Employee Monitoring Trends for 2021

A recent Gartner blog post outlined workplace trends expected in 2021: one of which being that organizations will expand their efforts to gauge their remote workforce’s effectiveness. Notably, Gartner noticed an increase in searches for “employee monitoring” and “productivity” a few months into the pandemic as organizations started to question their lack of direct employee oversight.

The pandemic served as a natural segue into these conversations on employee productivity—especially as a lack of oversight into employee created content can result in compliance issues for organizations. However, many of these companies ran into an absence of baseline productivity with which to compare, as most organizations had not previously instilled any analytics into their unstructured, employee data. That said, Gartner predicts that trends in “observable work” and overall productivity and feedback analytics will continue to flourish in 2021.

This trend is, in part, due to organizations realizing that their lack of basic employee monitoring for compliance and productivity was also an issue prior to COVID-19. In fact, over 80% of organizations’ data is dark—unused and unanalyzed information—of which the majority is employee created, unstructured data like emails, messages, and files. Turning this dark data light, organizations are seeking to leverage this information for insights into their workforce.

Notably, early yet powerful use cases of unstructured analytics have allowed organizations to tap into their employee created content, metadata, and networks to answer questions that strike to the heart of efficiency:

• How is the workforce performing while remote?
• Which employees have established relationships with clients?
• Who are key employees, the “same ten people?”

and compliance:

• Has anyone deleted, moved, or accessed sensitive data in mass?
• Has there been any extreme negative corporate sentiment expressed in messages?

To meet the needs suggested by Gartner, ZL Tech offers compliance management software and file management solutions.

ZL Compliance Manager

If employee monitoring is wanted to ensure compliance across the increasingly less visible workforce, ZL Compliance Manager is an ideal solution. Ensuring SEC 17a-4, FINRA, and other industry-specific regulatory compliance, ZL Compliance Manager sets up a systematic review process for organizations. With a customizable policy engine that uses keywords, phrases, wildcards, pattern recognition, inclusion/exclusion, and more rules, users can uniquely configure what triggers messages for review. Additionally, ZL Compliance Manager leverages advanced sampling to effectively monitor mass volumes of emails and further reduces review time by utilizing echo reduction technology, highlighting triggered phrases, and applying other review functions. All of which result in a seamless review process for optimal compliance and employee monitoring.

ZL File Analysis and Management

For organizations seeking to derive insights from their monitored, employee created data, ZL File Analysis and Management allows users to analyze their dark data in-place. With complete analysis of documents, both content and metadata, users can dig deeper than the superficial to better comprehend and visualize their workforce. Moreover, leveraging BigDB technology and an analytics dashboard that adapts on-the-fly, users can analyze data at the document, dataset, folder, project, or enterprise level. By operating in-place, ZL File Analysis and Management removes the heavy burden of scrubbing, copying, and exporting data, allowing users to glean insights quicker than external platforms.

These technologies address and solve Gartner’s prediction for increased “observable work” in 2021. Notably, employee monitoring does not necessarily require manual oversight if an organization leverages review and analytics functions to garner insights into employee compliance and efficiency.

analytics covid-19 Employee Monitoring Gartner

A graduate from Kalamazoo College, Martin Hansknecht serves as a marketing associate for ZL Tech. He gets his Midwestern charm from growing up in the mitten of Michigan, his East Coast work ethic from his time spent in NY and D.C., and his European fashion from years living in England, Germany, and Hungary. Now he is looking forward to absorbing that innovative West Coast mindset!