How Does Email Monitoring Affect Employee Productivity?
Email monitoring is something that many employers think about doing. When you monitor your employees' behavior online, there are several ways that their productivity might be affected. Sally Rimes, at Dolphin Staffing in Minneapolis, Minn., has several ideas about how monitoring your employees might affect their day-to-day work environments.
Other People Are Reading
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Less Time for Other Things
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If you monitor your employees' emails, the bottom line is that they are aware each email they send could be read. This will cut back on the amount of personal emails that are sent, as well as the amount of emails that are sent fruitlessly. You will see a jump in their productivity, says Rimes.
Less Importance of Personal Life
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On the other hand, says Rimes, if you take away your employees' rights to feel like they can deal with personal things during the work day, your employees might feel as if you believe their personal lives aren't important. There are many employees who are able to juggle checking a few personal emails in the morning, and then get right to work. If they feel as if you are monitoring their personal information, they might feel undercut, or that you believe they are not capable of dealing with everything in their lives at once. If you do monitor emails, try to make your employees aware that you aren't going to nit pick over every little personal email they send, because you trust them to be doing work on work time.
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Gossip
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Workplace gossip is one of the hurdles against workplace productivity, says Rimes. If you want to cut down on gossip, monitor your employees' emails. They will stop talking in emails about others on company time, because they won't want you to see it. Hopefully, they'll get some work done with that extra time they've saved.
Venting
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Rimes does mention that employees need to vent from time to time, even about you. So, if they feel that you are monitoring each move they make, they might get more frustrated, and you might see productivity drop slightly because they feel like they have no freedom in their jobs. To remedy this, make sure your employees have access to regular Internet sites, like MSN and Hotmail or Yahoo, so they can use free, web-based mail on their own time to communicate and even vent with others. If they know you are only monitoring company email, they will still feel as if they can have their personal email, on their lunch or breaks or before or after work.
Theft
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Rimes says that the number-one reason to monitor your employee's email is to cut down on theft or fraud by catching unscrupulous employees. You will save money and overall your productivity will increase.
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References
- Photo Credit email @ image by Witold Krasowski from Fotolia.com
