Top 10 Pros and Cons of Measuring Employee Productivity

Measuring employee productivity at the office and a remote workspace is a crucial factor in an organization. Monitoring employee performance is an effective means of maintaining productivity, establishing accountability, and tracking working hours.

Thus, organizations opt for employee monitoring software to improve their work standards and to manage their employees. The application of an employee monitoring app is common in many companies, but it is only beneficial if done correctly.

If not done properly, monitoring employees can cause privacy problems and, in the worst case, legal ramifications.

Our goal in this article is to help you identify whether employee monitoring is worth it or not by reviewing its pros and cons.

The Benefits of Employee Performance Measurement

1. Ensures Fairness

Organizing your employees at their workplace is a challenging job. The challenges related to managing a workforce vary widely. It is difficult to determine when employees begin their tasks. You can’t tell if they are working on your tasks or spending their time on other things. It is hard to know how much time they spend on a particular task.

If you have remote workers, managing them is even more challenging. Time and productivity management is hard for employees as well.

Keeping track of time and monitoring employee performance can alleviate these concerns. When you use a good employee monitoring tool, you can see when your employees clock in and clock out. You will know which project they are working on and how efficiently they are working. Furthermore, calculating the time for completion of a project is even easier with time tracking software.

Employee monitoring apps also benefit the employees. As long as they work on their tasks, they won’t have to defend themselves. Using the monitoring tool, their employer can verify it immediately.

2. You Can Track Individual and Team Productivity

Employee monitoring software is the best productivity tracker.

If you can’t monitor your teams’ productivity, you won’t know how productive they are. Many companies do not monitor their employees’ productivity. If you don’t have a clear way to monitor productivity, you’ll have to guess.

A simple guess won’t do when the going gets tough. You will lose tons of money because your records will be inaccurate. Also, you might have to face difficulties evaluating employee performance and rewards.

You can obtain daily and weekly reports on total working hours, apps and websites used by the employees, productive hours, breaks, ongoing projects, etc.

As a result, you can identify weaknesses in your productivity and work to improve them. Employees also get access to time-wasting behavior statistics to help them make adjustments quickly.

You can use employee monitoring software regardless of whether you have remote employees.

3. It Sets Positive Standards for Workplace Behavior

In an ideal world, your onboarding process will clarify what online activities are permitted during working hours. This task may even be enforced by firewalls that block certain apps and websites.

However, if you don’t provide a separate computer for remote employees, it’s difficult to justify blocking certain sites. Your employees likely need to access Facebook during their spare time, so you cannot block it indefinitely.

How can you ensure that your staff does not access any productive apps or sites during their free time? What do you do to ensure that they only use work-related apps while they are at work?

A monitoring system for employees would be beneficial. Using an employee monitoring system, you can keep track of the apps and websites your employees access while they’re clocked in. You can remind them of the company’s work policy if you find they’re using social media sites during work hours.

Monitoring your employees’ web usage allows you to set better standards of behavior and identify what is and isn’t appropriate.

4. It Identifies High-Performing Employees and Underperformers

The majority of employees gain the trust of their employers through the quality of their work and their productivity. Hard work and productivity are difficult to measure, but how do you find out?

A monitoring program can assist an employer in verifying this. This tool will reveal which employees are producing results, meeting deadlines, and exceeding their productivity goals.

You can reward these employees so they stay motivated by knowing who they are. You can also use your data on productive employees to train other employees to duplicate those behaviors.

This way, you can reward good employees, as well as increase productivity rates for underperformers. As a final benefit, monitoring employees can help you identify dishonest or lazy employees.

By using the tool’s data on their behavior, you can get in touch with them and set a plan in motion for getting them back on track. In case they don’t believe you or don’t respond well to you, you can always provide a record of what you did.

There are times when an employee is not dishonest or lazy; they are just unable to handle the demands of their job.

5. Shields Company from Cyber Attacks and Prevents Conflict 

You can deter your employees from visiting potentially dangerous, unproductive websites by monitoring their internet usage. How likely is it that you’d open a suspicious link on your work computer if you knew your employer was watching you? Not likely, is it?

You can prevent your employees from downloading and accessing suspicious sites, apps, and files that could compromise your company’s security.

