11 Ways That User Monitoring Software Improves Productivity
Productivity software can save companies thousands of dollars annually. Poor productivity is widespread and comes from a mixture of many things, including poor management, low morale, inefficient workflows, and negative company culture.
Without monitoring software, your company has no way of knowing whether you have good productivity and an efficient workforce or low productivity. By improving productivity visibility, tracking, and metrics, you can glean better insight into your company and employee performance.
Here are 11 ways that user monitoring software can improve employee productivity and why you need to implement one now.
11 Ways Businesses Can Increase Workplace Productivity With Monitoring Software
Productivity is the measure by which things get done in your company. Therefore, by implementing user monitoring software, your team can begin to track how efficiently tasks are completed.
With monitoring software, you have objective data around productive tasks and can seek ways to improve employee productivity. Here are 11 provable ways to measure productivity with monitoring software:
1. User Monitoring Software Tracks Project Time Management
At its core, user monitoring software is a computer tracking system. Once installed, employees and remote managers can monitor user behaviors and connect with employees to improve inefficient behaviors.
You can link up the tracking software through project management software and then encourage your employees and staff to track the time spent on each project.
With productivity tracking software, your team leads and other managers will have access to time and project estimates. With these time estimates, you can see:
- How long does a project type usually take
- If certain projects are taking way longer than normal
- Employees who are working harder than others
- Employees who are slacking off
- How well your company is doing
Without these metrics at all, you would have no real way of measuring your employee productivity.
PRO TIP: Every quarter, go through each project to update employees and teams on the project’s progress measured in productivity and efficiency.
2. Productivity Tracking Software Can Alert Teams to Poor Operations and Poorly Managed Projects
If you have a project taking much longer than it needs to be, your team leader can step in to reassess the situation. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to track when projects get off the rails.
Client-based work can be difficult to manage. You may have a client that needs more attention and care than others. However, if that is what the contract stipulates, then that’s fine. It’s when clients go out of the bounds of the contract and, inevitably, it makes more work for your team.
Other types of workflows might be inherently inefficient, but you wouldn’t be able to see any objective data around these inefficiencies without tracking time or projects.
With productivity tracking software, you can clearly see if there is a poor operational process in place too. If your employees are taking too long on certain administrative tasks, like emailing other colleagues internally, then maybe an internal employee messaging system needs to improve that process.
Poorly managed projects can be reassessed before it is too late or every quarter during regular check-ins.
PRO TIP: Educate your team leaders around how productivity software can be used for improving project management.
3. User Monitoring Software Provides Metrics Around Employee, Team, and Organizational Productivity
Your managers might regularly meet with their employees and teams to talk about productivity. In fact, they may even have plans in place with the employees on ways to improve productivity. Metrics around employee tasks, projects, and actions will only clarify and improve this plan.
Without the metrics, your team leads will be operating based on their judgment. With user monitoring software, they will have hard data around areas of improvement, operational weaknesses, and team performance.
This is especially important when you have a remote employee on staff. Without an employee monitoring tool, you have no way to measure your team’s productivity or that remote employee activity.
PRO TIP: Use hard productivity numbers in team and individual performance reviews so employees know that these numbers have a measured impact.
4. Employee Productivity Monitoring Software Catches Wasted Time
User monitoring software has a feature called “wasted time report,” which reports to management when an employee is on a webpage that is not approved by the company or is generally wasting time while on the clock.
For example, if Facebook is not allowed, any significant amount of time spent on Facebook will be reported as wasted time.
Your company settings can be managed in this regard, but the bottom line is that you can find out how much time is being wasted through productivity software.
For example, if your marketing team needs to go on Facebook, then their time on Facebook isn’t being wasted for socializing.
PRO TIP: Choose a minimum amount of wasted time allowed per team and reward teams that stay below that number.
5. Computer Monitoring Software Reports Time Logs to Management
User monitoring software reports daily and/or weekly time logs to management, so you can see how time is being managed straight from your email inbox.
