How to Choose the Best Employee Monitoring Software for Your Business?
Do you want to know how to choose the best employee monitoring software for your business? Keep reading this article!
Two years ago, employee monitoring might have been a business practice most employees feared and despised, and business owners were reluctant to implement it. But now that the business world is changing rapidly, adjusting to Covid-19 restrictions and circumstances, investing in advanced software for employee monitoring has become necessary.
As the demand for these tracking tools keeps soaring, you must use them for all the right reasons to make the most of the collected data and help your business grow.
So before you embark on the adventure of choosing the best employee monitoring app for your business, you need to ask yourself:
Why do I want to monitor employees’ activities?
Keep reading if the answer involves making your teams more productive and time-efficient.
However, if you want to use this software to track employees’ personal accounts during off-work hours, you may reconsider your intentions because they are unethical and potentially illegal.
Here you’ll find several steps to take before you invest in tracking workers, ensuring you opt for an employee monitoring solution that will best meet your demands.
How to Choose the Best Employee Monitoring Software
Before choosing employee monitoring software, you must keep these in mind. You need to
- Listen to your employees
- Check the features of the software
- Pick one with good UI and scalability
- Consider your budget
Below, we will talk more about each point. So, without any further ado, let’s get into the list.
1) Talk to Your Employees Openly and Transparently
Being open and honest about deploying an employee monitoring system needs to be your top priority. All controversies regarding employee monitoring stem from the lack of transparency.
Furthermore, if you decide to track employees’ computers without telling them, you may cause a train of actions that can seriously affect your business and ruin your brand image.
According to statistics, more than 70% of American workers state that they would leave their companies if they found out that managers were tracking their activities behind their backs. On the other hand, those who decide to stay may feel overwhelmed by the entire process. This unnecessary pressure and stress may make them wholly disengaged or overwork themselves, leading to burnout.
Besides having severe consequences to your employee’s physical and mental health, disengagement and burnout will destroy your productivity and harm your business.
For this reason, you must be open and honest about including employee monitoring software in your workflow.
Breaking the news may be the hardest step. Most employees find monitoring a serious and controversial issue, and they’ll have many questions. So avoid informing them about it via e-mail. Instead, try hosting a meeting where you’ll explain your reasons for computer activity tracking, focusing on benefits your employees may get from it.
Also, listen carefully to their concerns and objections and make suggestions. You’ll gain their trust and consent much more accessible by showing them they are heard and appreciated.
Also, you can create a clear Employee Monitoring Policy, defining what activities you intend to monitor, when, why, and how you will use the tracking data. By doing this, you’ll justify using a productivity tracking app, setting clear expectations.
This will show your employee that you have no hidden agenda for monitoring, shedding their fear and doubts about the entire process.
2) Choose Software with Monitoring Features That Best Fit Your Goals?
In a market filled with feature-packed activity monitoring tools, you must choose the right one for your business. So before you canvass the offer, define the goals you want to achieve by monitoring your teams.
Do you want to help your employees be more productive?
Or you need to automate an outdated payroll process and keep more accurate attendance records.
Nowadays, the most advanced monitoring tools can help you achieve your goals, providing you real-time insight into employees’ daily performance. So try to stay focused on your goals and choose the optimal solution to the issue you want to tackle. You may also wish to consider investing in additional tools, such as shift management software, to help you organize your employees in order to make tracking even easier.
A top-quality monitoring tool that offers various features doesn’t mean you need to use them to get a clearer picture of your team’s performance or attendance. Instead of wasting time and money using tracking options that don’t provide meaningful results, focus on features that offer the most valuable insight.
2) Always Go For a User-Friendly Solution That is Easily Scalable
When running a large company employing more than 1000 people, the last thing you need is monitoring software that requires complex installation. Instead, you need an easy-to-use productivity and time-tracking solution that you can install across all your office-based and remote teams’ computers in a few clicks.
Also, you don’t want to pay an additional training so that employees can learn how to deal with complex and unintuitive dashboards.
The best productivity and time trackers have intuitive dashboards that can be navigated efficiently, accompanied by automatic time-tracking that doesn’t require manual action. This feature will minimize the risk of human error. Also, with automated time tracking, your employees won’t need to check in or out manually, disrupting their workflow.
When running a growing business, keeping track of all onboarding employees and those leaving your company is essential. This is a demanding task, especially in the era of remote and hybrid work. However, adding new employees or removing them from the employee monitoring system should not be painstaking or time-consuming.
Therefore, you need to look for an employee monitoring solution that is easily scalable and highly adaptable to changes. It will allow you to add new users or remove the accounts that don’t need to be monitored seamlessly.
This will allow you to focus on significant issues you must tackle while scaling your business and keeping track of your employees.
4) Choose the Monitoring Software That Fits Your Budget and Your Needs
Investing in employee monitoring is an investment in your business’s efficiency and growth. Therefore you need to set a budget and stick to it. While large companies are well-aware of the importance of staying within set budgets, small business owners may easily overlook this fact. What they need is a solid strategy, leading to a reasonable investment.
So before you decide to buy a premium package containing numerous different features, look back on your goals, asking yourself:
What do you want to achieve by introducing an employee monitoring system?
Put all the benefits and costs that different monitoring options offer. Then, make sure that you choose the one that offers the features you need the most, avoiding those that add up to the price without helping you achieve set goals.
Conclusion
When you handle a team, you should be using employee monitoring software. You can easily track your team’s productivity, performance, and everything through it. You will see several free, premium, and freemium solutions if you check the internet.
Besides, employee monitoring is now part of various performance management software; when you select them, keep these points in your mind.
We hope you have found this article helpful and enjoyed the read. Please consider sharing this article with your friends and fellow bloggers on social media if you do. For more related articles, you can check out our blog archive.
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Dev Patel says
Human resources are an important asset for your company and its performance really influences the results of your company so it is important to monitor and this software will surely help you. Thanks for such an informative blog!
BlogHeist says
Hey Dev!
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Should you’ve any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch:
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Kristine Watson says
Employee monitoring software is an important tool for business owners who want to verify that employees are using their time at work to accomplish the responsibilities and tasks assigned to them. There are lots of great options for employee monitoring available on the market today.
Which one is the best? It depends on your specific needs. Thank you Cristina for writing on such a trendy topic.