When you think of keeping track of employees in the field or your staff on the road, you usually think of a GPS system or some sort of location monitoring from their phone or company hardware.
However, just because they are being tracked physically, that doesn’t mean you’re getting accurate information of their productivity, efficiency and overall time working data. Keeping track of employee whereabouts is only a fraction of understanding their efficiency. We need to look deeper and dive under the surface of general tracking and location pinpoints and search for better solutions for better employee monitoring.
Ineffectiveness of Location Tracking
Tracking and location data for employees can have an advantage, like knowing where your employee is, and if they are on the job site or not, and then have some not so great perks. Here is one of a few examples of the downfall and finding inaccurate employee data:
Let me introduce you to Jennie. Jennie’s job for her company is to inspect and test drilled wells at private residences. Unfortunately, even when she is at the specific job site location, she tends to get distracted and spend the majority of her time on her phone, and very little time checking to make sure the wells are safe and well tested. Jennie is also very inconsistent with how much time she spends on each service call, and isn’t very accommodating to customers.
Just because we know an employee’s location, that doesn’t necessarily say anything about productivity and efficiency.
Location monitoring can seem to sound very effective to management, but it only addresses a very small portion of the big picture of time theft.
In essence, wouldn’t you rather want to monitor your staff’s time keeping, productivity, efficiency, professionalism and capability rather than just seeing if they are on the job site location or not?
Monitor Productivity
Tracking specific employee activity and final outcome is simply much more effective. Instead of focusing on general location tracking, you should be looking to monitor true employee productivity with the right software.
A big benefit of monitoring activity is focusing on the employees areas of lack and/or areas of strengths. You can see how much time is spent on each task or activity and find a solution for the problem.
They may have a lack of experience, or lack of skills for that certain job requirement, and as a result the outcome could be inconsistent. This data collection allows you to see where your staff is excelling and where they may need some help, or are falling behind.
Motivation is another important aspect of monitoring activity. When an employee knows that they will be expected to keep track of time and are actively being used for company productivity and outcome data, it adds another level of incentive. Otherwise, if monitoring is not there, there is no way of knowing how that specific employee spends time.
In an overall sense, activity monitoring and data collection will help to enhance your business goals and grow your understanding of your company’s operation. With data collection comes pertinent information of how you can run better, grow faster, and especially help more people in the end.
Monitoring Customer Satisfaction
Software that monitors activity can only go so far when it comes to measuring employee performance, character, and human interactions. So, to assist with this, another step is needed. Monitoring customer satisfaction goes hand and hand with monitoring employee performance and productivity.
This provides a way to reveal many issues that could occur with technician professionalism and performance that any kind of software will not pick up.
The software solution would provide the customer, job site manager, and whoever else may be involved, with a very simple feedback outlet that allows for the collection of feedback data. That way you can be the very first to receive a notice of unsatisfactory service or complaints, rather than hearing from online reviews or through other sources.
This also allows for the customer to have a role in how the company operates and what areas to enhance or change, as well as providing the customer the ability to share their personal and real experiences.
Employee Peer Monitoring Through Gamification
An effective way to gain productivity and motivation is by introducing gamification and by monitoring it. This produces focus, gain of function, and performance by creating scoring and different levels of action and achievements to help motivate and encourage staff.
Another benefit to gamification is that it keeps employees’ self awareness up. It helps them to “self-police” and see where they are in performance and how they are doing on the scale of productivity.
Summary
The bottom line is that location monitoring isn’t the best option when it comes to collecting employee data. We now know that it is very important to monitor true employee productivity, as well as customer satisfaction with customer feedback. This can all be done with custom software.
And again, wouldn’t you rather want to monitor your staff’s time keeping, productivity, efficiency, professionalism and capability, rather than just seeing if they are on the job site location or not?
When it all comes down to it, “Inspect what you expect”. If you just monitor location, you’ll get employees who are on site but potentially unproductive. If you monitor productivity and customer satisfaction, you will achieve a more overall positive outcome as a whole.
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