George Orwell was wrong
Soho
8 Posts
I'd like to hear your opinion and experience with employee monitoring. Have we gone too far? I don't think the government or "Big Brother" will ever monitor you as much as what we do as employers.
I work for mid-size manufacturing company(about 60 people)and we are using Biometric thumb prints to monitor our employee's attendance. We have website filters/blocks and our email is reviewed on a consistent basis. We have a call monitoring system that tells management how long you are on a call and lists the phone numbers (incoming and outgoing).
I think this type of monitoring eventually starts to negatively affect morale. Our sales team is under pressure to make at least 50 cold calls every day. We just discovered that our most experienced senior sales person is randomly calling fax numbers in order to keep his call numbers up. What's even more disturbing is that the sales supervisor seems to have been guilty of the same behavior, to a lesser degree.
The sales person has been warned about the requirement of making a certain number of calls -- he's fallen short before and he's not making his sales numbers. I'm getting his "last chance" performance improvement plan together and we will soon be having a discussion about this latest incident.
Any insight to explain this type of behavior and/or how to deal with it? Or is this a symptom of a lack of trust in our workplace? I'm afraid that this may just be the tip of the iceberg.
I work for mid-size manufacturing company(about 60 people)and we are using Biometric thumb prints to monitor our employee's attendance. We have website filters/blocks and our email is reviewed on a consistent basis. We have a call monitoring system that tells management how long you are on a call and lists the phone numbers (incoming and outgoing).
I think this type of monitoring eventually starts to negatively affect morale. Our sales team is under pressure to make at least 50 cold calls every day. We just discovered that our most experienced senior sales person is randomly calling fax numbers in order to keep his call numbers up. What's even more disturbing is that the sales supervisor seems to have been guilty of the same behavior, to a lesser degree.
The sales person has been warned about the requirement of making a certain number of calls -- he's fallen short before and he's not making his sales numbers. I'm getting his "last chance" performance improvement plan together and we will soon be having a discussion about this latest incident.
Any insight to explain this type of behavior and/or how to deal with it? Or is this a symptom of a lack of trust in our workplace? I'm afraid that this may just be the tip of the iceberg.
Comments
Sounds to me like your company has taken monitoring to an extreme. Perhaps you work in a high-tech industry or one with corporate espionage issues?
It seems from your statements that your morale has certainly been impacted. There are people who react negatively to strict scrutiny and I would think that a real sales personality would be in that group. I would think that you could judge your salespeople by their results - certainly this is one of the most measurable areas you deal with. It seems to me you could set a performance target and then deal with your underperformers according to your policy, rather than play Big Brother with their telephones.
I am curious about how your hourly workers like the thumbprint method? It gives me the creeps but perhaps they don't mind.
I don't know how you deal with this kind of behavior except in a straight- forward manner by asking why he did it. Looks like your people are behaving like teenagers fooling mom & dad rather than mature employees doing their jobs. And if your supervisor is participating in this you could really have a problem.
Just my thoughts but you may want to try to take your employee's temperature - perhaps through a survey.
I would agree with the first poster- what is the outcome that you want to achieve? If it's sales, why not have the goal be a sales goal rather than how many outgoing calls are made?
Part of my responsibilities in HR is to run our HR call center, so I too can track everything on their phones. Do I? Nope. If they are making the core statistics (There are 3 that we count), then it doesn't matter to me if they make personal calls, etc.
If the associate doesn't make their goal, we use use progressive disclipine because their stats are so important to what they do.
Like the saying goes, it's not what you expect, it's what you inspect.
From my personal perspective, I have to say that it does decrease the morale among staff. For the most part, we are grown-ups and we know that we have a job to do...taking 10 minutes to check the headlines does not make us less effective...but the policies are needed for those that allow such access to interfere with job performance.
Good luck!
Just the women's... everybody knows it would be too gross to have cameras in ours.