Benefits of Productivity Monitoring Software for Your Teams

• By Lakshya Pareek
• 28-11-2024
• Software

Today, in the employee-centric, data-driven, fast-paced, and technology-oriented work world and atmosphere era, we have a diverse workforce spread globally across various time zones and locations. So, monitoring teams for productivity is a challenge since it has to be virtual. Unfortunately, you can’t be at the different locations at the same time. Plus, personally monitoring your employees is micromanagement, which is inefficient as well as unethical. So, the better solution is to use productivity monitoring and time tracking software. Are you curious to know more? Let’s dive right in.

An Overview of Productivity Monitoring Software

Productivity monitoring software or software solutions for monitoring the productivity of your employees are digital solutions and tool packages with a plethora of features.

Businesses and organizations worldwide use such software to monitor the productivity levels of their employees and increase it to maximization. Typically, productivity monitoring software will have these features.

• Screenshot monitoring.
• Employee activity monitoring.
• Seamless integrations.
• Time tracking.
• User-friendly interface.
• Analysis and reporting of work-time utilization, productivity, and employee work performance.

Benefits of Productivity Monitoring Software Diverse Teams

With the overview of productivity monitoring software, you must have an idea of some of the advantages of employee productivity monitoring software. However, the benefits don’t just stop there. Here’s why businesses and organizations regularly use software for employee productivity monitoring.

1. Productivity Boosts

It won’t be called productivity monitoring and time tracking software if it doesn’t increase the productivity of your employees. Would it? Thanks to its multitude of features, you will:

• Identify productivity levels on the spot and set expert strategies to skyrocket your employees’ work productivity to the next level.
• Detailed reporting helps you identify and amplify employee strengths. Plus, it also helps you know their weaknesses and get rid of them.

2. Better Work Performance

Employees when monitored for productivity always perform work to the best of their skills, which improves their work performance over time.

3. More Accountability

Employee monitoring for productivity through screenshot monitoring, behavior analytics, and other features of productivity software ensures that you have more and more accountable and responsible employees and teams. It means that:

• Your employees and teams don’t blame each other for low productivity or no compliance.
• All teams take full responsibility and accountability for their work.
• It establishes more discipline and integrity in your organization.

4. Improved Time Management

Due to the time tracking feature, your employees will have a better idea of where their work-time is being utilized the most. It means that:

• Over a long time of use of the software, your teams will be better at managing their work hours.
• You will have more focused and efficient employees.
• Your employees will know how to accomplish more task completions within the same time blocks.
• Your teams will eliminate time-wasting activities.

5. Better Resource Management

Due to the detailed analysis and reporting features, you will know where your employees are lagging and why. This is because:

• You will easily spot work gaps, low-productive work patterns, flaws, and obstructions.
• You will be able to fix them as per your goal settings and achieve your targets while saving time and expenses.
• Reallocating the right resources to the right tasks and projects becomes simple and easy.

How to Choose the Best Productivity Monitoring Software for Your Business?

So now you know the benefits of productivity monitoring software. However, you will only experience all these advantages over your competitors if you choose the right software for monitoring employee productivity. Fortunately, it takes only a few steps.

1. Cost Vs. Requirement. Vs. ROI Analysis

Simply put, it is the cost of the software vs your requirements and the expected return on investments. Here, you need to keep in mind these things.

• The expenses of productivity monitoring software implementation must be under your budget.
• The features must provide your expected return on investment.
• Your chosen productivity monitoring software must also be the best fit for your unique business needs.

2. Features Check

Now that you are done with the requirements, cost, and ROI checks, you need to evaluate your feature requirements. You can ask yourself questions like these.

• How many features, tools, and functionalities do I need?
• What metrics do I need to track?
• Do I need integrations?

Doing these evaluations will ensure that you have the best shortlist with only the top software for monitoring productivity.

3. Shortlisting

Now that all the checks are done, you will have a shortlist of productivity monitoring software solutions that are the best fit for your teams. Here, a tip is to reevaluate your options to identify, which software solutions you can keep.

4. Read Reviews

The best way to find out whether your shortlist is right is to read genuine reviews of people who are using these solutions. This step will let you know:

• Whether your final productivity monitoring software solution will work as per your needs.
• Whether the software will give you the maximum expected output.
• How often do you need to upgrade and update it?
• Is there any fake or scam in your list?

5. Get a Free Trial

At this step, you will have jotted down just one productivity monitoring software. Now to ensure that it is the best fit for your requirements, you need to get a free trial. Not only does it show how the software will work in different work environments but also how result-oriented it is.

Top 5 Productivity Monitoring Software for Your Teams

Unless you have a dedicated team for it, you need to rely on expert shortlists to identify the best productivity monitoring software as per your various business requirements. So to help you get started we shortlisted the top 5 employee productivity tracking software solutions as per our expertise and experience.

1. Clockify

Clockify is primarily a time tracking software known for editable timesheets and user-friendly features. However, it can also be used to boost the productivity and work-time utilization efficiency of your employees. Features such as reporting and automated timers highlight the core of Clockify.