Keeping an eye on your employees can also help prevent data breaches. Because their internet usage is being monitored, you will be able to identify suspicious traffic and discover where it began. Identifying suspicious activities helps you keep track of your data and keep it out of the wrong hands.

When working with freelancers and clients, monitoring your employees can help you avoid conflict. An accurate record of the time spent on a project provided by a monitoring tool is useful for billing clients. It won’t be a problem to bill them for hours since you can verify the time spent.

Employee Performance Measurement: What Are the Cons?

1. Concerns Over Privacy

There are privacy concerns associated with employee monitoring. Sometimes, employees may not be aware that their employers monitor them. Observing employees’ computer activity without their consent is never okay. It would help if you stopped using monitoring tools that monitor your employees without them knowing.

There’s a good possibility most employees will worry that you’re monitoring even their non-work hours. Moreover, they are concerned that their passwords could be exposed and that managers could record their private conversations and chats.

Your employees will have irreparable trust issues with you. After employees learn their employers secretly spy on them at all times, they may not trust them.

If you monitor employees, make sure they’ve permitted you first. Signing an agreement that you will monitor their activities is important. Then, the employee should download the software and install it themselves.

You must outline the type of monitoring at the workplace. Let the employees know how the tool will protect their privacy. They should be able to control what is monitored, and you should explain why you monitor them.

2. Disruptions of Trust

Employees are likely to feel distrusted if they learn that you plan to use a monitoring tool. As a result, they’ll feel their previous work is worthless and that you need to spy on them to prove your point. As a result, there will be a toxic work environment, reduced employee morale, and possibly higher turnover rates.

Everyone doesn’t want to feel that way at work. You can combat this by professionally presenting your monitoring software.

Explain your company’s standard policy to them first. Everyone in your organization must use it, from young employees to executive management – it isn’t personal or targeted at them.

Monitoring employees becomes easier to accept in an environment where everyone is monitored. You won’t feel like you are spying or applying double standards by using a software program that monitors your employees!

By doing this, the employee realizes that there is no issue of trust involved. It’s only a policy that applies across the board to computer monitoring, as a productivity tool that helps both company and employee, present employee monitoring software as a security tool.

3. The Application of Monitoring Tool 

When you use a monitoring tool to track your employee performance, the staff might not become familiar with using the software. If your employees don’t know the application, using the software does not provide good output.

Also, even though you use monitoring tools by letting them know, not everyone likes the idea of an employee monitoring tool. There will always be a conflict regarding the application of the time tracking tool.

4. Lack of Commitment

All members of your team must be committed to the process for it to be successful. If you commit to the process negatively, it will disrupt the metrics for others, and this will have a cascading effect for others. Individuals and teams are essentially competing instead of working together, which creates conflicts in time.

Your employees may not trust the monitoring tool. Many employees are skeptical about monitoring tools. Why is that? Since they can be monitored during off-work hours as well, they feel their privacy is invaded.

Make sure your monitoring software tracks only work-related activities and never compromises an employee’s privacy. In the absence of such guarantees, you will have many moral and legal issues.

5. Cannot Trace Where The Employees Spend Their Time?

Monitors don’t just track how many hours employees work. The hours you spend working must be productive. A worker can potentially use their work timer to search for travel destinations on Google for hours.

Few tools can track how much time your employees spend at work, so you may be paying them to watch Youtube.

Using social media and other apps can decrease output levels, and performance measurement standards may seem unfair to top performers. In addition, it may require workers with lower levels of training to achieve metrics that are unachievable at their current levels.

In addition, it may require workers with lower levels of training to achieve metrics that are unachievable at their current levels. As a result, workers with little training may have to achieve metrics that are impossible for them to achieve at their current levels, leading to demotivation rather than productivity improvements.

There is a human element to performance management, even with data points that help make it less subjective. Managers who do not like someone are likely to hold their performance back, even if they meet the metrics. Data collection can also be disrupted by emotional decisions and lead to false conclusions.

Conclusion

All things have advantages and disadvantages. Employee productivity monitoring, however, offers numerous advantages over its disadvantages. So, I recommend that companies should use employee monitoring software in order to improve their position.

Employers can minimize the disadvantages of utilizing this software by taking certain steps. Employers can achieve the best results when they resolve any conflicts.