitoring tools can support you to keep your team’s performance at the optimum level.
If you have a team who are working outside of your office and their performance is critical to your business success; then employee activity monitoring and reporting on the go through GPS enhanced tools is a must.
This type of tracking tool is becoming an essential part of running a sales force-based company in the twenty-first century. Today’s economy is built up of thousands of small and medium-sized companies employing field-based workforces.
However, it is not easy to implement such a system at a go. You need to train your field-level employees and tune them to manage the change through the slow and phase-wise implementation of technology.
Effective implementation of such a system will have a significant impact on increasing employee productivity and company profit. There are quite a few GPS-based employee tracking and activity monitoring tracking systems available in the market. To name a few:
4. Internet-Based Tracking
Around two-thirds of companies track their employees’ use of the Internet. A good tracking software should help you to monitor, track, and remove access to some potentially harmful web content (e.g. porn sites).
Failure to track such activities might expose your system to different virus attacks that might significantly damage your business. Also tracking and keeping a log of your employee’s internet footprints will help you to identify and take action in case of a data breach by any employee of your organization.
It will also help you to protect yourself from any such future actions by setting strong examples of disciplinary actions.
Also, these tools can be effective in tracking where your employees are spending time on the internet (e.g. which URLs they visit, how many times, and for how long).
For example, when you see that a group of your employees is wasting significant office time browsing online shopping sites or social media platforms; you can be certain that they are not performing their office duties up to the expected level.
5. Email Tracking
You might be astonished to know that 43% of employers track employee email. Almost every big company tracks its employees’ emails to ensure information security as well as to ensure that the company email is used for official purposes only.
Organizations track their employee’s email services to defend against classified data leaks. Approximately three-fourths of the businesses that track email use software, while 40% have a policy of opening and examining random individual messages.
6. Phone and Call Tracking
When you call some company customer service hotline and hear “This message may be recorded for quality support.”, you are on the other end of an employee-monitored phone call. Recording your team’s communications with customers, users, or suppliers is essential for a variety of purposes.
Let’s consider an example. Suppose two agents are getting much higher scores than everyone else. When you listen to their phone discussions of the past month, you can immediately figure out what they’re doing right.
So you can direct your other team members to prepare in the same manner. On the other hand, when someone is getting very poor feedback, attending to his or her old calls will possibly reveal his or her problems.
Phone tracking is frequently applied at call centers for purposes of quality maintenance. Recording employees’ communications with customers helps the managers to assure that the clients are receiving services up to the company standards.
Aside from quality control, phone records are also usually applied for training where employees track their communications for self-evaluation.
7. Computer Activity Tracking
If you own the computers and the infrastructure like network, server, wifi devices, etc your employees are using. Then you are not even required to let them know that you are managing or studying their messages, emails, notes, conversations, etc. through the system.
Nevertheless, if they’re working through their personal computers at the office or operating from home, maintaining an email strategy that essentially says, “We reserve the right to collect and open all automated messages sent through work hours or of your business email address” should suffice your purpose and keep you compliant in the eyes of the law.
Similar to internet tracking, similar software allows employers to track desktop application usage. Implemented effectively, these systems can bring out some accurate reports that might give you some amazing exploratory views on your employee’s computer usage.
This system will highlight how much time people are devoted to productive activity and work. You can easily see how much time the computer remained passive and also shows you which applications were used most.
8. Time Tracking and Time Clocking
Time-clocking essentially means following employees’ times of entry and exit using a time clock application. That permits employers to hold an eye on their employees to make sure they’re not late for a job and don’t move before the workday is finished.
In this case, all an employee has to do is to let the timer on while entering the office network. The time-tracking feature will simply work in the background – measuring the time spent and sites located during this time period.
In such a case, the employee does not need to manually enter a single data. All they have to do is begin and end the timer while getting out of the office system! This allows you to accurately monitor your team’s office starting and ending times and calculate their work hours accordingly.
9. Use Reminders and Timesheet
However, most well-mannered employees might ignore presenting their timesheets on time. A helpful reminder in this case can run a long way. Moreover, when your team is little, the most suitable option is to automate your timesheet notes and reminders; whether that be a time alert, SMS, Slack information, or email.
Control Your Tracking Process Properly
While tracking the activities of the employees, the management sometimes seems to get carried away. Frequently, the employee tracking process becomes more important than the employees themselves. All the private or personal data obtained that is unrelated to the business leads can be misused if it is not controlled or managed properly.
It can create company-wide employee dissatisfaction and low morale, which can lead to employee productivity loss and employee turnover, in extreme cases.
This is why the company management team needs to design employee tracking policies and methods with great care and prudence. The employer needs to make decent use of employee tracking technology.
The management should have a clear idea of why and how they are monitoring employee activities. Restricting the monitoring of employee activities outside of business hours is a crucial way to minimize any such challenges.
Conclusion
Those times are gone when the management of the organization used to spy on their employees. Doing such acts will significantly decrease the respectfulness of the entrepreneur to his team because no employee likes to be tracked at the micro-level. Presently smart businesses are applying smart ways to track their employees’ activities and tying them up with their performance metrics.
This measure is helping the management to keep employee motivation high while tracking the employees. We hope that you found this article helpful. It should assist you as an entrepreneur to gain stronger control over your company activities; while keeping the employees’ motivation intact.