2. Toggl Track

Toggle the way you track your work hours with Toggl Track. This productivity monitoring software stands out for its excellent reporting features that show details of where your employees spend their time. Plus, the user-friendliness and integration with other tools also make it a great choice.

3. RescueTime

Rescue your employees from wasting their time with RescueTIme. What makes this software unique is how it runs in the background of your desktop or smartphone and tracks time spent on work activities. An advantage is that since it works silently, the workflow will not be disrupted.

4. Harvest

Harvest helps you boost the productivity of your employees with features including time tracking. Plus, the integrations with project management software make it an excellent choice.

5. Hubstaff

This productivity monitoring software is the most useful for your remote teams due to the GPS and time tracking features. Other exceptional features such as activity tracking and screenshot monitoring also help you increase employee productivity.

Productivity Monitoring Tips & Strategies for Maximum Benefits

Using software for monitoring the productivity of your employees is one thing. However, completely relying on it will never give you the desired results. So below, we have provided you with effective tips and strategies to experience maximum benefits from the software.

1. Use the Best Software

The first idea as we mentioned before, is to use the best productivity monitoring software, which is:

• Ideal as per your requirements
• Feature-rich and provides the desired results regardless of your working environment.
• Customizable and scalable
• Doesn’t hinder the privacy of your employees.

2. Have Employee Consent

Like everything else in your business, employee productivity monitoring and the software for it also has its legal and ethical considerations. Thus, you must:

• Have the written and legal consent of your employees before using productivity monitoring software.
• Ensure that all your employees agree to the usage of software for monitoring productivity.
• Ensure that your employees are clear about the usage of productivity monitoring software.
• All your employees must be well aware of the benefits of productivity monitoring software.
• The software must not hinder the privacy of your employees.
• Your productivity monitoring software must never monitor unnecessary non-work-related activities including breaks.

Failing to meet legal and ethical considerations gives your employees the right to sue you against spying, micromanagement, privacy breaching, or any other related concern.

3. Implement without Rush

All employees have a mindset, ‘live and let live. Thus, sudden changes such as productivity monitoring software implementation will only cause confusion and frustration. It will result in employees not being able to adjust to the change and resigning. Slowly and steadily implement productivity monitoring software to ensure that your employees can adjust to the new changes. This will ensure optimization and achieving the desired output.

4. Don’t Go Overboard

Like everything else, it is recommended to never go overboard with productivity monitoring. As we mentioned before:

• Your employees must know how many activities will be monitored and at what time.
• The software must never hinder the privacy of your employees.
• The productivity monitoring software must never track what’s unnecessary including breaks and lunch hours.
• Never monitor outside of work hours.

5. Train Your Employees

Training your non-tech employees in using productivity monitoring software to access their data and other essential things such as pausing the timer is essential to get the maximum benefits. In this context, your productivity monitoring software training plan must:

• Be curated for each employee’s needs.
• Must be definite.
• Must blend with your regular workday so that it doesn’t interrupt the workflow.

6. Take Regular Employee Feedback

Taking regular feedback from your employees ensures that you know how the productivity monitoring software works. This way, you will identify:

• Whether the software is working as per your requirements or not.
• Whether the productivity monitoring software is providing you with desired results or not.
• Whether the software is hindering employee privacy. If it is then it is time to switch to a better productivity monitoring tool.

Productivity Monitoring Software: Latest Trends to Look Out For

Another way to maximize the benefits of using productivity monitoring software is to stay on par with the latest trends and patterns. To help you out, we shortlisted the top 4 trends in productivity monitoring and the software for it.

1. Gamification

Gamification is a technique that ensures that employee productivity monitoring doesn’t feel like a task. However, it feels like fun. What happens is that:

• The productivity monitoring software has a game-like interface.
• Instead of tasks, the word is quests.
• Employees can create their custom characters and earn rewards on task completions. Otherwise, the character will lose health.
• Gamification improves employee engagement and thus boosts productivity.

2. Diverse Work Models

Since these days, there are diverse work models including remote and hybrid, the productivity monitoring software must also:

• Have the features to monitor and increase the productivity of your diverse teams.
• Must be able to work in any working environment.
• Must stay updated as per your requirements for your diverse work models.

3. Employee Inclusiveness

Another trend you can’t miss in software for monitoring the productivity of teams is employee inclusiveness. What it means that your employees:

• Must know what’s being monitored.
• Employees must be clear about their productivity monitoring policies.

4. AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning have amplified productivity monitoring and the software for it. What artificial intelligence provides is:

• Advanced predictive analysis.
• Hands-free productivity monitoring (voice input).
• More accuracy
• Better forecasting and planning and much more.

What it does is make employee productivity monitoring more convenient and simple yet advanced for both the employees and the employers.

Conclusion

With that being said, we are done putting our title for today’s post, The Benefits of Productivity Monitoring Software for Your Teams under wraps. To summarize, employee monitoring software solutions are feature-rich digital solutions and tool packages that businesses and organizations worldwide use to monitor, track, and increase the overall work productivity of their diverse employees and teams. However, for the best outputs, you need to choose employee productivity monitoring software as per your requirements. However, unless you have a dedicated team for it, we recommend searching expert shortlists.