Holding your employees responsible for their actions is more important than you might think. If you do not promote workplace accountability it can erode trust, and tempt others to cut corners or be dishonest as they feel they can get away with it.

Unfortunately according to Gartner Research many cases of employee misconduct go unreported and unresolved. But modern digital tools could help to change that.

Types of Modern Digital Tools That Can Help

If you want to promote greater workplace accountability, you need tools that can monitor employee activities to make sure they meet expectations and comply with your policies. And it goes without saying that the perfect tool for that is employee monitoring software.

By taking advantage of the features in employee monitoring software like Controlio you can track attendance, work hours, and employee activities during that time. It can monitor app and web usage, file transfers, IM chats, emails, or even record keystrokes, screenshots, and videos – so you’ll get a complete picture of what employees are doing.

With Controlio’s data you can easily check on most forms of misconduct including whether employees are late, aren’t working sufficient hours, aren’t productive enough, or are rushing through jobs and producing poor quality results. It can even track communication issues and more severe forms of misconduct such as theft or data breaches.

Simply put, employee monitoring will give you the means to identify cases of misconduct so you don’t need to rely on guesswork or reports from other employees. Other digital tools that have monitoring or surveillance capability can do the same.

Overcoming Ethical Concerns

The biggest problem with digital tools that can monitor and surveil employees is that they do raise ethical concerns. Primarily these concerns focus on the fact that they can invade employee privacy.

It isn’t easy to overcome this issue completely, but there are ways to mitigate it. For example you can create a clear and transparent monitoring policy, obtain consent from your employees, and avoid monitoring that is too intrusive and may violate personal boundaries.

Suffice to say, you need to strike a balance between monitoring for employee misconduct so you can promote accountability – while not letting it affect your employees’ right to privacy.

The good news is that by taking steps to address these ethical concerns you’ll be showing an example of accountability. On its own that will help promote employee accountability, and build a culture that values integrity and ethical behavior.

Conclusion

All in all modern digital tools can provide the opportunity to promote employee accountability in a way that was almost impossible in the past. However these tools need to be implemented carefully and with full awareness of the ethical concerns that surround them.

Ultimately your goal should be to promote employee accountability while at the same time holding yourself accountable to use these tools in an ethical manner. If you can do that then it will help establish a company culture steeped in integrity.