I often hear questions like this from small business owners, “I’m suspicious that my employees are wasting time on the Internet. Can you put something in place to monitor their productivity?”
The short answer is yes, we can put something in place. In the era of remote work, employee monitoring software, aka bossware, has grown increasingly popular. Gartner reported mid-2020 that 16% of employers were using technologies more frequently to monitor employees as a result of remote work caused by the pandemic. The more sophisticated tools use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to not only provide basic activity logging with alerts, but also use multivariate analyses to determine positive activities and/or misbehavior.
However, employee monitoring is more than simply deploying software. First, I ask the business owner why they are interested in employee monitoring software. Maybe they are looking for proof of something they already know, like justification to terminate a problem employee. If the owner has a clear purpose, then the effort may indeed be beneficial. However, in my experience, it is more likely the owner wants to change the culture or improve their bottom line without making changes to personnel.
Unfortunately, many companies implement employee monitoring without a well-defined vision for use cases and impact. As a result, they amass scores of data that still leave them uninformed and unable to enact meaningful changes to their business. You can save time and money by considering these factors before you decide to implement employee monitoring software for your organization.
Employee Monitoring Software Breaks Your Cyber Security
To roll these tools out, the first thing we need to do in to break the cyber security controls that in place. Use of monitoring software usually means we need to allow what most anti-malware platforms recognize as an intrusion or suspicious software onto the company network. Are you willing to take these risks?
You Can Discourage Misbehavior with Existing Technology
I often recommend that it is better to prevent the bad behavior instead of allowing it, tracking it and punishing it. Instead of reducing security on the network, how about improving your security? I recommend upgrading the corporate firewall to a next generation appliance that is capable of advanced content filtering, application flow control and real time network usage statistics. Any cybersecurity platform is going to require a firewall, why not make the most of it?
Employees Will Waste Time Finding Work Arounds
According to Gartner, more than 1 in 10 employees will try to find ways to trick the AI monitoring software once it has been installed. Employees may be motivated by spite, a desire to do less work, or by the simple challenge of tricking the system. In any case, monitoring software can have the opposite of the intended effect by making them less productive rather than more productive.
Create a Culture of Trust Instead
If your employees are meeting their goals when it comes to business results, does it really matter what the monitoring software tells you? You can empower your team by hiring strong people and trusting them to be accountable for their own schedules and productivity.
If You Do Implement Employee Monitoring Software
Be Transparent. Communicate the scope and purpose of the effort to help reduce the creepy, Big Brother factor that can happen when employees find out the boss is watching them. Have a governance plan in place that specifies who has access to the data collected by the monitoring software and how long you will keep it.
Once you have the data, how will it be used? This goes back to what I talked about at the beginning. Knowing why you want to implement employee monitoring software is critical to understanding what to do with the information gathered. Sure, you can collect and analyze everything from mouse movements to website activity, but what does this really tell you about your employees and their productivity? Until you can articulate how the data will drive decisions, your company probably isn’t ready for employee monitoring software.
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Referral$
If you know of a company that would be interested in the services of Invario, please email me the company name along with the phone number and email for the person we should contact.
That is all you have to do! Upon completion of the onboarding of a new customer, Invario will pay the equivalent of one month of Invario service to that customer. Recipients that cannot or do not wish to receive a referral payment may elect to have the referral fee donated to a charity of their choice or put into a company entertainment fund.