Monitoring Performance to Lift Employees Up, Not Bring Them Down
Remote and hybrid working has caused physical distance between employees and their managers. To compensate, some managers are micromanaging their staff at every opportunity.
Studies have shown that micromanagement has a detrimental effect on employees — the Journal of Experimental Psychology reported that employees who feel they are being micromanaged perform at a much lower level. Luckily, there are more engaging ways of using employee performance data to benefit businesses.
What is micromanaging?
A micromanager differs from a regular manager because micromanagement involves closely observing and controlling the work of team members. Going beyond an appropriate level of leadership and support, micromanagement involves excessive and often unwanted supervision of employees. Gartner defines micromanagement as “a pattern of manager behavior marked by excessive supervision and control of employees’ work and processes, as well as a limited delegation of tasks or decisions to staff.”
Micromanagement has risen in the last few years, especially since the introduction of remote and hybrid working. With fewer people in the office, many managers have questioned whether staff are actually working from home. This can mean they feel the need to check in more frequently, which eventually spirals into micromanagement.
Impact on employees
If done properly, there are a few benefits to micromanaging such as less miscommunication and supporting correct performance, particularly for new members of staff. However, the cons outweigh the pros.
One of the biggest issues with micromanaging is that it causes loss of trust between a manager and their team members. This leads to a range of other issues that can ultimately lead to lower staff retention. A survey conducted by Accountemps, found that 59 percent of employees said they’ve worked for a micromanager and, of them, 68 percent reported a decrease in morale and 55 percent claimed it hurt their productivity.
Lack of trust causes workers to feel disengaged and lowers their self worth as they begin to question whether they are capable of doing their jobs. It also prevents employees from making decisions and demonstrating their capabilities. This leads to workers feeling stressed, uncomfortable and, ultimately, performing at a much lower standard, which is detrimental to the success of a company.
Lessening the pressure
The last thing businesses want is to negatively impact their employees’ performance. At the same time, to monitor individual KPIs, it’s important to monitor productivity. So how do you strike the balance of managing, without micromanaging?
Firstly, it’s important to ensure employees have the appropriate business software to improve ease and efficiency of day-to-day tasks. This doesn’t need to be invasive productivity monitoring software.
For example, Ringover provides numerous collaboration and productivity tools for different business needs from assigning call tags, which enable agents to learn more about prospects or customers, and the transcription of calls and voicemails to eliminate manually transcribing calls, saving agents time and allowing them to focus on more valuable actions.
But what should businesses do next? Investing in software that automatically records data including call wait time, average call length and pick-up rate, and generates this information into reports, means managers can monitor specific KPIs. If the data indicates shortfalls in productivity in a certain area, then managers can make the call about how to resolve it — without needing to make their observation obvious and uncomfortable for the employee. Collecting and observing data over a long period of time can give managers the bigger picture and prevent them from analyzing every little detail about an employee’s performance.
Overall, micromanaging is counterproductive, and only in rare cases does this method work. With the help of software that can deliver insights and analytics into employee performance, managers can effectively manage, without the need to micromanage.
About the author: Renaud Charvet is CEO of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software provider Ringover, a global communications company helping businesses transform their conversations into powerful engines of growth. Their unified suite of services includes phone, video, text/SMS, chat, fax, call center and sales engagement technology.
Edited by
Erik Linask
