Written by Jess Edwards – Marketing Manager
Since the pandemic changed the way we work forever, hybrid working has become the norm with employees now working longer or more hours from home than they previously did in an office. Continuing to keep a hybrid workforce has many benefits including saving money on office space, commuting times and general overheads but from a management perspective, how do we maintain communication with our employees who are no longer in the same physical space and not resort to Micromanagement?
Micromanagement itself is not a new topic. Many companies have seen this as the only way to monitor their employees, but the rise of productivity scoring has taken this to a new level.
Some businesses are now tracking employees via automated software installed on their computers on multiple aspects of their working day. While this undoubtedly takes the human element out of this element of management, the simplistic scoring method simply tells whether each employee is in the red or green relating to pre-set parameters and often fails to take into account the individual circumstances of workers. This New York Times article goes into more detail and states that ‘eight of the 10 largest private U.S employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time’ according to their research.
If employees were deemed to be not productive enough, messages such as ‘not enough time in the zone yesterday’ would be presented to them. This was, perhaps unsurprisingly scrapped at Barclays bank in the UK after it caused uproar with the workforce. As the NYT continues, ‘many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable – and perhaps inevitable.’
It gets us onto the question, is this level of employee monitoring beneficial?
Clobba’s reporting enhances a workforce rather than ‘humiliating’ individual workers. Using dashboards or wallboards, we report on call quality, missed calls and headset use for example, with the ability to drill down further to individual departments, location, and a specific employee – but not down to such a granular level that we see how they are browsing the internet. We see our solution as an aid in hybrid workforces, allowing employers to find out how their remote teams are working faster and save time and money, but without the intrusion employee scoring and micromanagement brings.
Find out more about what Clobba can offer your business here and let us know your thoughts on productivity tracking!
