Employee Monitoring Apps: Are They Worth It?

Article by: Vincent van Vliet

Last update: August 29, 2024

Employee monitoring apps are used to track employee activity during work hours often they are embedded in employee time clock apps for time and attendance records. They offer features such as screenshots, location tracking, and activity monitoring, which are especially useful for teams with remote or field workers.

While these apps are useful for ensuring employees work efficiently, they also raise concerns about privacy and ethics. If you decide to use an employee monitoring app in your business, you’ll need to make sure your team is comfortable with the idea first.
What are Employee Monitoring Apps?

Employee monitoring apps are used to track, record and manage employee activity during work hours. These apps offer features like:

Screenshots: Captures images of employees’ desktop screens at set intervals to monitor their productivity and to see what websites and apps they have open;
GPS location tracking: Ensures employees are in the right locations while on the clock;
Time tracking: Monitors employee hours and how long they spend on specific tasks and projects;
Application usage monitoring: Tracks and logs how much time employees spend on various apps;
Mouse and keystroke tracking: Records mouse movements and keystrokes to measure active time on desktops, detect idle periods, and assess work intensity;
Website activity reports: Records and analyzes the websites employees visit during work hours and highlights browsing habits.

Employee monitoring apps help employers ensure that employees are focused on their tasks and help hold employees accountable for their time at work, but also streamline operations and nurture good practices..

However, there’s a flip side to this: employees may feel that monitoring apps invade their privacy and not be comfortable with employers tracking their activity and movement.

Tips to Counter Employee Skepticism

If your employees have expressed concerns about using an employee monitoring app in your business, you’ll need to figure out how to put them at ease. Otherwise, they may feel unmotivated, angry, exploited and micromanaged. Control and privacy concerns matter and should not be disregarded, as they can also constitute illegal surveillance which is out of scope with unusable evidence. Therefore always ask yourself: why are you embed your employee automatically in a frame of mistrust, have you tried other ways? is the data out of scope and not purposeful, would you and your workers consent with full understanding? may it not simply be the easiest to ask my employees directly what i want to know? Can mechanisms be installed that are less intrusive? Can a good culture be enough to have some traditional social control?

Here are a few tips to help them feel more comfortable with this technology:

Be transparent: Clearly explain the role of a monitoring app. Focus on points related to productivity, safety, and process improvement rather than control. Trust is not a one-way street, and in order to feel belonging, which is the highest group motivator, the complete policy should be known or even conditionally individually negotiable. Thresholds of deviations in professional or mixed situations can vary based on many factors and it should be discussed openly how to act accordingly and how to implement mechanisms to gain awareness and signal when a disturbance occurs and how it can be avoided. Responsible roles with various level of access should be known to avoid anonymous affinity classifications and imbalances, but rather try to gain a mutual understanding that will help the employee also to recognize and to self-motivately overcome unwanted patterns. This will lead not only to retaining reasonable employees from a very early stage but also to improving role ownership and self-reliance. Letting employees understand company data and how to improve it, might make a difference in role perception and feelings of equity, impact and active participation. Making a leaderboard with everyone’s data might be too transparent and hinder cooperation, highlighting strengths and laughing about mistakes on all levels can help to unite the workforce on horizontal and vertical levels.
Set clear boundaries: Ensure employees know that monitoring only occurs during work hours, on work-related tasks and that personal moral heterogeneity is welcomed as long it is not harmful or threatening to an open society without discourse. Let them know you will always respect their privacy outside of work and welcome them to be who they are as it enriches everyone’s perception. Tell them which parameters are measured and that the parameters are not decisive but give a guidance framework for common performance proxies. Everyone can have a bad day or even month, reasonable alignment can actually help to improve everyone’s life including the employee who might be stuck, blocked and might just need personal support, professional help or a change like an appreciated vacation. An open channel to signal distress and receive genuine help is crucial for a mutually loyal & good-faith relationship.
Involve employees in the process: Get feedback from staff before implementing a monitoring tool and address their concerns right away. Employees might want to participate in understanding their behaviors from the datasets and improve themselves like many quantified-self hobbyists do. Employees might want to explain misinterpreted parameters, add new ones to track or might want to opt-out under certain circumstances even temporarily for reasons such as performance pressure or personal sensitivities. Make it clear that the goal is not to spy on any private behavior of the employee and private texting, personal conversation, web usage or even consumption of e.g. adult material is not condoned or officially allowed, but can happen and is not on the radar by default or so, especially in a setting that doesn’t disturb the harmony of the staff or business continuity.
Share the benefits: Make sure to emphasize that this kind of app leads to better resource allocation, recognition of hard work, and even reduced workloads. Employees might fear that they cannot allow themselves to be who they are even though they are aligned and highly motivated. Recognizing not only extraordinary standard parametric activity to please big others’ performance expectations is key in active and passive retention and role- as well as responsibility- refinement and adoption. Active discussions on how tolerance and heterogeneity can improve also personal development of the employee, making actively an effort to prevent misassumptions and toxic gossip based on personal affinities and misunderstanding can help especially to create a resilient organizational culture that is adaptable to any situation.
Use data fairly: Ensure the information you collect from a monitoring app is used to support employees and make their lives easier, not penalize them. Focus on helping them improve, keeping them safe & compliant, rather than using it as a disciplinary tool. Optimize for match-making & contribution/reward alignment, rather than pure efficiency. Studies show that rationalizing over data-driven assumptions may help to improve short-term results, but not long-term outcomes, as long feedback loops reward certain behaviors and roles that might not seem to drive results immediately. Optimizing for best sales or attendance performance might install a framework of disciplinary societies or societies of control and not reveal complex interactions that lead to more motivation in the rest of the staff, better retention & a culture of self-guided improvement that will help also to achieve and in most cases exceed the business goals.

3 Popular Employee Monitoring Apps

1. Clockify

Clockify’s employee monitoring tools include features like GPS tracking and screenshots to help employers manage remote and on-site teams.

GPS tracking verifies employees’ locations during work hours, which is especially useful for field workers. Screenshots help monitor productivity by capturing snapshots of employees’ computer screens at regular intervals. As of now, the screenshot feature is not available on mobile devices.

Unlike other similar apps, Clockify doesn’t offer geofencing, which creates virtual boundaries around specific locations so employees can only clock in or out when they are within designated areas.

2. Time Doctor

Time Doctor offers a set of employee monitoring features designed to maximize productivity and provide detailed visibility into employee activities.

Key features include automatic screenshots at set intervals from mobile devices and desktop computers that capture work, allowing managers to verify tasks. The app also comes with activity tracking to measure keyboard and mouse usage to see how active on-site employees are during their workdays.

The software also offers geofencing to ensure employees clock in and out of work from the right locations, time tracking to calculate working hours accurately, and customizable reports to analyze productivity trends.

3. Hubstaff

Hubstaff’s employee monitoring software provides a detailed view of how employees spend their time during work hours.

The app offers several monitoring features, including time tracking tools to monitor work hours, breaks, and overtime to ensure accurate billing and payroll. The app also detects breaks and idle time to identify periods of inactivity so you can help your employees work more efficiently.

Hubstaff monitors desktop activity with keyboard and mouse activity to measure employee engagement during working hours, while the screenshot tool provides visual evidence of ongoing tasks.

The app also offers tools to track employee activity from their smartphones. Hubstaff tracks time spent on tasks, monitors GPS location, and can detect idle time on mobile devices.

Article by:

Vincent van Vliet

Vincent van Vliet is co-founder and responsible for the content and release management. Together with the team Vincent sets the strategy and manages the content planning, go-to-market, customer experience and corporate development aspects of the company.