From this article you will learn: what is control of employees, what tasks it solves, what happens if you do not control subordinates, what is dangerous micromanagement and what the 7 basic principles of modern personnel control.
The main task of any manager is formulated very simply: it is necessary to make the company work effectively. How do you solve it? Through work with personnel: your business is all about the people who work in it. Let’s talk about how a manager controls his employees, and let’s start with the key question:
Is it Necessary to Control Workers at All?
Agile, Scrum and other methodologies of work organization, which depart from the traditional hierarchy of management in favor of horizontally oriented systems, are now in vogue. These are great approaches, but one of the key mistakes of modern management is related to their popularity.
The 10th principle of the Agile manifesto – the main document revealing the ideas of the methodology – says: “Self-organization and self-control of the project team. It is this point that many managers, who are just starting to work with agile systems, perceive as “there is no need to control their employees at all”.
In fact, of course, this is not the case. Self-control in this case is the key word, and the task of the manager becomes to create opportunities for the unproblematic implementation of this self-control by his employees. In addition, the formation of motivation (9th principle of the same manifesto) and close daily communication of performers with the customer (8th principle) are also varieties of control, albeit unobvious.
So you have to control your employees in any case, even with the most flexible approach. But if you work with traditional approaches, control becomes the main management tool.
What Happens if You Don’t Control Your Subordinates?
In fact, nothing good can come of it. The following consequences can occur:
Employees will stop working
It is in the nature of any person to “save calories” – if you can do something without actually doing it, you really want skip. So as soon as a manager stops keeping his hand on the pulse, problems start brewing within the company: people begin to procrastinate and work suffers.
Of course, there are always highly motivated employees who work perfectly well without any external control – the problem is that they are not all 100% of your staff. There is a simple principle at work: if you are distracted from controlling your people, you lose efficiency.
You won’t notice people who fail
Procrastination is the most well-known, but by no means the only problem arising from a lack of control. The second difficulty you are bound to encounter is a poor understanding of the capabilities of your specialists.
Typical situations:
- You hired a person who performed well in the interview. He started real tasks and it turns out that the employee is not pulling it off – you need to upgrade your qualifications;
- You have promoted an employee (or given him a more complex project than usual) and he is not coping with his new responsibilities;
- The employee has always worked well, but now something has happened in his life and the quality/productivity of his work has dropped.
Without control directly over your people, you will only notice all these problems at the stage of the consequences: a thwarted project, a product with defects, etc.
You won’t notice executives who fail
The usual vertical of control: director – department heads – subordinates. Often in this vertical, the top manager knows about employees only what the middle managers tell him: from reports, office memos, etc.
The problem in this case is obvious, the head of the department can:
- Something deliberately withheld, so that the numbers of his department looked good, and himself receive a bonus;
- Fire or cause to be fired employees who are useful to the company without objective reasons;
- Something to overlook – simply through negligence or lack of qualifications in management activities.
The ability to get information about employees, not through an intermediate link, but through a well-functioning system of personnel monitoring insures you against such problems.
How Exactly Does Control Solve These Problems?
Properly organized control of employees is:
- Informed. You will be aware of each of your workers: How well is he or she doing in his or her job? Can you recommend the employee for promotion or a management position? Is he or she sabotaging company activities (simply through negligence – for example, procrastination – or with malicious intent)?
- Motivation. Control is a guarantee that the success of your employees will not go unnoticed. By paying attention to the achievements of company employees, you increase their loyalty to the organization and create a desire to work at maximum efficiency;
- Discipline. The very fact that the manager constantly keeps his hand on the pulse is a powerful incentive. Employees must realize that the quality of their work directly affects the results they will receive: either it will be a bonus or some negative consequences;
However, it is important to understand that all of these benefits come only from properly organized control.
Control of Remote Employees
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made the issue of employee control more acute than ever. Many teams were moved to remote work, so managers had to urgently learn new control tools
4 mistakes managers make when controlling their employees
Punitive Surveillance
It is also a “stick without a carrot”: the manager focuses on the mistakes and shortcomings of his subordinates, ignoring their successes. Unfortunately, such a system of material incentives is built in many organizations:
This is a very pernicious approach, which destroys all motivation of employees: your people will begin to hate the company, sabotaging its development, and will change jobs at the first opportunity.
Micromanagement
If the boss controls literally every step, nothing good will come of it. An employee opens an a site from friend link and gets a call from his supervisor: “Look at this document, please.
