Managers: Too Much Information Can Hurt

Employee Monitoring is a concept that should be dealt with a lot of consideration for Managers of teams. During the design of this product, not much in-depth consideration is given to the human and business effects. Partially because it's very easy to leave the ethical and HR issues in the hands of the end-user. This article will address one of these issues -- Management.

Managers are entirely focused on performance -- as they should be. And, it's very easy to get software into the hands of a Manager that gives them the tools to identify the poorly performing employees. Truthfully, Managers love it! It makes their work a lot easier when they have reports on hand that empirically show who's dragging down the team. With these reports, Managers don't have to micromanage the daily operations and within seconds they can identify where the performance losses are occurring.

There are two problems that arise from Managers having this type of control:

• Justification of action
• Increased costs

It may not be immediately apparent why and how these issues come into play. Let's take a look at them here.

Justification of Action

Generally, employee monitoring software gives Managers the information that can help them justify actions they take such as termination and even favor to other non-offending employees. Terminating an employee doesn't address the root of the problem which is the lack of engagement.

By terminating an employee and hiring a possible higher performing one, a Manager can increase the performance output of the team. However, this is a temporary solution because humans lives change. Humans that live and work in our enterprises have on-going problems and joys which can affect their performance.

The management of employee engagement is what the true job of the Manager is. Managers are required to ensure that their team is amongst other things:

• Well trained to do the job.
• Rewarded according to performance.
• Nurtured (support and encouragement).
• Always performing optimally.

To be able to handle this effectively, a Manager needs to get humanly involved with the employees to a level that allows each of those things to happen without losing the professional air. It's hard work.

When Managers have too much information, they easily resort to termination actions rather than focus on nurturing the solution. Nurturing is the real job of the Manager -- to support, encourage, train, motivate etc. It is in the nurturing that employees perform. Terminating an employee and hiring another is a quick fix because the new employee will at some point have a crises or some other engagement reducing event. Terminating the employee at that point is neither providing the right solution, nor ethical.

This is the fine line that must be considered when looking into a monitoring solution. The important question to ask is -- does the solution give too much information/control to Management?

Increased Costs

Termination actions come with a cost that is carried by HR. It is expected that it costs HR about $6,000 to find and replace the right talent for each position. Of course this is an average, however, if we increase the number of terminations that can be created by the Managers, the productivity increases that an employee monitoring solution promises can be negated in value!

The Solution

The solution to this is to chose an employee monitoring software that does not permit Management too much information. The information that should be provided to Management from such a solution should be an aggregate. It should give Management an overall look at the performance of the team -- as a whole, rather than identify each poorly performing employee individually.

• What is the most popular website in my team?
• How much time is spent as a team in browsing the web?
• How many emails have we all sent out this week?
• How much time is spent on chat in my team?

With this kind of information, Management can hold periodic meetings to discuss the reductions to be made. Wouldn't it be great if you overheard a Manager say:

Now that's Management.

We are now offering an educational orientation that outlines the challenges of, and solutions to, productivity losses due to technology misuse. This information is available at no-cost to qualified businesses in the Greater Toronto Area as a marketing test. Please contact IT Werks to book the orientation.

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