How to Monitor Employees at Work: 7 Best Practices

Employee monitoring in the workplace is essential for maintaining security in many industries, but you must be aware of its potential pitfalls. Balancing workplace monitoring with employee trust and legal compliance can be challenging.

In this article, we’ll explore seven best practices to ensure your employee monitoring methods enhance security and boost productivity while complying with the applicable laws and regulations and respecting your employees’ privacy.

What is employee monitoring?

Employee monitoring is the process of overseeing and collecting data on personnel actions in office and hybrid workspaces. Monitoring employee activity helps organizations understand their staff’s work habits, system and app usage, and interactions with sensitive data. To facilitate the process, employers may implement time-tracking tools, activity-logging solutions, and on-screen activity recording software. 

The monitoring of employees in the workplace can serve various purposes. Many organizations monitor employees to maintain high levels of productivity, manage security risks, and ensure that employees adhere to company policies. Along with these practical benefits, however, come other challenges. Thus, when it comes to workplace monitoring, it’s important to closely examine both sides of the coin.

Pros of employee monitoring

When done right, employee monitoring can benefit your organization in many ways. Let’s look at the key advantages of employee monitoring for organizations.

Improved security

Employee monitoring helps secure organizations from insider risks that may result in the abuse of valuable corporate data, operational disruptions, sabotage, legal issues, and many other negative consequences. Dedicated monitoring solutions can detect abnormal user activity and immediately notify security officers, enabling them to respond quickly.

Streamlined compliance efforts

Many acts, laws, and regulations, such as HIPAA and the GDPR, require companies to implement relevant security measures to protect sensitive data and prevent potential data leaks, misuse, and theft. Workplace monitoring solutions enable organizations to oversee how employees handle sensitive data and streamline compliance with such requirements.

Increased productivity and performance

Many companies want to ensure that their employees are spending time productively. Modern employee productivity solutions and virtual desktop monitoring tools can determine how efficiently workers do their jobs by calculating hours spent on work-related resources and applications. Employee monitoring also allows organizations to spot employees’ strengths and weaknesses enabling managers to provide targeted feedback to enhance employee performance.

Optimized business processes

Employee monitoring also provides organizations with informative insights into their operational efficiency. By identifying the bottlenecks your employees face during work, you can detect any counterproductive procedures or tools your organization uses. With these insights, you’ll enable your managers to make business operations more efficient.

Cons of employee monitoring

Although employee monitoring can help organizations in many ways, it has its downsides too. Here are the most common ones:

Resource intensiveness

Implementing employee monitoring in an organization requires significant resource investments. First of all, you need dedicated technology to carry out the monitoring. You need to engage staff to research products and find the right monitoring solution (or solutions) for your organization. Then, you need to deploy those solutions and continuously maintain them to ensure they work properly.

Lack of employee trust

When employees aren’t fully informed about the reasons they’re being monitored, they may think you doubt their skills or intentions. This may create a sense of mistrust between you and your workforce. In turn, it can negatively impact job satisfaction and morale, which could potentially be detrimental to workplace culture and overall team productivity.

User privacy concerns

Even if your staff feels okay about being monitored, they may still be concerned about the privacy of their data, as the line between oversight and intrusion can sometimes blur. Employees might worry about how much of their digital activity is being tracked and whether their private messages, for example, are visible. Additionally, they may wonder how securely their data is stored, who has access to it, and whether it can be shared with third parties without their knowledge or consent.

Potential legal issues related to employee monitoring

Before planning to implement employee monitoring in your organization, you must ensure that monitoring employees in the workplace is legal according to the applicable laws and regulations. The legality of employee monitoring and workplace privacy differs from one country to another. While some of them lack specific laws on monitoring, they may impose strict rules on individual privacy.

Monitoring employees without explicit consent is illegal in some European countries, Australia, Canada, and the UAE. To avoid legal issues in these regions, employers must obtain formal consent from employees before monitoring them. 

In the UK, employers are allowed to monitor employee activity if the employee gives their explicit consent and the terms of monitoring are clearly outlined in the employment contract, including specific details about the use of personal emails and calls.

Employee monitoring is generally legal in the US at the federal level, and businesses are allowed to monitor what employees do on equipment provided by the organization but aren’t allowed to track personal communications. Most states don’t require employers to notify employees about monitoring them. However, in Connecticut, Delaware, and New York, state laws oblige employers to send notices to their staff before engaging in electronic monitoring.

The best practice is to consult with a lawyer to check whether laws in your area permit employee monitoring, require written notices, or place any restrictions on the types of information you can monitor.

Types of employee monitoring

There are numerous ways to monitor employees. But before deciding which monitoring solution to choose and which practices to apply, you should decide what kind of monitoring you need to implement.

Here are the most common types of monitoring:

Work time monitoring

Work time monitoring helps organizations oversee how employees use their work hours and allocate them to different tasks. This type of monitoring enables managers to see when employees are late for work, leave early, or miss their shifts, helping to assess attendance accurately and calculate wages.

Phone monitoring

Telephone and call monitoring is especially popular in call centers. However, it may also be applied in other companies where making phone calls is a part of the job. Recording phone conversations helps companies assess employee performance, improve customer service, and look for errors should an incident occur.

