It is understandable to get concerned about what your employees are doing at work. Several different thoughts may cloud your mind. For instance, are your employees paying attention to their work or are they misusing your business resources?
Secondly, you may also wonder whether or not they are not attempting to leak your company’s private information to a third-party or business competitor. For that, you would need to track your employees’ devices while they are work. You can begin with monitoring Android phone, iPhone, or any other device your employee is using at work.
Before you decide to track your employees at work, you must find out if it is legal to monitor them. In this post, we will talk about why employee monitoring is necessary and whether monitoring your employees’ devices is legal or not. If it’s legal, then you can carry out necessary measures and monitor them to prevent them from slacking off or misusing the company’s resources.
Why Monitoring Employees is Important?
Let’s begin by explaining why monitoring employees is important. Later, we will discuss monitoring your employees legally. There are several advantages to tracking your employees during office hours.
Every company, be it big or small, needs some sort of monitoring tools to track their employees. Below, we have mentioned a few reasons why it is essential for every company to monitor its employees:
- To prevent the company from a major data leak: Not all employees are honest and trustworthy. Some can be deceiving and unfaithful to your company. Monitoring every employee’s device is important so that you can determine whether any of them is trying to leak the company’s private data to a third-party or business competitor. Monitoring employees will prevent your company from huge data theft.
- To find out whether employees are misusing the company’s resources: Most employees if left unsupervised tend to slack off and waste time in other leisure activities while they are at work. They can misuse the phone service to make personal calls, use the internet to browse sites and watch online movies, use social media to interact with their friends, etc. When they know that you are monitoring their internet and social media usage, they won’t slack off or waste time on other things.
- To track an employee’s location to determine whether they are really present at the business meeting: Many companies use GPS location tracking apps to track the company-owned automobiles provided to employees. Using these location-tracking apps, employers can track their employees’ whereabouts. They can determine if the employee is really outside for a business meeting with a client or has gone out for some personal work. Location tracking apps are really helpful for those employers who frequently send their employees to work outside the city/country to attend business meetings.
The above-mentioned are some reasons that indicate why employee monitoring is crucial to every company. Without employee monitoring tools, no employer can keep a watch on their employees.
The truth is, an employer cannot hover around their employees all the time and see what they have been up to. They need to use monitoring tools that help them track their employees’ devices remotely.
Thankfully, we do have some monitoring apps that let us monitor someone’s cell phone or any other device activity effectively. You can check iPhone and Android device monitoring apps, depending on what type of device your employee is currently using.
Is Monitoring Your Employees Legal?
Is monitoring your employees’ devices at work legal? This happens to be a huge debate among many employers and employees. The answer to this question is not straightforward. In fact, different countries observe different employee monitoring laws that you must be wary of because deploying any tracking or monitoring apps on your employees’ devices.
In case you are attempting to monitor your employee’s personal device, then you can land yourself in hot waters. It could be a big legal issue if you attempt to monitor your employee’s personal smartphone.
On the other hand, if you want to monitor a company-issued device, either a smartphone or laptop, to your employee, then it’s completely legal. Monitoring your employee’s company-owned device is legally possible because that device belongs to the company.
You just need to make sure that you have informed your employee about monitoring their activity during office hours. Your employees should know that their activities will be monitored and that all the monitoring will be work-related only.
Also, it is better to seek legal advice from your lawyer or any legal company before deploying a monitoring app on your employee’s device so you can understand the employee monitoring laws applicable in your country.
Several employee monitoring apps and programs are available out there that are designed only to monitor employees in a legal way. You should pay close attention to those that let you track your employees legally. If a monitoring app does not offer legal monitoring then you should stay away from it.
You should not shy away from tracking your employee’s activity while they are at work. However, you need to make sure that you are only tracking devices that are company-owned and not the personal devices of employees. Also, be sure to check all the employee monitoring laws applicable to your country before opting for a monitoring app.
Further, it is best to inform your employees that their smartphone or computer activity will be monitored during working hours before installing the monitoring app on their device. This is done to avoid any sort of nuisance.
