A couple of decades ago, tracking the activities of employees was nothing but a bad experience for both employers/managers and staff members. Managers and supervisors would have to ask employees to report work updates multiple times a day. Also, in most cases, they had to micromanage things, which was definitely annoying for employees.
However, with the advancement of technology, dedicated employee monitoring systems came into existence that made it more practical to keep a track of employees’ activities. Employers and managers can now keep an eye on what their employees are doing without even them noticing it. With these systems, it is now possible to ensure that employees are working efficiently and delivering their tasks on time.
Through this article, I will shed light on the importance of employee monitoring, its benefits, and the best modern software systems that you can use to monitor your employees. But before that we need to know why employee monitoring is important?
What is the Need for Employee Monitoring?
One of the biggest challenges that you have to face while managing teams is to ensure that employees do not procrastinate and complete their tasks on time. As a manager, it is your responsibility to make sure that your team members are putting efforts to meet the deadlines.
The best way to do that is by keeping a check on their activities.
In today’s time, due to the rising competition among businesses, it has become crucial for organizations to ensure that their employees work at optimum productivity levels. Employee monitoring acts as a feasible way to track and enhance the working efficiency of employees. Besides this, here are a few of the benefits that organizations can reap by using an employee monitoring system:
Benefits of Employee Monitoring
By monitoring the activities of employees, it becomes possible to enhance their productivity. When employees are aware that they are being monitored, they tend to be more active in their tasks. Moreover, as you are able to see how they are spending their time across different projects and tasks, the chances of straying onto non-work related websites and apps become minimal.
- Better Utilization of Resources
For your business, human resources are of supreme value. Employee monitoring allows you to assess if you have allocated your resources effectively or not. Without having a proper employee monitoring network, it’s quite common that some of your employees have extra workload while others are assigned less work than their capacity. This leads to the underutilization of resources and ultimately restricts the efficiency of your business’s operations. Employee monitoring lets you visualize how your resources are assigned across different projects and help you with better resource planning.
To help your employees boost their output capacity, it’s important to measure their performance and identify what is holding them back to deliver their best. With a performance tracking system, you can measure the performance of your employees by tracking how much time they are spending to complete different tasks. This allows you to pinpoint tasks that are taking too much time to accomplish and take appropriate actions to make such tasks execute faster.
- Time Tracking and Client Billing
Time tracking is a crucial part of employee monitoring. You can see how the work hours of your employees are spent across all your projects and tasks. The timesheets keep a detailed record of all the time data and provide critical information that helps you to manage your time better in the future. Also, you can use the time data for client billing and payroll, etc.
- Ideal for Managing Remote Teams
However, with employee monitoring in place, it becomes feasible to supervise your remote team. Modern employee monitoring systems let you take screenshots of your employees’ monitors and also provide you a detailed report on how much time they spent on different websites and applications. Hence, employee monitoring softwares are great for setting up a productive remote working environment.
4 Best Employee Monitoring Tools For Your Organization
To make the most of employee monitoring, you need to use modern tools that facilitate the way you track the activities of your employees and help them become more productive. Here is the list of the best employee monitoring tools that you can start using right now:
Kickidler is among the top-rated employee monitoring software that helps your employees to stay more alert and focused on their work. Team leaders and project managers can rely on this software to manage their teams effectively while ensuring optimum utilization of the work hours.
The software comes with an intuitive interface, which is visually appealing and easy to understand. You can explore all the features in Kickidler without requiring any professional assistance. Additionally, it is also the perfect tool to monitor your remote employees and teams. Apart from being a web-based software that you can access from almost anywhere, it has all the advanced features that you need to ensure higher employee output.
Main Features
- Integrated time tracking and desktop activity tracking
- Computer screen recording
- Employee violation monitoring to prevent visits to undesirable websites and usage of unwanted apps
- Keystroke tracker keeps a detailed record of keys pressed at different times by an employee
- Comprehensive employee productivity metrics and behavior analytics
ProofHub is an all-in-one project management and team collaboration software ideal for gaining complete control over teams and projects. Its advanced time tracking feature lets you understand how your employees or team members are managing their work hours individually.
The software comes with automatic timers to keep an accurate record of the time spent working on different tasks and projects. You can set time estimates so that employees get a clear idea of the time that they need to finish their assigned work. All the time data gets saved in timesheets and you can access them easily whenever required. Moreover, it also has custom reports that can be a wonderful tool for monitoring employee and project progress.
Main Features
- Custom time reports help to assess employee performance and develop effective time management strategies
- Export timesheets
- Gantt charts make it easy to plan task schedules and manage resources
- Build-in chat interface for quick team conversations
- Custom reports
Desktime is a dedicated time tracking software for teams of all kinds. It gives you the flexibility to keep an accurate record of the time data for your employees along with the URLs & apps accessed by them.
The time tracking software comes loaded with several features that allow you to take the productivity of employees to the next level. You can identify the habits of your employees that forces them to become inefficient at work and prepare necessary plans to eliminate them.
Main Features
- Time tracking with automated screenshots
- Customizable time reports
- Offline time tracking support
- Cost calculation and project billing
Toggl is a simple yet powerful time tracking and employee monitoring tool that will help your team deliver more work in less time. It allows you to understand the time management habits of your employees and assess their performance.
The best thing about Toggl is that you can get detailed time data for individual employees, clients, and projects. To ensure that your employees do not procrastinate and accomplish their work on time, you can set time estimates for each task.
Main Features
- Visual time tracking reports
- Task management
- Integration with third-party applications
Conclusion
For modern organizations, employee monitoring offers a great way to ensure that your employees are performing at their best. It’s always a great idea to use modern tools that are specifically designed to make the employee monitoring process smooth and effective. I hope this list helps you achieve just that.
All the best!
Author Bio:
Vartika Kashyap is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub — a project management software for teams of all sizes. She is one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2018. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click
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