No, because this approach just doesn’t work. And there a few reasons:
1. Most employees hate it and so it results in staff churn.
2. It sends a message to employees that management doesn’t trust them.
3. Most importantly, it shifts the attention away from performance and towards time spent in front of a screen and the number of times you press your keyboard. You ask one of your employees why their project is taking so long, they show you that they’re working hard, pointing back at the results of the screen recording app. And, of course, those recordings don’t show what they’re doing on their mobile or whether they’ve got another laptop right next to them!
Few would disagree; the best way to measure performance is output. That is exactly what high-performing teams need to relentlessly attempt to measure. But measuring output isn’t that easy for most non-sales roles. Sure, in theory you have KPIs, but in the real world there are so many good reasons why those KPIs are missed.
A balanced approach, and one that we’re seeing adopted by leading companies is rather old school. Employees indicate the hours they’ve spent on various tasks, i.e with timesheets. This make employees accountable for their time and encourages a trusting yet transparent environment. Crucially, it also allows managers to go into any of those tasks and see the output. If an employee has indicated that they’ve spent 7 hours creating an ad campaign, their manager could have a look at that ad campaign and understand what 7 hours of work has produced. Do this a few times and you have a very good sense of that employee’s productivity. Sure, it’s simple… but it’s very effective.
A common problem is that staff keep forgetting to put in their hours. And so Jibble is focused on making time tracking seamless, aided with reminders, the ability to track time via MS Teams or Slack, and making clocking in and out easy, whether on a laptop or mobile phone. This creates a transparent work environment where employees are focused on performance.