Your Guide to Balancing Employee Monitoring and Trust

Trust is one of the most important factors in determining whether an employee stays with you or starts looking for a new role at another company. It takes a long time to build and can be broken instantly. 

This delicate balance of trust becomes particularly relevant when considering employee monitoring. Most managers recognize the value of such tools, but the challenge lies in implementing them without undermining the trust that keeps employees engaged.  

We’ve looked at the right way to implement employee monitoring and how to build a high-trust culture, so let’s dive deeper into what employees want and how you can build a productivity monitoring program that simultaneously satisfies executive requirements.

Control How Data is Used From Employee Monitoring Tools

The Harvard Business Review states that most employees have accepted that their work activities will be monitored to a certain degree. One way to satisfy their concerns about being monitored is to select how data from these tools is used judiciously. If management does not use this data to control but to coach and make smarter, data-driven decisions, staff are more likely to retain trust in the organization and their managers and value the data themselves. 

Some examples of negative, controlling use of workforce data may include:

• Reprimanding employees for minor infractions based on data collected, such as clocking in fifteen minutes late
• Reprimanding employees for not spending enough time in work tools, with the tone insinuating they weren’t working

Examples of using workforce data for coaching include:

• Incorporating data into performance reviews to guide conversation, promotions, etc. 
• Using data to pinpoint training gaps and fill in skills gaps for employee growth 
• Reviewing productivity data in one-on-ones and allowing employees to address any anomalies without judgement

Communicate Why and How Employees are Monitored

Another way to build trust from your direct reports is to be transparent about how and why they are being monitored. A 2019 Gartner survey showed that employees' acceptance of monitoring increased to 70% when they were given an explanation. Similarly, an article from Gartner about employee monitoring stated that 41% of employees were not informed of monitoring when it was implemented, which led to a negative perception of their company. 

This approach requires ensuring employees understand the why and how behind the data. 

This means setting expectations during the onboarding and whenever changes are made, that will lessen employee anxiety and make them less suspicious or resentful. Right from the start, open communication fosters a culture of trust and honesty that will spread throughout the organization. 

Choose the Right Solutions and Highlight the Benefits

The Harvard Business Review article recommends highlighting the benefits of an employee monitoring solution to employees. If you choose the right productivity monitoring tool, this is easy to do. At Prodoscore, we believe solutions that let staff retain autonomy by being noninvasive are the right ones. An invasive tool conducts surveillance rather than monitoring, taking screenshots, capturing photos via webcam, and logging what an employee types. None of these surveillance-style tools will improve trust. 

With a solution like ours, built to inform and coach rather than punish, employees become active participants. They can see their productivity outputs and access coaching insights that help them improve. When employees bring their own data to their performance reviews to justify a promotion, you’re using the right solution. 

This is especially important when you consider good employees who are quiet, hardworking, and often overlooked. Solutions like Prodoscore ensure they are not. This greatly benefits staff who previously had no way to show how productive they are. Sure, everyone is judged on final deliverables. Still, if one employee takes half the time to produce the same quantity and quality of work as others, that person deserves to be rewarded.

How To Deal With Negative Employee Productivity Data

Dealing with negative data can be challenging, as managers must find the right balance between punitive and encouraging. Any monitoring solution will pinpoint low producers. How you approach the situation is what engenders trust. Prodoscore provides a template for how your top performers work. What tools are they using, and how often? What cadences have they established for the workdays and weeks? How do they collaborate internally and externally? 

Your lower and average performers can be coached up based on that blueprint for success without anyone being singled out, and they can monitor their own progress.