Doesn’t Company Culture Suffer Because of Computer Monitoring Software?

As the balance careers explains it - Company culture is the personality of a company. And when you think about it, it really is. It defines the work environment, relationships within the team, values, work ethics, and goals. 

Company culture plays a huge role in employee happiness, and we all know that happy employees are productive employees. Yet, no matter how friendly and laid back the company culture is, certain procedures and processes need to be set in place. You, as a business owner, must make sure everyone’s data is safe, as well as that your clients’ requirements are met at any time.

These two things can be achieved with one simple computer monitoring software. And right now you’re probably thinking how employee PC monitoring will have a disastrous effect on your team. Well, you’re both right and wrong. 

Negative Effects of Employee Monitoring

There’s no point in lying… Employee computer tracking software can harm the company in several ways.

First of all, if you implement it without notifying your employees or even discussing it with them, you can expect a backlash. Not to mention that in most countries it’s completely illegal to monitor employee computer activity without prior notice or even consent.

Careless implementation leads to distrust, which ultimately leads employees to leave, underperform, and feel stressed in general.

Positive Effects of Employee Tracking 

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If implemented properly, employee tracking can boost productivity, create a bit of healthy competition in a team, allow you to bill your hours more correctly, as well as to pay employees in a fair way.

Once you communicate the expectations to your team, explain different scenarios which will portrait the benefits, and help workers embrace the growth mindset - you’ll be set to implement the software without hiccups.

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How Does Employee Activity Monitor Affect the Company Culture?

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User activity monitoring software plays a huge role in the modern workplace, and so does culture. Can these two coexist in any environment?

In short, they can complement each other in the ways you thought were impossible.

Implementation of the activity monitor software will require you to make some changes in your policies, as well as in your culture book. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Given that you can track productivity now, you can set productivity trackers for every team and reward those who manage to hit the targets frequently. 

Additionally, you can set aside certain times of the day for different activities. If you have a game room, set aside the time for all teams to enjoy a round of table football, and create a weekly tournament.

The fact that you’re using a productivity tracker app doesn’t have to mean your workers must be productive every second of the day (and that’s not going to happen with or without the tracking software). What we’re trying to prove here is that employees monitoring software aren’t a necessary evil and that they won’t spoil your culture.

And How Do We Know That?

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Let’s start with our own personal experience. Yes, we are using Insightful in the office, because it works wonders combined with our culture.

Our culture is a startup culture - we have flexible starting time in the morning, option of working remotely (and some teams who are fully remote), we’re also very friendly. From time to time we even have two adorable dogs running around the office, so you can imagine that distractions hide behind every computer (or under the desk in this case).

We can allow ourselves so many distractions because we have Insightful to keep us focused. Not only that, our core values (which are a huge part of Insightful culture), help us with maintaining high productivity levels.

Everyone has access to their own data, and we can see at any time if we’ve spent too much time finding a perfect playlist for the day. Given the nature of our culture, no one has a feeling like they’re being watched, or overly controlled.

For the sake of proving a point, we conducted an experiment in the office. Since we already had productivity baseline for everyone, a couple of team members volunteered to have their trackers in stealth mode for 2 months, and we turned the software on and off at random days. Now, with stealth mode, an employee doesn’t see if the workplace monitoring software is running or not. 

At first, the productivity skyrocketed! We’re talking big numbers - it went up around 35% on average during the first 2 weeks. Over the next 2 weeks, those numbers started deteriorating, going down until they came to being about 5% above the baseline. The second month of the experiment went by peacefully, with no major statistical changes. 

The whole point of the experiment was to see the numbers, and see how would employee behaviour change over time. We realized that behaviour didn’t change much, when we look at the culture and overall relationship among team members. However, those who knew their daily productivity levels, were much quicker to go back to work.

The experiment also provided our HR department with valuable data, which was used to optimize some of our core processes. Additionally, during the experiment, we’ve found some tasks which could have been completely avoided or automated.

Most importantly, we did have fun while evaluating the data, and we’ve definitely set benchmarks for future experiments and employees.

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