Increase Employee Productivity with User Activity Monitoring

High employee productivity is vital for any business’s success, but productivity tends to decrease over time, and employees tend to require constant support to stay productive. According to a survey carried out by Webtorials, companies could be losing out on as much as $11,000 in potential annual revenue per employee because of low productivity. Though monitoring employees in the workplace is commonly used to address productivity problems, only innovative technologies can provide you with the best solution for increasing productivity.

Why Employee Productivity May Suffer

There are various reasons for the low productivity of employees, but the most common are the following:

Low morale – Dissatisfied employees tend to work less productively. Workers may not be motivated because of unfulfilled job expectations, challenging tasks, poor management, or problems with colleagues. Moreover, low morale can become a reason for frequent sick leaves or high turnover rates. All these factors negatively affect your business and may result in losses.

Extensive technology use – While modern technologies greatly increase employee productivity, extensive use of technology can also distract your workers from their responsibilities. For instance, a survey conducted by Career Builder revealed that more than half of all employees consider cell phones their biggest distraction, while unlimited access to the internet distracted 44 percent of respondents. Visiting social networking sites, checking personal emails, and using the internet for personal matters takes your employees’ time and has a direct impact on your revenue.

Office distractions – Workplace distractions such as co-workers dropping by, meetings, and short breaks can also negatively affect employee productivity. While communication is important for business processes, extensive meetings and chatting may just substitute time talking about work for actually doing it. Short breaks can reduce productivity when they’re used as an excuse for avoiding tasks.

Low competence – New employees may lack the knowledge or skills needed to perform their duties. During their probation period, newcomers may distract your experienced employees. Low levels of competence can also reduce the productivity of well-qualified workers, who may need to refresh or update their knowledge.

Poor management – Employee productivity may also suffer in the case of poor communication with managers. Workers may feel confused and dissatisfied if they don’t understand their responsibilities or get unclear instructions. Managers who don’t keep their promises, aren’t available to their employees, or control their employees too much may also make it difficult for their employees to get tasks done. As a result, poor management leads to employee mistakes, unnecessary work, and decreased productivity.

New Ways to Assess Productivity

Monitoring can improve employee productivity. Though most companies use video monitoring, tracking systems, and telephone recording to track their employees, these methods to increase employee productivity may not be enough because of the widespread use of computers.

Monitoring employee activity on computers is a more effective way to assess productivity in the workplace, as you can become fully aware of all actions performed by your workers throughout the day.

In addition, the information collected as a result of using user activity monitoring will reveal reasons for low productivity and help you take effective measures to counter them.

Keep in mind that total control over employees in the workplace may negatively impact their productivity, however, as few people do their best with someone standing behind them.

To achieve the best results while tracking employee activity, follow these best practices for monitoring employees at work.

Quantified Improvement

There are different approaches to increasing employee productivity with monitoring, each with its pros and cons. The trick is choosing one that will guarantee quantifiable results.

Innovative employee monitoring solutions will let you collect information about what your workers do every day. Here are some tips on how you can increase employee productivity by using user activity monitoring.

Evaluate employee productivity – Quantifiable data on your employees’ activities can help you evaluate how productive each worker is. But don’t start with identifying the lowest performers. Instead, find and reward the most productive workers, which will motivate others to do their best as well.

Decrease distractions from technology – Analyzing monitoring reports, you can define which applications and sites that are used or visited by your employees have no relation to your business activities. For instance, you can find out if people are spending their work hours making online purchases or watching entertaining videos. You can also notice if your workers are visiting web resources that relate more to their hobbies than to their work tasks.

Simplify timekeeping – Video recording of user activity allows you to monitor how much time an employee spends completing a particular task. Thus, video recording may help you optimize workloads and delegate assignments to the employee who can most efficiently handle them. In addition, using video recordings, you can define the most and least productive periods of the day to schedule more efficient meetings and short breaks.

Increase employee competence – Recordings of business processes or calls can be used when training new employees. In addition, video recordings make it easy to find mistakes and correct them.

Solve disputes – Communicating with clients puts your employees at risk of getting into disputes. If your clients are dissatisfied with services provided by your company, you can find the source of the dispute by using data recorded during employee monitoring. You can see if your employees interact politely with clients, business partners, and others who are involved in your business activities. This data may be especially helpful as forensic evidence in case of proceedings.

Document bad behavior – Revealing cases of bad employee behavior will help you prevent negative consequences. Based on monitoring data, you can take action to deal with chronic lateness, protect against data leakage, and eliminate harassment in the workplace.

Improve management – Monitoring employees in real-time, managers can notice when a worker has started dealing with a low-priority task and contact them immediately. They can also monitor whether an employee has difficulties with their work and offer useful advice. Monitoring can help managers prioritize and delegate assignments more effectively.

A detailed article can be found at https://www.ekransystem.com/en/blog/increase-employee-productivity.