Video surveillance

Video surveillance only works for office settings. Recording employee activities through video cameras can help employers ensure workplace safety and prevent misconduct. It also helps gather evidence for incident investigations.

Computer monitoring

Computer monitoring allows employers to track the productivity of both in-office and remote employees and ensure they don’t neglect your security policies, visit shady websites, respond to suspicious emails, or perform malicious actions. This type of monitoring may involve tracking the use of email, websites, and apps, as well as keylogging and screen recording.

Best practices for employee monitoring

Effective employee monitoring is more than activity tracking. The following best practices can help you ensure that your monitoring process doesn’t only serve its express purposes, but also respects privacy, reduces legal risks, and supports a positive workplace culture.

1. Create a clear monitoring policy

When monitoring your staff, it’s important to establish clear and transparent policies. You should explain how monitoring is conducted, what its purposes are, and how employee data is protected. Your written policy should contain information about which of your assets are surveilled, and rules for using those assets. Make sure your employees are familiar with the policy and stick to it.

2. Map applicable regulations

Map all state and federal legislation regarding employee monitoring and employee privacy that apply to your organization, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Develop a strategy to comply with the relevant legislation. Regularly check for updates in legislation and review your compliance strategy to avoid potential fines and reputational damage.

3. Notify employees

Outline what you’re monitoring and why monitoring is important for your organization. Introduce your employees to the monitoring system: explain how it works, list its benefits, arrange training, and answer any questions your employees may have. Even if sending written notices to staff isn’t required by law, letting your employees know they’re going to be monitored is a good practice that helps create a healthy atmosphere in the organization.

4. Limit monitoring

Make sure to avoid excessive monitoring and collect only the data that’s essential. As employees may feel anxious about having their every move monitored, your monitoring process shouldn’t overreach to the point of seeming like spying. Only gather the information necessary to achieve your objectives.

5. Respect employee privacy

Set clear boundaries by restricting employee monitoring to working hours only. Personal employee emails and other forms of personal communication should be excluded from the monitoring scope. Make sure not to record sensitive information like passwords and bank card details. Applying anonymization techniques to data collected during the monitoring also helps protect employee privacy.

6. Secure the collected data

Ensure that any employee data collected during the monitoring process is properly secured. Limit and control who can access the gathered data by implementing secure authentication and access management measures. Also, consider applying data encryption so that data can’t be exposed even if stolen.

7. Use dedicated software

When choosing an employee monitoring software solution, take into account the type of activities you need to track. Carefully analyze the software tools available on the market and their features to find the best match. Look for software that will integrate smoothly with your existing tools and won’t disrupt your processes or employees’ workflows. It’s also helpful if the software has built-in protection against any attempts to disable or bypass the monitoring process.

User Activity Monitoring with Syteca

Using Syteca for monitoring staff at work

Syteca is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform that provides effective endpoint and employee monitoring. It combines advanced user activity monitoring (UAM) with powerful privileged access management (PAM) to track employee actions and control user access, securing the sensitive data of both the organization and employees.

1. User session recording: Record on-screen employee activity and log relevant metadata, such as the names of opened applications and active windows, visited URLs, typed keystrokes, connected USB devices, entered commands (for Linux), etc. Capture input and output audio streams, if required.
2. User productivity dashboards: Receive insights about employee productivity at a glance. Leverage visually structured and easy-to-read dashboards with insightful information, such as total active time and idle time ratios, top applications and websites opened, and overall employee productivity.
3. User activity reports: Generate over 20 types of reports as a convenient way to track user activity and employee productivity. Smoothly integrate with Microsoft Power BI to organize data in an interactive and user-friendly manner.
4. Alerts and incident response: React quickly when employee behavior differs from the normal baseline with rule-based customizable alerts and automatic responses to suspicious activity.
5. Monitoring filters: Reduce the scope of data collection and implement ethical employee monitoring by limiting the hours when monitoring occurs, excluding the activity of specific users, IPs, or apps from the monitoring process, and minimizing keystroke monitoring.
6. Personal data pseudonymization: Substitute any employees’ personally identifiable information gathered during the monitoring process with aliases to protect it from misuse and compromise. Securely de-pseudonymize data when needed for investigations.
7. Data encryption: Safeguard collected data with AES-256 encryption to enhance its protection against unauthorized access.
8. Continuous monitoring: Monitor employee activity without interruptions. Continue collecting data even if your network connection is lost and have it sent to your central storage location once the connection is restored. Prevent employees from interfering with the monitoring process, e.g. by uninstalling the software client or editing the solution components.

Syteca offers remote desktop monitoring and supports the broadest range of platforms compared to any other monitoring solution on the market. It supports Windows, macOS, VMware, Citrix, Linux/Unix, and X Window System.

For all-around security, Syteca also provides tools for managing user identities, securing workforce credentials, monitoring third-party vendors, security incident investigations, and meeting IT security requirements.

Conclusion

Employee monitoring is crucial for securing your data and ensuring overall employee productivity. However, you should always approach the monitoring process wisely.

Adopting employee monitoring best practices and advanced monitoring solutions can help your organization monitor employees responsibly and legally while fostering a transparent work environment built on trust.

Deploying Syteca for employee monitoring in the workplace can make visibility into employee activity less challenging and more effective.