Even if you use micromanagement fairly, rewarding people for success, living under constant surveillance is very tiring – we even conducted a relevant experiment. Your employees won’t be able to relax, won’t be able to recover their resources between tasks (e.g. over a cup of coffee), and eventually will simply burn out. Constant pressure does not lead to anything good.
Asymmetric control
Everyone hate favoritism, and even more to be the scapegoat. A manager must always remain objective and impartial, but we are all human: without an outsider’s perspective, it can be very difficult to avoid personal likes and dislikes.
If you don’t pay attention to this point, you will quickly discover that not all employees in your company are equal before management. You reward someone with great pleasure and are willing to forgive him or her minor blunders, while you punish other employees harshly for the same little things.
Control for control’s sake
And the last mistake is perhaps the most key: you must always remember what you are doing all this for. Every action of the leader must be aimed at achieving the main goals:
- Increasing the profitability of the company;
- Increasing the attractiveness of the organization on the market;
- Business development, etc.
You don’t have a goal of just controlling people in a “because I can” format: when you take an action against an employee – observation, encouragement, reprimand . So before you do anything, be sure to stop for a second and think: why? What will it do for the company?
Modern control tools give you all the information you need to effectively manage your employees, all you have to do is use this data intelligently. “Do no harm” is your basic principle.
7 principles of competent employee monitoring
Drawing on the knowledge of how not to do things, we can formulate the basic principles of effective personnel control.
1) Transparency
Each of your employees should know the following things:
- The very fact of exercising control;
- The tools used to solve this problem;
- Key indicators to evaluate performance;
- Consequences arising from the results of the control (bonuses/penalties).
In other words, you need clear regulations – regulations on the control of employees’ activities, which will spell out all the relevant points. Pay maximum attention to the development of this document: you must ensure that each employee fully understands the conditions of his work.
2) Predictability
It’s simple: follow the regulations. Once you have established a system of control over your staff, stick to it – it will help create a sense of stability and safety, which is essential for effective work. Nothing is as annoying as a self-promoting boss: that’s why you prescribe the rules of the game and follow them yourself.
This does not mean that the schedule cannot be added or changed from time to time, just try not to do it too often. Pay more attention to planning.
3) Objectivity
The rules are the same for everyone, one way or another. You must remain impartial, it is the only way to get real respect from your subordinates. We recommend to remember that a person is always subjective, and to use independent means of control – for example, modules of automatic data collection on the work at computers and analyzing the received information. The more control you automate, the better the whole system will work.
4) Invisibility
Good control is like air: it is everywhere, but no one notices it. You must be aware of your subordinates’ every move, but any interventions into the work processes are made by the manager either according to a pre-approved plan (at weekly briefings, for example) or in a very urgent situation.
5) Effectiveness
Data about employees alone does not give you anything, you have to work with them: identify problem areas and think of actions to eliminate them. Identify promising specialists and help them discover their potential. And so on. Don’t just “punish here, reward there,” but look more broadly, so you can get the most out of monitoring your employees.
6) Continuity
Once you start controlling your employees, always control them. If you don’t do that, the whole well-established system will quickly break down. That, by the way, is why the next item on our list is so important.
7) Effectiveness
Supervising employees is one of the main tasks of any manager, but it is by no means the only one. You need to organize the surveillance system itself in such a way that with a minimum waste of your time and effort you get maximum results. And this leads us to the need to automate the processes of control and management.
Automating employee control
All office employees now work at computers, which means that you only need to organize the collection of data on what they do at their PCs. Automated timekeeping systems – such as Monitask employee monitoring software – help with this. It:
- Keeps track of all activity at your computer:
- Start and end times;
- Open applications;
- Time spent in each app.
- Automatically generates reports – both for the entire company and with details to each individual employee – analyzes the productivity of specialists, forms the necessary to work with the data graphs;
- Provides employees with access to statistics so they can monitor themselves without a supervisor, can send notifications and reminders.
The advantages of such solutions:
- collects complete data on each employee and presents it to you in a convenient format: all information is available in one click;
- control is one hundred percent objective – it will be easy for you to justify any of your decisions;
- With the right setup, you can build a system in which employees control themselves with help, and you will only have to exercise “control over control”.
That is, such a software saves a huge amount of time, helps create a comprehensive and unbiased system of control over personnel – this is exactly what you need.
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