Employee tracking is a potentially controversial topic, yet opposing arguments to its implementation often come from those who are unfamiliar with its benefits and those who make wrong assumptions about its purpose.
To create some clarity, here is a rundown of a few common misconceptions and an explanation of the reality of the situation when it comes to keeping tabs on employee activity.
Privacy Is Compromised
The biggest bugbear brought up in relation to employee tracking is that it is invasive and in some way infringes upon the privacy of individual employees.
The truth of the matter is that this is only the case if you deliberately choose to withhold information about how you are monitoring team members and what kinds of data are collected.
The solution is to be upfront about everything involved, to ensure employees are on the same page, as it is only through this kind of transparency that your tracking policies can be effectively deployed in the first place.
The Employer Is the only Beneficiary
Another often held belief is that employee tracking is only advantageous to those higher up the management ladder, and is all about enabling increased control over workers.
If you look into it, you will find that the opposite is true; using software to track employee hours is as much about providing flexibility to individual team members and scheduling their time efficiently, especially in a remote working context, as it is about helping employers.
When used correctly, tracking solutions will empower managers to adjust scheduling to suit the unique needs of employees, rather than forcing them all to conform to the same formula.
Furthermore, data collected can be used to demonstrate the value that employees are bringing to the table, and thus be used as evidence to encourage managers to offer pay rises, promotions, and other perks based on undeniable performance statistics.
Employees Will Be Singled out for Tracking
Lots of people assume that employees are targeted specifically for monitoring, putting them in an unfair position compared with their unmonitored, and thus more managerially favored, counterparts.
There are several reasons why this is not the case, not least of which is that there are legal protections that exist to prevent this precise state of affairs from arising.
Instead the aim of any tracking software deployment should be to assess all team members and look for efficiency improvement opportunities and issues across the board, rather than just in the perceived “problem” areas.
Only Remote Teams Can Benefit
While there is little doubt that employee tracking has become far more important in the era of rapid remote working adoption, it is also important to note that in-house teams can still take advantage of these solutions even if they remain on-site at the office.
Once again this is all about ensuring that the entire organization can be scrutinized and that optimizations can be made, regardless of how and where employees are fulfilling their responsibilities.
Job Satisfaction Will Suffer
As with the privacy issue mentioned earlier, some people have the idea that tracking employees will lead to worse morale among team members and could stir up widespread disgruntlement.
Thankfully this is again something that will only come about if decision-makers are not open and honest with those who they are responsible for managing. Explaining the advantages of tracking solutions and underpinning the idea that this will allow for improvements to be made at all levels will avoid any potential dissatisfaction.
In the end, employee tracking should be implemented as transparently as possible and be explained comprehensively by those responsible for its rollout so that misunderstandings can be avoided and the best possible results can be achieved.
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