Will Monitoring the Workplace Improve Productivity?

Choosing to implement any tools and services for monitoring the workplace in this age of hybrid work is not a simple yes or no answer. To inform the decision, let’s look at whether hybrid and remote workplaces really have seen a productivity hit, examine if there’s any reason beyond surveillance to use productivity-monitoring tools, then get into the best practices for boosting productivity before sinking time and money into tools for monitoring the workplace and the people in it.

Statistics Show Working from Home Is Already Productive

According to technical talent recruiting company Apollo Technical, here are a couple of key research findings about remote workers and productivity:

In other words, “If I can’t see what you’re doing, you’re not productive” is not a research-supported position for monitoring the workplace. But there are reasons why employers would want to roll out productivity-monitoring tools for their workers.

A Good Reason for Monitoring the Workplace

According to experience-management vendor Knoa Software CEO Brian Berns, monitoring employee productivity can be a method to identify workflow issues.

Rather than monitoring everything the employee is physically doing on the device, user experience management (UEM) uses baseline data on the workflow process and identifies bottlenecks, slow-downs, and other hindrances that disrupt the workflow such as poor user interfaces or system errors.

Using this data, organizations can then identify the cause of those disruptions whether they be related to training, a backend issue, or some other issue around the workflow.

“As we are trying to monitor remote employees it creates a whole series of issues. You are not sitting in the office to look at body language or catch someone as they are in the office to check with them about why they are frustrated”, Berns said. “This process of UEM provides insight into each of these potential issues and allows them to be rectified.”

That’s not to say there isn’t also the type of employee monitoring that’s focused less on workflow optimization and more on employee surveillance -- recording keystrokes, app usage, and other system data to verify the employee is in front of their computer during the times they are on the clock. This is the type of monitoring the workplace, whether remote or in an office building, that creates distrust plus privacy and legal issues.

Pros, Cons, and Ideas Around Monitoring the Workplace

Based on the descriptions of the two types of employee monitoring discussed above, when pros and cons are listed out, they tend heavily towards negative impacts. However, following those lists, our research resulted in several good ideas to be proactive with remote employees. We surveyed nearly 50 different employers; their feedback reflected the following broad arguments.

Here’s what respondents said in favor of using employee-monitoring tools as a way to maintain or boost productivity:

However, the respondents also had concerns about the impact of using employee-monitoring tools in the name of productivity:

Our pool of respondents also pointed out that there are a number of good managerial practices that can be implemented before resorting to productivity-monitoring software. These include:

If productivity monitoring software is the best option after all other efforts have failed, the employers we surveyed recommended these best practices: