Your growing company must always look for ways to maximize efficiency and productivity, and having a solid staff is essential. One tool you may use to ensure that your agents can succeed is employee monitoring. There are many benefits to employee monitoring, including the chance to get a closer look at mistakes, improve employee-employer relationships, and it provides opportunities to recognize good performance. However, tact and proper preparation are required before you begin.
Employee Monitoring May Enhance Efficiency
The traditional methods of ensuring employee efficiency, such as annual reviews, check-ins, and reporting, still have a place in the modern workplace. However, as new monitoring methods become a reality, consider using this time to add them to your organization so you can continue to tweak your processes and succeed.
Focusing on continuous process improvement has various benefits, including revealing hidden bottlenecks that may be slowing things down and remedying them to speed things up.
Monitoring Can Help Analyze and Improve Processes
The best way to make continuous improvements is to analyze your processes to see what’s working and what isn’t. There are many forms of employing monitoring that can help individual and team performance.
Call Monitoring
Consider call monitoring in a call center or sales office. You can have employee calls recorded when they’re speaking to each other, or you can review the calls that they have with their customers and use that information to coach.
Call monitoring is also helpful when you have a customer service or retention team. Management can review the live or recorded calls and determine if their employees took the proper actions. You can also listen to the customer feedback. If you are looking to use this type of monitoring at your company, it is always best to disclose to customers and workers that they are being recorded.
GPS Tracking
GPS tracking is another way to analyze and improve your processes. Suppose your industry has employees who are truck drivers or other associates who are often out and about. Use GPS tracking to review drivers’ movements and determine if better routes may be necessary. In addition to the efficiency aspect, GPS tracking has other uses, like notifying you if a driver is in an accident and correctly calculating mileage reimbursements.
Enhancing Cybersecurity and Compliance
Monitoring cybersecurity at work is crucial to ensure that your employees are both staying on task, but that also your data is not being compromised. Data breaches at work can be costly, both in terms of the amount spent to repair them – the average expense for repairing a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023 – but also in terms of company and client trust. Data breaches are likely to damage your relationships with your existing clients, but could also be an issue for employees, especially if their information is compromised in a breach.
Protect Your Company’s Data
Both human resources and management must ensure employees follow the protocols to keep their computers and the company secure. That includes using strong passwords, staying aware of potential phishing scams, and following policies when avoiding dangerous websites. Investing in regular training is one way to make sure that your employees are educated on the latest cybersecurity threats and know how to deal with them. Having continuing education sessions on these and related issues is also a good way to cultivate a culture of learning at your company.
You can also consider using employee monitoring to enhance data security in all these areas. Consider monitoring internet activities to ensure that employees aren’t visiting prohibited websites during work hours, which can be detrimental to productivity.
Opt for Digital and Physical Security
Another area that you should consider is ensuring that your data is meeting compliance standards. If your company works with a variety of different stakeholders from around the world, it’s best to adhere to the strictest data privacy laws out of all of the different nations that you work with.
You should also consider who in your company has access to what types of information. Keep in mind that employees may need to have certain clearances or seniority to have access to specific data. You should regularly review and update these clearance lists so that only those who need access have it, and to avoid unneeded redundancies which could cause workplace efficiency to slow.
On a final note, it’s always best to ensure that the physical security of your buildings is up to date, both to keep your physical assets and your employees safe. For instance, if your employees normally access the building through a garage, you may want to take steps to secure the garage door by giving out key codes to trusted employees who use this entrance on a daily basis, or to contractors who make deliveries to your building. Motion sensor lights are also a good way to deter theft.
Creating a Culture of Trust
Call monitoring, GPS tracking, and cyber- and physical security compliance are all good ways to enhance productivity in your workplace. But remember that the trust of your employees always comes first. Be cautious about how you use monitoring technology. This should not be an opportunity to micromanage your employee’s every move because that can create a toxic work environment. Let your staff do their job and use this tech to supplement your leadership.
When in doubt, always ask yourself if the processes that you are looking to enact are for the benefit of your workers – such as helping improve training and making delivery processes easier – or if it could be considered unnecessary spying. Ultimately, your employees should feel safe and valued at your company, not as if management is working against them.
