Communication Strategy for Employee Monitoring Step by Step 📈

According to Gartner research, the number of large employers using employee monitoring tools to track their workers has doubled since the beginning of the pandemic. The company expects this number to reach 70% of employers monitoring their employee engagement in 2025. Other sources suggest that the percentage of companies monitoring their employees reaches 80%.

While employee monitoring can help you increase productivity in your company and even improve team collaboration, the truth is that if you’re not transparent and ethical about your employee monitoring strategy, it can backfire on you. How so?

BBC quotes a study conducted by the Southern Management Association that found that US employees who were under surveillance:

Took more unapproved breaks
Intentionally worked more slowly
And even stole more office equipment than their un-monitored peers

Obviously, you want to avoid these challenges in your organization and use employee monitoring for the benefit of your business. If that’s your goal, you need to be smart about employee monitoring and implement your monitoring strategy in a way that addresses ethical concerns and fosters mutual respect between the company and its team. The way you communicate about this strategy is also immensely important.

Let’s see how you can develop a transparent communication strategy for employee monitoring, step by step.

an infographic summing up the steps of developing a successful communication strategy for employee monitoring

Steps of effective communication strategy for employee monitoring

Start With The Right Objectives

Depending on your business profile, you can have different objectives for team monitoring. You may want to:

Improve team performance
Ensure compliance with company policies
Or even increase the security of your workplace or better workplace behavior (e.g., concerning handling dangerous equipment or processing sensitive customer data)

It is important to state those objectives in a specified manner because this way, you will be able to come up with a strategy that fits your organizational culture and addresses all the relevant ethical considerations. Also, it’s important to be reasonable when it comes to data collected from the employee monitoring tool. If you collect too much information and track every second of your employees’ lives, they will likely feel like their privacy is violated.

Add the lack of the proper communication, and you may find yourself in the situation described in the intro to this article. Such an approach will probably backfire on you.

Such a scenario is more than likely. According to a study conducted in the UK by Britain Thinks in 2022, 60% of surveyed British employees believe they have been subject to some form of surveillance and monitoring at their current or most recent job. Such a result is a direct effect of the lack of good communication around employee monitoring in those companies.

Include All The Relevant Stakeholders (And Address Their Concerns)

If you want to use employee monitoring to gain insights that will help you improve team performance and ensure organizational success, you need to involve all the key stakeholders very early in the process, ideally in the planning phase.

Before finalizing the monitoring approach, you must ensure that every department’s concerns and expectations are understood and addressed. How can you do so? It’s a good idea to create a special team or task force that will be responsible for analyzing and fine-tuning the employee monitoring strategy. Such a task force should comprise at least one team member from the following departments:

HR
Legal
Other department managers (marketing, sales, customer service, administration, etc.)

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Each such person should be able to provide constructive feedback and take part in designing the final shape of your monitoring strategy. You shoud plan at least three or four task force team meetings as well as some one-on-one meetings with each team member to ensure everyone’s perspective is heard.

What should be addressed in the communication strategy for employee monitoring?

Department	Concerns
HR	Employee privacy and trust issues Ensuring fairness and avoiding micromanagement Impact on employee morale and retention
Legal	Compliance with labor laws, data protection regulations, and other legal requirements Proper consent and notification procedures Handling and securing collected data legally
Marketing & Sales	Monitoring sales productivity without being discouraging Ensuring client and prospect communications remain confidential Avoiding excessive tracking that could hinder creativity
Administration	Tracking working hours and attendance accurately Preventing unauthorized access to company resources Managing remote and hybrid work monitoring efficiently
Customer service	Ensuring quality and compliance in client interactions Avoiding excessive pressure that impacts service quality Maintaining a balance between efficiency and employee well-being

An infographic collecting the employee concerns that should be addressed when implementing a communication strategy for employee monitoring

Make your communication strategy for employee monitoring transparent

Make sure your task force takes those and similar concerns into account, and you’re on the right track to create a strategy that checks all the right boxes and doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy.

