4) Don’t electronically track employee movements
Here’s an unpleasant-but-possible scenario that you can find yourself faced with if you use staff passes or electronic methods to track where your employees are at all times. You call an employer (we’ll call her Melissa) into your office.
You: “Melissa, I can see from the tracking data that you’ve left your desk six times this morning. Can you please explain this to me? We’re working on a big project and I would hope that you’d be focused on it.”
Melissa: “I’ve needed to run to the bathroom.”
You: “Six times? That’s excessive – it’s only 2.30pm.”
Melissa: “I’m pregnant. It’s morning sickness. I’m not 12 weeks yet so I didn’t want to tell anyone as it’s not safe to do so…”
Tracking staff movements just isn’t a good idea. As the above shows, if you decide to act on the information you gather, then you can open a whole can of extremely awkward worms on the situation.
If you feel the need to track your employees, then it probably comes out of a sense of distrust. Perhaps you don’t feel that work is being completed as quickly as it should be, or you’re worried that your employees aren’t focusing as much as they should.
However, these issues aren’t truly resolved by tracking – they’re just pushed into the background. What truly resolves problems of delays and lost productivity is talking to employees, finding out what’s holding things up, and going the extra mile to ensure everyone is confident in what they’re being asked to do. Tracking does nothing but provides you with worthless data for something you should have noticed naturally anyway.
Conclusion
Give your employees privacy, taking the steps necessary to ensure they feel comfortable at work. At the end of the day, it’s both their well-being and your continued that are set to benefit.
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