How to Implement Remote Work Employee Monitoring Ethically and Securely
Remote work monitoring isn’t new, but the number of solutions available has increased dramatically since the pandemic. Solutions range from timekeeping software to comprehensive surveillance software and hardware. Most of these can be tailored to remote, in-office, or hybrid work, but we’ll focus on remote work employee monitoring here.
Why Not Simply Trust Remote Workers to Do Their Jobs?
Most managers of remote workers would agree that their team members are trustworthy. However, upper management and shareholders need metrics that provide accountability. When the old-school “walk-by” is no longer possible, objective data can help. Arguably, desk walk-bys are not a reliable indicator of productivity!
Outside of merely creating accountability, remote work employee monitoring software provides managers with data about how and when their people work best. It can offer a template for good work habits, present context for employee reviews and highlight business application utilization, as well as empower employees with valuable data for them to impact their own development. Ethical remote work employee monitoring software gives you a goldmine of data without making employees feel infantilized or untrustworthy and instead includes them in the learnings.
Using Remote Work Productivity Software to Spot Over-employment
Ethics run both ways—your company should be ethical, and the people who work for you should be too. Unfortunately, the pandemic gave rise to the over-employment phenomenon, which saw remote workers stack multiple full-time jobs with overlapping hours.
Concerns over employees juggling several jobs simultaneously contributed to the resurgence of return-to-office mandates. This trend underscores the challenges of maintaining productivity and accountability in remote work environments while highlighting the ongoing debate about the optimal balance between flexibility and control in the modern workplace.
Prodoscore, our employee productivity monitoring solution, can easily help spot over-employment without being invasive or unethical.
Some signs of over-employment include:
- Being inaccessible when you should be on the clock
- An increase in absenteeism
- Being distracted
- Showing signs of burnout
- Making mistakes more frequently
Over-employment hasn’t been as prevalent since the increase in hybrid and in-office arrangements. However, the risk of over-employment remains a concern for companies with remote or hybrid workforces.
Security Issues With Remote Employee Monitoring
Employee monitoring solutions usually don’t pose any kind of security threat, although your cybersecurity team should always evaluate any new solution your company is thinking of using. One of the greatest roadblocks to adopting remote work is the perception of insecurity - 73% of executives think that remote work poses a cybersecurity risk. This is only the case if staff use unsecured personal devices or fall prey to phishing scams by email or text, which could just as easily happen in an office setting.
With remote work monitoring, Prodoscore uses a multi-layered approach involving rigorous security testing and secure data warehousing to guarantee the integrity of client data.
The Ethics of Remote Work Monitoring
At Prodoscore, we believe that more transparency in the process leads to greater employee engagement and buy-in. That’s why we involve employees, giving them access to their productivity data. This empowers workers to take steps to improve and self-coach. We also focus only on business activity - not keystrokes or browser activity. A valuable employee monitoring solution surfaces metrics that matter, not junk data.
