Monitoring employees can be a highly effective way of boosting productivity in the workplace. However, it can also go the other way, if you aren’t tracking your staff correctly. In today’s guide, we’re going to go through some of the most important things you need to consider about employee tracking, to ensure you are using it in a positive way for your business. Read on to find out more.
It’s not always a great measure of output
If you are a factory owner, productivity tracking is an excellent way to see how each member of staff on the conveyor is pulling their weight. It’s a simple time and unit equation, and the results will be as clear as day. However, if you run a different kind of business, things are a little murkier.
Output can be complicated. Take a web developer, for example. While you can track how many lines of code they can write in an hour, it’s no indication of quality. In fact, it will often go the other way – coding is all about creating a clear instruction for a computer to follow, and the more you include, the messier it will be. Also, those lines of code don’t take into account the many hours of thinking that go with them – and how can you track thought?
Your employees can enjoy it
If you were to suggest monitoring for the first time, the vast majority of your employees would not like the idea in the slightest. But there is a lot more than tracking hours worked involved, and it’s essential that you let your staff know that there are also benefits for them. With tracking, high performance can be rewarded.
If you learn how to document employee information correctly, you can learn a lot more about them, including their likes and dislikes, favorite hobbies, and all kinds of other things. Of course, some employees will feel like you don’t trust them if you set up a monitoring process, but your job is to convince them of its benefits.
Breaks are OK
Many modern, forward-thinking companies realize that driving their employees to work long hours at a time has an adverse impact on productivity. The work they do is less useful, and they spend more time doing simple tasks when tired.
So, if you do set up employee tracking of any kind, ensure that you allow plenty of time for breaks. Not only will it help staff focus their minds better on a task, but it will also get them away from their desks on a regular basis – which is ideal for the general health of your workplace.
It won’t solve your problems
If you have any productivity issues in the workplace, tracking work won’t solve them. An employee who is working to complete a task as fast as possible won’t necessarily do so in the best way – they will take the fastest route.
To make monitoring work, you will need people to work for you, not the system. And no accounting software is going to change that, so look at your company’s culture first, before investing in a tracking system.
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