Monitoring employees (teleworking or not) remains far from being the best attitude for you or your employee. This way of managing is far from being conducive to developing confidence but also remains time-consuming for you. Worse, it has deleterious consequences on productivity and the atmosphere since no one likes having someone behind their back watching their every move.
Among the practices that have scandalized since the implementation of telework, the implementation of technologies that allow you to keep an eye on employees at all times is far from unanimous. Thus, mandatory screen sharing, monitoring of web pages visited and clicks per minute or the activation of webcams throughout the working day have become common practices in some companies. While some mention a period of adaptation and a desire to maintain productivity or help in the event of difficulties, it is clear that this monitoring sometimes proves to be too heightened.
Surveillance, a bad choice for productivity
Different studies show that surveillance changes the behavior of individuals who feel observed. If they seem more concentrated, for example by avoiding social networks, studies indicate that the propensity to make errors is also multiplied. Indeed, the tendency to place oneself from the point of view of the observer and not to concentrate on the work to be carried out disrupts productivity and impairs concentration. The fear of making an error that cannot be corrected and the desire to perform a task perfectly interferes with its successful completion. If these effects are, of course, not wanted by the employer, who sometimes simply seeks to help, monitoring can very quickly become counterproductive and above all damage employee confidence.
An opinionway study for Dropbox shows that authority only makes sense through the link between skills and the relationship with company managers, which obviously involves leadership.
The other side of the coin: an exponential turnover
While 53% of employees agree that their organization has developed these solutions, 33% of them do not know if their company has implemented these systems on their devices. It should be noted that companies that use very intrusive tools are also those that have the most resignations with 45% for those with intrusive tools and 48% those with too many monitoring tools. “By lacking transparency and measuring their productivity randomly and only using numbers, employers can quickly undermine the confidence of their employees, and risk seeing their best talents leave, while we are in an extremely complex and competitive”explain the authors of the study.
Empower each individual
It must be remembered that each employee is used in his personal life to make decisions, to organize his life and that he therefore has this ability to take responsibility in an obvious way. Putting their sense of responsibility at the heart of the relationship is above all a way of recognizing their motivation and their ability to self-manage. Employers often monitor their staff because they worry about employee slacking. Monitoring appears as a strategy to prevent this from happening. However, there are many other strategies to keep teams engaged and motivated. In particular, that of setting objectives with an employee and monitoring the progress made and the achievement of these objectives. This requires, of course, on the part of the manager an excellent knowledge of the work and the missions, of the tasks to be carried out by the employee but fundamentally avoids creating a negative relationship between the two individuals. The Opinionway survey for Dropbox on authority in the workplace provides a picture of employees’ vision of the meaning given to authority.
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