You can’t keep your eyes and ears all over your team or office all the time. That’s when using a time tracker and employee monitoring tool makes sense. And although time tracking and employee monitoring seem to be interchangeable terms, both are different in specific.
Difference between simple time tracking and employee monitoring
Time tracking mainly focuses on tracking or monitoring time spent on the whole project or an individual task. It is helpful for project managers, supervisors, clients, and team members because they can easily track timing. Time tracking is much easier and simpler than employee monitoring.
Employee monitoring is the process of tracking what employees are doing during working hours. Employee monitoring software provides every detail about employees, such as activities they do, websites they visit, etc.
It answers questions like:
- Are employees utilizing their time for the company’s growth?
- Are they misusing provided time and spending it on irrelevant and/or unproductive activities?
Time trackers are used for tracking attendance, costs, and issues related to human resources, etc. On the other hand, employee monitoring tools are intended to prevent employees from performing illegal or unethical activities, identify potential threats that might cause damage, etc.
How employee monitoring affects the company
When implemented thoughtfully and transparently, an employee monitoring software tool can help with business growth.
You can’t keep your eyes and ears all over your team or office all the time. That’s when using a time tracker and employee monitoring tool makes sense. Using such a tool might sound like you don’t trust employees. So, make sure you convey the purpose of implementing this tool among your employees within your organization transparently.
Note that team monitors are useful and beneficial not just for businesses but also for employees themselves. So, make everyone on your team aware of these benefits before deploying them.
Once done, here’s how an employee monitoring program helps businesses:
- You Can See Employee Strengths: You can see what your employees are good at. Take snapshots of instances when they outperform your expectations and appreciate them for the same. This motivation encourages them to do better, which helps businesses grow.
- Improves Employee-Employer Relationship: Pouncing on team members only inspires fear and anxiety. When you have an employee monitoring tool, you can note down their mistakes and reach them at a later time in a better way.
- Improve Production Rates: The way your employees spend their working hours directly affects your business’s bottom line. Using such tools, you can check where your team members are utilizing their time productively or not.
- Increases Employee Efficiency: Since employees know that they are being monitored, they will be more focused and less distracted. This improves their overall business productivity and drives profits.
What are some alternatives to employee monitoring?
Google “best employee monitoring software”, and you will find overwhelming options. It can be quite confusing to choose the right one, given such a wide range of options.
But, if you want to leverage these solutions in your favor, it’s important to choose the right tool. It’s important to note that each tool has its pros and cons, while some may lack desired features.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one tool, you can also consider Monitask. This popular time monitoring and employee tracking software program offers multiple useful features. In addition, this tool facilitates online timesheets, computer monitoring, screen monitoring, employee productivity tracking, and a few more features.
What does the future of employee monitoring apps hold?
Employers and managers are increasingly leveraging non-traditional employee tracking tools. At the same time, employees are also understanding the purpose of these tools and growing more comfortable with them. In fact, employee monitoring has become even more important during the new normal induced by the pandemic.
The workplaces in the future will become more interesting than ever before. With the innovations like machine learning and artificial intelligence, future offices will be able to use intelligent employee monitoring software tools. These programs would be able to perform the following functions:
- Behavioral analysis: Employee monitoring tools in the near future will be able to track changes in employees’ behavior. They will be able to do so in multiple ways. This will help employers assess behavioral anomalies in real-time. These advanced solutions will help prevent security-related threats posed by employees.
- Turnover prediction: Future tools will be able to predict unhappy employees, thus slacking off or resigning. It tends to be expensive, hectic, and time-consuming to constantly replace employees. Future solutions will significantly reduce this.
- Intelligent suggestions: Future employee monitoring programs will be able to intelligently find out certain activities that could cause potential health risks to employees. For example, employees spending excessive time on their computers will receive a warning and advise them to take a break.
All in all, in the future, employee monitoring software tools and time trackers will pack machine learning and artificial intelligence abilities. These will make them even smarter and more efficient than existing solutions.
Wrapping up
So, we can say that an employee monitoring software tool makes it easy to keep a tab on your team – remote or in-office. It’s beneficial for both – the employer and employees.
In the future, these programs are going to be even smarter, thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence. These capabilities will make things easier than ever before, driving more benefits and revenue to business while making businesses more productive.
