How to Stop Time Theft and See Everything

For all its benefits, remote work has certainly created some challenges. One major issue is the lack of visibility you have over your employees and the ramifications that could result.

While it is critical to cultivate trust in and with your employees, you also need tools to monitor progress and hold your team members accountable. Let’s talk about some of the issues you may discover once we give you the visibility you need.

Time Theft is Terrifying (Especially When You Pay for the Time)

It’s crossed every business owner’s mind: thoughts of their team members…

• checking in to start the workday before going back to bed or out to run their errands
• secretly working for another company at the same time as yours
• stealing data, like intellectual property or client contact information, for their own profit

Research Shows These Fears Have a Logical Basis 

Back in the 1920s, researchers observed how productive factory workers were with the lights on and off. The workers’ productivity was higher when the lights were on and they knew they could be observed. 

This is called the Hawthorne Effect and is what led to most studies and trials using blind grouping and placebo treatments. The knowledge that observation is taking place encourages people to perform at a higher level… but how can you observe someone working remotely, or in their own area, or just across the room?

Modern Technology Helps Promote Visibility

At Horne & Benik, we make sure that you—as the boss—have the power to step in and evaluate how operations are progressing. This access lets you check in on a team member’s performance and potentially detect issues as they arise.

Here are a few practical examples:

• Login/Logout Audits - Do your team members claim to be clocking in and out at certain times on their timesheets? You have the power to check the records and either confirm it or catch them in a lie.
• App Usage - Are they spending 75% of the workday with Netflix open, and only 25% with business-related applications open? You’ll have the ability to see what has been used the most and act accordingly.
• Access Logs - There is almost no (legitimate and aboveboard) reason one of your team members needs to access your database in the wee hours of the morning, and especially not to download massive amounts of data. Our tools alert you if this is ever attempted.
• Idle Alerts - Similarly, if a team member hasn’t touched their work device for an extended period when they really should have, your systems will take note and sound the alarm.

You Need to Be Mindful and Communicative About Monitoring

It is important to remember that all these tools share a common goal: protecting your business. They are not meant to facilitate a “gotcha” moment or to watch over your team’s shoulders constantly. They are a security tool.

Catching a hacker will require you to monitor your network. Finding a virus will require you to scan your files.

The fact that these tools work as a productivity monitor is secondary to their real purpose. As the boss, you have certain fiduciary responsibilities to keep the company secure. These tools help you meet these responsibilities.

We Have to Address the Elephant in the Room

Naturally, some of your team members may not take kindly to the eyes of “Big Brother,” a constant presence scrutinizing their workday. There are a few steps you can take to minimize resistance from your team members. Still, over time, most of the pushback should naturally fade once it becomes apparent that this transparency also highlights the diligence of those who pull their weight. Only the employees trying to hide something from you—such as lax work habits while on the clock—are likely to resist for the long term.

If anything, it makes your hard workers look even better in comparison to the slackers they’re carrying.

To get started on the right foot, you want to implement employee monitoring without actively harming team morale. So, what does the right foot look like? 

How to Implement Employee Monitoring without Alienating Your Team

Taking care when approaching your monitoring policies is essential. After all, this is a policy-level change. Therefore, your first step should be to get something written down:

Update Your Employee Handbook
As with any other organizational change, you need to update your official documentation to reflect it. Legally speaking, you need to notify them that monitoring tools are in place, and your acceptable use policy within the handbook is the place to do that.

Prioritize the Real Problems
Too many business owners see their monitoring tools as a license to micromanage the team members under their purview, obsessing over each wasted moment and counting every second they are late to log in. They aren’t the ones you need to worry about. Instead, focus on those whose time card is short a ton of hours… they’re the issue that warrants concern.

Base (Most) Decisions on Data
Wrongful termination claims are no joke, so before you let anyone go after things you’ve seen while monitoring them, communicate with them. Let them know you’ve seen a concerning pattern, and see if there’s some way to correct it. If this fails, the documentation you’ve collected along the way can justify your actions if need be.

We’ll Be There to Assist You

We can help you strategize your entire technology infrastructure and translate the data it collects into actionable directives to advance your business. We’ll help you sort through the noise to identify and mitigate the real problems.

The tools to keep a closer eye on your business are out there. Give us a call at (603) 499-4400 to put them to use.