To monitor or not to monitor? Personnel monitoring has long been a necessity in any business. And it is not about distrust, and not about the desire of an “evil” employer under a magnifying glass to study every action of an employee. In today’s world, the speed of effective decision-making is important. Any delay, any erroneous action inevitably leads to losses, and sometimes to the collapse of the company.
Global experience and the practice of our clients confirm: it is necessary to control the personnel. And there are five simple reasons for this.
1. Protection of company assets
The sword of Damocles is always hanging over any business – internal risks associated with the activities of insiders. Unscrupulous employees may try to steal new developments, customer, partner and supplier bases in order to sell them to competitors or start developing their own business. But even this is not the worst thing. Sometimes the mole may appear at the very top – among the top management. In such a situation there is a serious risk of losing the entire business, because the insider’s appetite is not limited to valuable information, he needs everything at once, from office space to personnel.
Comprehensive control of company employees’ communications, from corporate mail to voice conversations, analysis of information movement and copying, rapid detection of risky situations – this is not a whim of a shrewd business owner. It is a matter of survival in a highly aggressive environment, where any mistake will immediately be taken advantage of by predators nearby.
2. Control of employees
Any business owner knows that to increase labor efficiency, sometimes you have to play the role of Cerberus, constantly in the office and looking into the monitor. After all, as soon as the boss leaves the building, productivity will immediately cut in half. Such a practice is vicious, because the time of the manager is always expensive. Instead of solving global problems and developing the business, you have to waste your energy on low-qualified supervisor’s activities. But even having a manager in the office doesn’t eliminate the issue of wasted work time. It is enough for the chief to turn away and employees will immediately find a loophole.
For businesses, personnel monitoring is a way to redirect efforts, focus on strategic tasks, and save time and money. After all, the function of control will be taken over by an electronic assistant.
3. internal process analytics
The larger the company, the more problems with internal work algorithms and communication between employees. Sometimes it gets to the point of absurdity: there is a task, but no one in charge. Such situations end sadly: failures in contracts and project deadlines, serious deterioration in the quality of the work done and, of course, financial and image damage.
Flair is not enough to detect “dead” processes that inhibit interaction. You need a software package with analytical tools that will allow you to analyze all stages of personnel actions, from task setting to its implementation.
4. Improvement of labor efficiency
Everyone wants employees to work better; thousands of articles have been written about this for a reason. One problem is that it is almost impossible to find recommendations that actually work, because they are focused on a specific situation, and at the slightest change in conditions, they simply stop working.
The three pillars on which the highly productive work of employees is based are: competent time management, adequately distributed workload, and effective work patterns.
In order to save time, it is necessary to clearly understand what part of the day the staff spends on non-work needs, and this figure can vary from 20% to 60%! By implementing a screen monitoring system, a manager, with minimal labor costs, can significantly improve the performance of the team within a few days.
Workload distribution is a problem for most companies. Situations when one department or employee works from dawn till dusk and the other one drinks coffee without much effort are everywhere. And it’s not the laziness of individuals, but in the wrong distribution of tasks, which has developed historically. The boss may not be aware of the problem until it is too late and the “burnt-out” personnel leave the company. Timely identification of irrational task assignment within the team helps to optimize the staff, increase the loyalty of leading specialists and eliminate the prerequisites for staff turnover.
The final stage of the company’s internal modernization is the search for and implementation of effective work models. By analyzing the actions of “front-runners”, identifying best practices, discovering key “success factors” and retranslating new work algorithms to the entire team, a manager can increase business efficiency by 20-40% in just 2-3 months.
5. Inventory of the company’s assets
No one likes counting tables, chairs and computers. Nevertheless, such routine has to be done with enviable regularity. Incredibly, there is not a single company in which everything remains in its place throughout the year. Unfortunately, it is common for hard drives, discrete graphics cards, and even entire laptops to go missing between inventory cycles. And the main thing is that nobody knows exactly when this or that part or the whole device is missing, and even less who has contributed to its sudden disappearance. It should not be forgotten that attackers are cunning: parts are unscrewed not from weak office machines, but, for example, from powerful computers, designed to work with graphics.
According to statistics, 30% or more of the budget allocated to update the “hardware” is spent to cover losses from theft, and prices for electronics is not small. One average graphics card will cost $ 200 and above, the cost of “office” laptop, which allows without “brakes” to perform current tasks, starting from 600-700 dollars.
By implementing an electronic system with the option of monitoring the condition of equipment, the manager has the opportunity to prevent theft, save time and promptly update the outdated technology park.
Things are even worse with software inventory. About 60% of software is used either very seldom or gather dust on the hard disk during the whole cycle of its existence. Having estimated the intensity of different applications use by your employees, you may optimize their distribution in the company. For instance, remove specific software from employees who do not use it, and install it in the employees who need it desperately. Without digital systems capable of evaluating the demand for software, such an obvious solution is almost impossible to implement. The average “white-collar worker” needs everything, on the principle of “what if it comes in handy”, so he or she will never “share” the software with a colleague. As a result, a manager is forced to blow the budget and buy even a license for the software that is not objectively needed.