How We Monitor Remote Teams without Spying (and why employees actually love it)

A few months earlier, we went fully remote with a team of 60-70 members. But, we started feeling we are spending a lot of our productive time catching up with others!

Meetings, update calls, and constant messages were eating into our focus time. We wanted to stay connected, but not at the cost of productivity.

That’s when we decided to try a smarter way for employee monitoring. One that respected privacy but still helped us stay aligned. And surprisingly, our employees loved it!

What was that? Let’s discover the rest through my experience—

“Wait….Do You Want to Spy on Us?”

The beginning of announcing the team to use an employee monitoring software was a blast!

Almost every employee rejected the idea. They even questioned us! Most of the team members started thinking this would be the end of their freedom to work. And we will judge their every click!

Well…we, the members of the management, were not ready for that outburst at first. We thought they would take it as a positive way of managing their work!

So, instead of getting them all ready to use the platform, we decided to arrange a meeting on how the app will help the entire troop to work more efficiently.

Here’s what we discussed–

• The managing team will only get access to the team members' data. So, there's no way to lose the privacy of work with colleagues.
• We won’t track their clicks. Instead, we will use the app to understand their way of working, which will be used to help the employees grow, not to spy on them.
• At the end of our sprint, we will use the data to understand what factors interrupted the employees from achieving their potential instead of judging why one did not submit a task.

Guess Who Started Asking for More Data?

After applying the new system for employee monitoring, we started sharing the data with our employees. By arranging individual meetings with employees, we shared details about their project completion insights. We analyzed the data on where their focus was getting broken, and how they could perform better.

After just a few weeks, we started noticing a real shift. The entire atmosphere changed. Employees were coming back to us, asking to see more of their data. They wanted to understand what was helping them stay focused and where they could improve.

The best part of this new implementation is that employees were seeing it as a mirror of growth!

Everyone even started setting their own productivity goals and tracking their performance. The data turned into motivation instead of feeling like pressure.

And that’s when the new idea hit my mind! I want to let the employees access their own data so that they can see and analyze what we see!

“You Want to Show Them the Data?”

When I first suggested giving employees access to their own productivity data, my boss looked at me like I had just suggested handing over company passwords.

“Wait,” he said. “You want to show them the data? The same data we use to track performance?”

He wasn’t wrong to be concerned. The idea sounded risky. What if people got defensive? What if they started comparing their numbers or questioning the process?

But I knew what the team was looking for. Instead of only getting advice from us, they needed data to refine their work patterns.

So, on a trial basis, we chose one small team to give access. And can you guess the results?

Within days, they began to fix time leaks, set personal goals, and even compete quietly but positively to improve their productivity.

That team, for the first time, achieved a higher rate of work submission than the others. Each employee's productivity rate increased, and they were happy with their achievement.

Closure

In a remote culture, you don’t have the freedom to monitor your team like in office setups. You can’t even know when one of your employees is struggling until they reach out on their own.

And that’s where we found the importance of using employee monitoring software. These solutions give you access to your employee data without making it feel like surveillance at all. You can get insights into their ability, areas of improvement, track progress, and even compare data.

These modern tools also come with some profound features like employee budgeting, which helped our remote team track expenses, manage operations efficiently, and plan projects without errors.