Whether you own a small business or a large one, it is practically impossible to keep an eye on every single thing that your employees do over company owned gadgets and internet connection. On the low end, there is a high likelihood that your employees are most likely just spending a large amount of time on YouTube or surfing through social media sites. But on the other hand, there is an equal likelihood that your employees are spending a considerable amount of your company resources to plunge your company into financial ruin. However, monitoring employees should be a moderate activity and employers should know when to draw the line and stick by it. Here are some of the practices that ensure monitoring employees is not misused.
Be honest and open
There is usually no need for covert operations when it comes to monitoring employee usage of company owned gadgets. It is in fact not only ethical to let your employees know that you will be monitoring them but also productive for the company at large. First of all, by openly declaring that all company owned gadgets will be monitored, you are protecting yourself and your company from any lawsuits that could be thrown at you for breaching privacy. Secondly, when your employees know that they will be monitored thoroughly, it only helps increase their level of motivation which in turn helps increase their efficiency. Lastly, being open and honest about your monitoring practices can help ward off any unwanted internet activity which could potentially harm company owned gadgets and servers. The best way to go about this is by making all your employees sign a nondisclosure agreement along with their regular employment contract when you hire them.
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Limit troublesome avenues
Another way to monitor your employees without putting anyone in harm’s way is to filter their internet usage proactively. This includes filtering web and email content which not only blocks inappropriate sites which can potentially harm your company servers but also blocks users from sending and receiving and harmful files. Placing filters has helped protect company secrets from getting in to the wrong hands. Moreover, by limiting different avenues which lead to trouble you will automatically be doing your employees a huge favor. However, for adopting moderate policies it is always recommended that you allow your employees some leeway in terms of maybe some time off during their lunch hour where they can surf the internet or browse through social media sites. Obviously these practices will take place in a supervised environment.
Checking accumulated reports regularly
What’s the point of generating reports when you don’t plan on going through them? Occasionally, if you are not checking reports and making changes accordingly, employees get the hang of it and understand that they will not be getting penalized for any of their actions any time soon. By penalizing we don’t suggest firing the employee point blank r humiliating him or her; it just means that you take some measures that help prevent the problem from occurring again. By taking out some time to check the reports generated you can come across different things like a recurring trend regarding the excessive viewership of any particular site or the excessive time being employed on playing games. Such problems can occasionally be fixed easily by just sending out a mass email through your workforce which suggests any particular activity as not productive and indirectly indicating that it should be stopped immediately. Furthermore, these reports also help you understand what changes need to be brought about with respect to making office environments more stimulating and productive.
Conclusion
While you are monitoring your employees, make sure you are monitoring your conscience as well. it is really important that you understand when it is time to back down and not cross a line with monitoring which could potentially become pathological in nature for example monitoring an employee to the point of stalking or monitoring any specific employee in order to take out trivial flaws just to penalize them in response to some other behavior. Nobody likes to be monitored, so understand when employees come into a contract to work with you they are coming in willing to help you, and in turn you should respect their input and compensate them accordingly for it. Therefore, all monitoring applications come with some preset settings to help you find a balance with your monitoring skills and practices.
Author Bio:
Addison is a senior editor and blogger at TheOneSpy Blog. He loves to write about digital advancements in local sectors and mobile location tracking applications for business and employees management. To know more about him follow him on twitter @addisonalbert55
