How to control your employees?

When employers care for their business, they want their employees to be effective. It is important for them that in working hours employees do their job and not play games, chat with friends, or read articles not relating to work. That’s why the employer wants to control personnel and their actions at work.

If there is no control the company can suffer great damage. Some employees are just not interested in their work. Some employees may burn out. Some of them have personal problems that influence their work. There are plenty of reasons.

However, if the business is important for the employer, they must know how they can control the personnel. It can solve many problems, the main of which is an early identification of those who just pretend to work.

What methods the employer can use to control employees?

To begin with, there are a lot of types of control. The employers must understand what type they need according to their business goals. For instance, you can track the employees’ presence at work, how often they go out, what information they try to access, what tasks they perform, why they surf the Internet etc.

You also must consider that since the beginning of the pandemic many employees started working remotely. It is more difficult to control them, because you cannot see what exactly they do.

So, how to control remote workers and office workers? What methods does the employer have at their disposal?

1. Reports

Actually, reports and meetings can increase the effectiveness of personnel’s work. They need to inform the boss about the results of the work – what they have done, what mistakes made, how they fixed them etc. In order to say something, it is necessary to do something. That’s why the employee will have to work at least a little bit whether they want it or not.

Reporting on regular basis can lead to employees’ effectiveness increase. It is important not to overdo with it so that the personnel’s work does not turn into constant reporting.

2. Video surveillance

This method is used almost everywhere. If a company started working not two days ago but long ago, then it probably takes advantage of video surveillance. It allows to optimize personnel’s work, monitor employees’ movements, track violations etc.

However, security cameras have blind spots. The employee can hide behind the screen, and you won’t understand what they are doing there. With equal success, they can work or play games.

It must be mentioned that video surveillance won’t help when it concerns remote workers.

3. KPI

KPI (Key Performance Indicator) shows employees’ results in numbers. With its help, you can answer the questions: what result was achieved? how many resources were expended? Does the result match the resources spent on it or not? KPI also influences the bonuses the employee will get along with salary. They have a possibility to influence their income.

KPI is considered to help employees understand how they can bring more benefit to the company. The company describes all possible tasks and the amount of money the employee can earn for each of them.

KPI is good when it concerns influencing the effectiveness of both office worker and remote worker. Because everything is about working results.

The disadvantage of KPI is that the personal KPI often depends on all employees’ KPI. One mistake can cost bonuses to the whole personnel. That can influence the relationships in the team or increase sackings. If a person sees that they cannot keep up with others, their motivation can decrease.

4. Special software

The methods described above often work with shop or manufacturing employees. However, there are many people who work using computers. However, it must be mentioned that not all video cameras can show the computer monitors in details. There is special software developed for such cases.

There is software with different purposes – to track working hours, provide sensitive data security, monitor Internet activity of an employee, their correspondence with colleagues, effectiveness of their communication with clients, their use of company’s resources etc.

However, so that everything is done by law, you must notify employees that their actions are tracked by a program. An agreement must be signed.

Due to such programs, the boss is always aware of employees’ activity. They can track how much time the worker has spent doing their job and how much they dedicated to their own business. They control the access to the network from both employee and non-authorized person.

The disadvantage of such software is that it causes stress and unpleasant emotions. This influences employees’ effectiveness, their loyalty to the company, and working results.