If you were previously not attuned to these numbers, having a time log delivered to your email every day or week will keep you updated. It will also keep you informed to check in with your team as the week progresses.
PRO TIP: Report weekly productivity updates to management to show the value of the productivity tracking software.
6. Employee Productivity Tracking Software Provides Manager With Clear Examples of Poor and Positive Productivity
Managing your employees can be difficult. You might tell them that they need to do better. But they won’t listen until you give them clear examples of times when they weren’t doing well enough and areas for improvement.
For example, if you notice that a certain project took 10 extra hours to complete, you can pull up the reports and ask that your employee goes through their process for completing it. By going over the process together, you can see improvement and mistakes and improve productivity for next time.
PRO TIP: Use productivity metrics garnered through the monitoring tool to provide a productivity plan.
7. Employee Tracking Software Records the Visited Websites and Applications
Employee tracking software records the websites and applications that your user’s visited and the length of time they were on that website. This allows you to see if your employee spent 2 hours on Reddit rather than on your annual reports.
With website and application monitoring reporting, make sure you clearly understand how much time your employees should be spending on their dedicated work, and then give them leeway.
Use this data to report employee productivity, reward productive employees, and improve workplace productivity through strategic action.
PRO TIP: Use team competitions to boost productivity minutes and lower wasted time. Incentivize these competitions for increased morale.
8. User Monitoring Software Tracks Duration
Employee monitoring software can track the duration of things, such as individual tasks, breaks, projects, emails, and workdays. Duration monitoring can be a great indicator of issues and efficiencies.
If you notice that some of your employees are faster than others at completing a task, then you can dive into how they complete a task to improve productivity company-wide.
PRO TIP: Analyze the duration of task completion so that you can optimize your workforce for efficiency.
9. Remote Employee Monitoring Can Be Used for Time Tracking and Employee Attendance
This monitoring tool can be used for basic time and attendance tracking, indicating to managers that their workers are present and actually doing what they say they are doing.
If you notice that your employees are actually unavailable throughout the day, but they said they were sending emails or completing tasks, then this may be an indicator that they were lying (or that there was an issue).
Attendance tracking is critical for remote work; otherwise, your remote manager will have no idea if that employee is working or not!
PRO TIP: Measure attendance for remote workers to monitor actual workplace productivity and create productivity incentives for your remote team.
10. User Monitoring Software With Keystroke Logging Software Can Catch Wasted Personal Messages
Monitoring software with keystroke logging software can actually track the strokes that the user types on a keyboard.
This can be used for insider threat monitoring, but it’s also useful to go in and see if your employee was actually working or if they were chatting with their colleagues in Slack all day!
PRO TIP: Customize your keystroke logging feature so that sensitive information and passwords are not recorded.
11. User Monitoring Software Gets Teams on the Same Page
With the metrics, insights, and accountability that monitoring software provides, your team will be able to get on the same page quickly.
Metrics and data help your employees understand where you’re coming from, and it also helps your team to separate the objective (like completing projects) from the emotional (tasks that are mentally taxing). It also provides a way forward through complicated client relationships.
PRO TIP: Create team goals that can be achieved by a higher individual productivity score.
Tap Into the Power of SoftActivity Monitoring Software to Drastically Improve Productivity
At the end of the day, productivity tracking provides metrics, actionable insight, and clearer direction around how to improve productivity. Your company can then put this insight to work.
A productivity tool is a software that tracks certain activities in a company. And it can be extremely useful for monitoring employee behavior and improving company processes.
Employees and sometimes the media talk negatively about employee monitoring, but the truth is that without this monitoring software, management has no way of knowing what their employees are doing on company time.
With SoftActivity software, your team can check in with employees and actually find ways of improving company processes! It can lead not only to improved productivity but also to improved morale, employee engagement, and company culture!
By SoftActivity Team.