Define The Monitoring Scope And Boundaries

At the planning stage, you need to determine:

What data will be collected
When (keep in mind employee monitoring cannot interfere in any way with your employees’ private life)
Under what circumstances

Of course, it all depends on your objectives. Here are the typical data points you want to track depending on your goals:

Productivity tracking: Work hours, application usage, task completion rates
Security monitoring: File access logs, login activity, email scanning
Customer service quality: Call recordings, chat logs, sentiment analysis
Compliance: Employee location (for remote work), adherence to company policies

However, you also need to make sure that these data points are tracked in a transparent and ethical way. That’s why you need clear (written) guidelines on what monitoring activities are acceptable in your company.

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Communicate Your Strategy To Your Team

Once your employee monitoring strategy is ready to be implemented, you should invest some time in appropriate communication with your team. Remember, you shouldn’t just impose monitoring on your employees. That’s a recipe for a disaster and perhaps even some people leaving your workplace.

Make sure there is always room for constructive feedback. Even your task force may have omitted something that will become apparent only in real-life conditions. If possible, plan an initial pilot program or test phase so that your employees may get acquainted with the monitoring tool and simply get used to the idea of being monitored. Be patient, it may take a few weeks, but if it results in a high-performing team and perhaps even higher job satisfaction, it’s surely worth the effort.

Ensure you explain how employee monitoring works in an understandable way and emphasize the benefits for your employees (e.g., better organizational culture, better project management, improved work-life balance, etc.).

Lastly, pick the communication channels that ensure every person in your company gets all the necessary information. Emails and team meetings are usually your best bets.

Create Related Policies

Your employee monitoring strategy requires hard-and-fast policies, where everything is clearly outlined for your employees and the business administration team. Those policies are also crucial for ensuring consistency and transparency, and they should include:

The scope
The purpose
Legal considerations
Privacy security measures that have been implemented

Gather Feedback From Your Team Members

It’s vital to collect feedback from your team before finalizing the work on your strategy and policies. You can do so by organizing:

Anonymous surveys
Focus groups and workshops
And possibly even virtual collaboration channels, e.g., on Slack

All employees should be given the opportunity to voice their concerns and ask questions about employee monitoring. Also, HR and legal teams should analyze this feedback to identify potential issues and refine policies accordingly. Also, ensure full anonymity. If you don’t, you will receive false positive feedback that’s pretty much useless.

Train Your Team And Onboard New Employees

Every team member needs to be trained on how to use your employee monitoring tools and get actionable insights on what is expected from them. In your training materials, you should include:

What data is collected and why
How it aligns with company goals and how it benefits employees themselves (emphasize their professional development)
What are the questions employees might have (and provide good answers to those questions)
Where to go for additional information or support

Additionally, it’s a good idea to conduct the same training with every new team member, ideally, during the onboarding process. This way, your new workers or employees will be able to fully understand company expectations from day one.

Continuous Learning

Your employee monitoring strategy can change over time, there may also be some new legal requirements to address, etc. Consider providing some continuous learning opportunities such as periodic sessions with employees or e-learning workshops to address policy updates, new technologies, or evolving legal requirements as needed.

Use Monitoring Data To Enhance Team Communication

Employee monitoring data can be a valuable source of knowledge regarding work patterns, communication issues, and even workflow bottlenecks. Your tool can reveal some issues, such as delayed approvals or unnecessarily complicated processes that slow down the work.

It’s a good practice to analyze and act on those findings both concerning clear communication with your team and decision-making processes to improve performance and productivity. Share those insigts with other team members and think about what can be done to streamline communication and remove spotted bottlenecks.

However, it’s important to stay on the “positive side of things“. Don’t use these findings for personal attacks or to throw blame around. Rather, frame these insights to support your team’s success and focus on possible improvements and solutions.

Use Employee Monitoring To Foster Accountability

This step is quite sensitive. In general, you should never use employee monitoring as a “punitive tool”. Rather, you should emphasize all the positive aspects of productivity tracking so that your team members can:

Identify areas for their own growth
Receive effective feedback from their managers
Maintain good communication with other employees
Maintain a healthy work-life balance (for example, you can highlight that employee monitoring results in no overtime)

However, sometimes, your employees may need some constructive criticism if they work below expected productivity levels or their organizational behavior is negative or even dangerous. First off, it’s a good idea to give your team members access to their own productivity metrics or communication patterns so that they can self-assess and adjust their working patters and habits as needed.

