Monitor Employee Phone Usage
On employer-owned phones, you can listen to what your employees are saying. However, it should be for quality control purposes; maybe you’re ensuring customers are getting helpful responses, or clients are being treated respectfully.
It’s also a good idea to bring two or three different options to the table and ask your employees to vote. This way, they’ll feel like they’re choosing the system (rather than having it forced upon them). For example, you might say, "We’re looking at using Hubstaff or Time Doctor—take a look at each platform, and tell us which one you’d prefer."
For a real-life example, look at Marissa Mayer’s 2013 decision to abolish Yahoo’s work-from-home option at Yahoo. Tracking how much time telecommuters spent on the company’s intranet revealed they were much less productive than their in-office peers.
It’s understandable why monitoring employees might cause those employees to think you don’t trust them. Unsurprisingly, this feeling of distrust and suspicion can harm the relationship between manager and their workers.
URL-blocking also falls under this category. Many employers will restrict their employees from visiting websites with unquestionably inappropriate content (think: pornography), while others may allow certain “questionable” sites, like Twitter or YouTube, but only for a limited period of time.
So, how do you get buy-in? First, prepare a presentation for your workers. Maybe that’s a simple slide deck, or maybe you hold an all-hands Skype call. In any case, you should have a detailed explanation of how this system will improve the business, and more importantly, how it will help your workers.
Tracking the location of mobile employees (whether by vehicle, smart phone, or both) has gone way up lately. According to the latest study, which was conducted in 2012, 62% of organizations that have "roaming" workforces keep records of their movement. That’s up from 30% in 2008. Although we don’t have exact numbers, the percentage has no doubt risen in even more in the past four years.
But that’s not the only way employee monitoring boosts security. It’s one of the best ways to make sure your field employees aren’t in danger; for example, "If an employee is supposed to be back at a certain time and nobody has heard from them," says Paul Randhawa, senior management analyst at Santa Clara Valley Water District in California, "we can look up on the GPS, see where they’re at and check up on their safety."
But some jobs make this type of monitoring problematic. Say you’ve hired a social media manager—if you see she’s always visiting Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, that shouldn’t raise any red flags. But you’ll still have no idea whether she’s being productive.
After learning how employer can monitor personal cell phone, you can simply start tracking the device. Once you have set up the iOS account or have installed the Android app on the devices you wish to track, you can go to Spyzie’s Control Panel to track them. You can also use a Spyzie Control Panel app to access the dashboard on the go.