Your Employees Hate Monitoring. Learn how to humanize Performance Tracking
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If your employees feel like they’re under constant surveillance, you’re less likely to retain them.
When it comes to performance monitoring, especially in remote, hybrid and asynchronous work environments where managers may not see their employees physically, some monitoring methods are controversial. According to a May 2022 survey of 750 technicians by Washington analyst Morning Consult, More than half of workers would quit their jobs if their employer insisted on recording their audio or video or using facial recognition to monitor job performance . .
For Dan Pupius, founder of San Francisco-based remote workplace management tool Range, the Big Brother problem is directly related to whether the leaders are Theory X or Theory Y, which was invented by social psychologist Douglas McGregor of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. in 1960. Theory X basically assumes that workers are unmotivated by default, meaning that they require strict supervision and compliance; Theory Y, on the other hand, claims that people are intrinsically motivated and want a sense of mastery in their work, so that they can work on the job without any interference. Subsequent researchers have studied Theory X and Theory Y in terms of their effects on the skilled and unskilled workforce. Although Theory Y is more often associated with intellectual workers.
Weak performance monitoring does not contextualize employee performance, Pupius says. That’s why it’s important that managers understand the leading indicators, but also focus more on the bottom line when setting targets. One of the top metrics for a salesperson may be the number of emails he or she sends, but that’s short-sighted. A person can send 200 bad e-mails, but 20 good e-mails can lead to more sales,” he says. “Instead of judging solely on metrics, you should ask questions that then make you check and diagnose what might be going on.”
He adds that another hidden factor affecting performance is emotion. With Range’s logging platform, employees can mark their overall mood throughout the day with emoticons, giving managers more insight into why employees’ performance may vary from one day to the next and giving employees insight into how their bosses The sentiment. “In a remote environment, you lack the context of what people look like,” Poupy says. “If I’m a little brief in my emails, people can attribute that to my mood, not that I’m upset with them.”
Ultimately, these kinds of human interactions – as opposed to machine monitoring – are good for business. “When you build a relationship with an employee through good communication, you give them a chance to become a partner in your organization,” Turner says. “Then they’ll feel like they have something to buy.”
