Productivity Monitoring System: The benefits

Many employers find that they struggle to ensure that their employees use work time effectively. It’s easy for employees to get distracted during work hours, and they wind up checking their emails, shopping online, or chatting on Facebook instead of completing work-related tasks. This holds up other employees and slows down productivity. 

You’re paying your employees for the time they spend at work, and when employees get distracted during work hours, you end up paying them to browse social media and take care of personal tasks. Can a productivity monitoring system help cut out the distractions and raise productivity levels to where they belong? Check out our guide to some of the benefits of using productivity monitoring system in your workplace. 

Less Wasted Time

Keep your employees focused on what really matters during working hours.

Time really is money, so the less of it that gets wasted, the better. The most obvious reason to use productivity software is to prevent employees from wasting the time that you’re paying them for. Poor productivity costs money in several different ways. 

Not only can it slow down work on existing projects, but it could also cost you new projects as well. Clients may notice that work is being completed slowly and decide not to use your company for future projects or decide not to recommend your business to others. Or you may decline to take on projects that you could take on if your workplace was more efficient. 

This means that time-wasting in the workplace comes with opportunity costs as well as direct, real-world costs. It can be difficult to calculate exactly how much money you could save with a more efficient workforce, but a simple way to find out is to ramp up efficiency and see what you gain. Employees who know that their activities are being monitored are less likely to allow themselves to become distracted by social media and other internet-based distractions. Instead, they’ll be motivated to prove that they can be efficient workers. 

Fewer Errors

Fewer distractions mean that an employee’s work is more likely to have fewer errors. 

One thing that you may not have considered when it comes to workplace distractions is that employees who are splitting their attention between work and non-work-related tasks are more likely to make mistakes. They aren’t giving their work their full attention, and that can lead to careless mistakes that could cost your business even more money. 

Productivity monitoring tools can help alert you to mistakes made by your employees in time to correct them so that you can ensure that finished projects are error-free. What’s more, by eliminating distractions, you also eliminate many of the mistakes from happening in the first place, which means that you spend less time correcting mistakes and more time moving on to new work.

Fewer Security Threats

When your employees venture off work-related sites and into social media sites, forums, and shopping sites, not only are they slowing down productivity, they also run the risk of compromising your workplace network. It’s easier than you might think to pick up viruses or malware from insecure websites and personal emails. All that it takes is for your employee to click a bad link or open a bad attachment to a personal email.

Every business has to cope with the possibility of Internet-based attacks. Whether it’s a business rival engaging in corporate espionage, an opportunist using ransomware in order to extract payment, or a disgruntled employee trying to get even for being passed over for a promotion or raise, there are threats that every business is at risk of encountering. You may not be able to prevent someone with malicious intent from trying to infiltrate your network, but you can make your business less vulnerable to those attacks. 

When you use productivity monitoring software, you can block insecure websites by keyword, URL, or category and you can monitor what types of web activities your team is doing. These features can help to eliminate vulnerabilities in your system and keep your workplace safe from security threats. 

Implementing Productivity Monitoring With Minimal Backlash

While productivity monitoring has a number of benefits, you may have some worries that it will backfire by making employees feel as if they aren’t trusted and that the company doesn’t respect their privacy. It’s true that employees often have concerns that they’ll be unfairly targeted by a workplace that uses monitoring systems, or that their personal privacy will be compromised. There are some valid reasons for employees to have these types of fears, but you can help reassure your employees as you implement your new productivity monitoring system. 

Start by being transparent about what you’re monitoring and what you hope to accomplish. Employees don’t want to feel that they’re being spied upon, but letting them know what you’re doing and what your goals are for your productivity monitoring system is much better than having them find out later that they’ve been being monitored. You can also reassure employees that you’re not interested in targeting them unfairly or in accessing their personal information. 

Confine your monitoring to workplace-issued devices, not employee’s personal devices. Use blind monitoring when appropriate to help you spot patterns of low productivity rather than single out individual employees. Remind employees that by increasing your network’s security, you’re also protecting any of your employees’ data – like social security numbers, phone numbers, and addresses, that you necessarily have on file. 

Understanding the benefits of productivity monitoring and how you can use productivity monitoring software to improve the pace, quality, and security of work performed by your employees is the first step on the way toward improving your organization and making up for lost or wasted time. To find out more about how productivity monitoring software can work for your organization, take InterGuard for a free test drive.