Another idea worth considering is conducting one-on-one check-ins with managers so that your employees can understand how their work aligns with team goals, giving them a chance to ask questions and set personal development goals. This way, you can foster accountability, but also create an open dialogue between the management and your team. When done the right way, such transparency and open communication will help your employees feel more motivated to take ownership of their performance.

Reward Mechanisms

You can’t expect your employees to work better just because that’s what you want. You can reinforce positive behaviors and accountability by implementing recognition and reward mechanisms that are based on your employees’ improvement and work consistency. Here, performance-based bonuses seem to be the best way to go.

Protect Employee Privacy & Ensure Compliance

Monitoring your employees’ activity requires a delicate balance between collecting all the necessary information and protecting it using adequate security measures.

an infographic featuring the best tips for protecting employees' privacy while implementing communication strategy for employee monitoring

To ensure that sensitive data is properly handled and protected in your company, follow these best practices:

Collect only the data that’s strictly necessary for your tracking purposes
Whenever possible, anonymize the data collected with your monitoring tool
Implement cybersecurity safety measures such as encrypted transmission, access control, and firewall
Require two-factor authentication from every user trying to access employee information
Create and implement data handling procedures that are in line with your local privacy policy requirements (e.g., GDPR in the European Union).

Apart from that, your legal and HR teams should conduct regular security audits as well as stay updated on new regulations.

Gather Feedback & Focus on Continuous Improvement

Your company should always be open to constructive feedback, even months after the implementation of the monitoring tool. Many organizations conduct regular meetings and anonymous surveys to ensure everything is on the right track and their monitoring strategy is still relevant and effective.

If you find that you need to refine the monitoring strategy or the communication around it, don’t worry, that’s completely natural in the ever-evolving business environment. You just need to be ready for potential future legal, operational, and technological changes. This way, you will stay on top of things and ensure your monitoring strategy works as indended.

Measure Success (Using The Right Metrics)

With employee monitoring, you need to focus on the right metrics. Focus most of your attention on the outcomes instead of tracking every single minute of your employees’ lives. an infographic with tips for measuring success for employee tracking

Good worker monitoring tool should help you understand how monitoring contributes to:

Improved task completion rates
Time saved on tasks
Output quality
Revenue growth
Reduced operational costs

These are the metrics you should be looking at most of the time. Also, establish appropriate review cadences for those metrics. Monthly cadence is good for short-term trends in task completion rates, time saved, and output quality. On the other hand, quaterly and annual reviews allow you to assess broader patterns in revenue growth and operational costs.

Make Your Employee Monitoring Future-Proof

Lastly, keep in mind to future-proof your employee monitoring strategy. You can do so by regularly reviewing data protection laws, adapting to new market norms, and integrating ethical AI-driven monitoring solutions (AI tools will help you save a lot of time on analysis and gathering necessary information).

Additionally, opt for flexible and scalable monitoring tools that can grow along with your business. Important features to look for include:

A cloud-based platform that can be accessed from anywhere 24/7
Customizable dashboards (adjusted to different departments and roles)
Intuitive analytics and reporting features

Fingers Crossed for the Success of Your Communication Strategy for Employee Monitoring

Clear communication is a sine qua non-requirement for successful employee monitoring. Follow the best practices outlined in this article to improve your monitoring and communication around it. And if you’re looking for a flexible monitoring tool that works across various industries, we’re here for you.

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Sources:

https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-right-way-to-monitor-your-employee-productivity

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230127-how-worker-surveillance-is-backfiring-on-employers

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01492063211053224

https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/intrusive-worker-surveillance-tech-risks-spiralling-out-control-without-stronger-regulation

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Ola Rybacka Product Marketer and Content Specialist at TimeCamp. Remote worker advocate; has been working from home for 10+ years so far. Knows TimeCamp far and wide and does her best to translate the technical jargon into reader-friendly English to help users gain better understanding of our time tracker. Feels best in writing, but is also open for creating short video explainers. Privately, passionate about any form of Japanese culture and has been learning 日本語 for 4 years so far to devour animes and mangas in their native language.

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Your Guide To Developing a Transparent Communication Strategy For Employee Monitoring