🔝 Pros and Cons of Productivity Tracking Apps for Your Team

Productivity monitoring has been in vogue since the onset of Covid, and has grown in popularity ever since. Some even suggest productivity monitoring apps are now an essential tool for business.

Is this a surprise? Perhaps not—especially when we consider the increasing shift to remote and hybrid working setups in the last half decade. This shift, while controversial, has made the need for accountability around work hours and productivity a top priority, which is exactly where employee monitoring software fits in.

But with Verified Market Research projecting the global productivity tracking software market to reach USD 12.3 Billion by 2030, it’s worth asking: What are the pros and cons of productivity monitoring apps exactly? In what follows, we will answer this question—but first, let’s get to grips with what productivity monitoring software and tracking is.

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What is Productivity Monitoring and Tracking?

Put simply, productivity monitoring software can help a company and its teams to locate ways of improving efficiency by analyzing day-to-day work activities. It equips leaders with valuable workforce analytics around employee working patterns: how they work, when they work, and the tools they use. This is great news for the company and its teams, who can use this information to:

Improve business processes
Improve company workflow efficiency
Reduce employee burnout and inefficiency
Review employee responsibilities and tools usage
Identifying support and guidance that pre-empts employee burnout

Let’s now examine productivity monitoring apps—in particular, their benefits and drawbacks.

What are the Benefits of Productivity Monitoring Apps?

Employee monitoring apps are tools used across company devices to monitor computer activity. They produce workforce analytics that help streamline time and resource use, and combat the reported daily loss of USD 7.4 Billion due to unrecorded work activities. Below are 5 core benefits of productivity monitoring apps.

1. Does Employee Monitoring Software Improve Time Management?

Be honest—how often do you go off track when you are at work? It’s easily done, and that’s precisely what makes application monitoring so great: it helps companies and individual employees automatically track how they are spending time, offering actionable advice around time management.

This includes isolating time spent on unproductive activities, such as overly lengthy or frequent meetings, and redistributing the time to productive tasks that move the needle.

Employees spend an average of 2.9 hours of an 8-hour workday on non-work activities like social media or personal tasks.

By eliminating this wasted time, these apps promise a smooth transition that enables most employers to free up extra hours that boost workplace productivity and employee engagement, benefiting both employees and their bosses.

2. Why Does Time Tracking Enhance Employee Productivity and Efficiency?

Besides helping you shift your focus from time-wasting activities to more important tasks, employee monitoring and productivity apps help you to cut down on idle time.

Whether you work remotely or as part of a team, tools like TimeCamp detect periods of inactivity or non-work-related activity, prompting users to get back on track. They provide custom reports on big-picture trends around workplace efficiency and employee performance, helping business leaders and employees plug productivity gaps. In addition, productivity monitoring provides objective measurements that can support employee coaching and recognition.

The net effect? Greater overall workplace efficiency and enhanced billing accuracy, resulting in 83.4% of TimeCamp users reporting surges in profits.

3. How Do Employee Monitoring Solutions Help Project Management?

Another key benefit of productivity monitoring apps is their ability to streamline project management by helping leaders with project scheduling, meeting deadlines consistently, and resource allocation. When it comes to project management, these apps are great for:

Project phase productivity tracking
Billing and invoicing clients
Team accountability
Project budgeting
Cost estimation

Most employee monitoring apps integrate with popular platforms such as Asana, Jira, or Slack. TimeCamp goes even further with features including:

Proof of Work, which enables managers, clients, and employees with monitoring goals by proving tasks are being performed within tracked hours by screenshots and other means.
Geofencing, which uses GPS tracking to provide physical location-based attendance tracking.

Finally, by tracking websites and application usage, employee monitoring software helps businesses cut unused or underused software licenses, saving on cost.

4. How Does Productivity Tracking Facilitate Data-Driven Decision Making?

Nothing is more challenging—and dangerous—than making uninformed decisions. As Inetum reports:

Data-driven decision-making, prioritizing evidence over intuition, is key to success, as emphasized by 96% of businesses.

Productivity monitoring software eliminates the problem of uninformed decision making. By monitoring employees and analyzing workplace productivity trends, they supply actionable insights that enable teams to make data-informed decisions, cutting the need for guesswork. This helps leaders identify areas of weakness across their teams, while isolating opportunities for team-wide improvement using company resources and customized employee support.

5. How Can Productivity Monitoring Apps Support Remote Employment?

Have you ever led or worked in a remote team? Then you’ll understand the importance of remote team management, especially in WFH settings. From effective communication and feedback to whole-team accountability, productivity monitoring software offers teams the flexibility and functionality to perform at their best. This is especially important when we consider the substantial productivity gains on offer with remote employment, as laid out by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By helping manage everyone’s time more effectively, employee monitoring software also facilitates a better work-life balance across teams. Who doesn’t want that?

What are the Drawbacks of Productivity Monitoring Apps?

While the benefits of employee monitoring software are hard to understate, it is also important to highlight the possible drawbacks. Below are the 4 potential drawbacks to consider.

1. Productivity Monitoring Apps: Should Employees Have Privacy Concerns?

Perhaps the biggest concern with productivity monitoring software is their potential for personal invasion. It goes without saying that regular employee monitoring can damage trust between employees and employers—and yet it’s necessary for employers to understand their employees’ user behavior analytics and patterns across the working day.

This can be discomforting for employees, who generally have have little expectation of privacy while using company equipment, and who distrust employee monitoring apps as spying devices or surveillance tools. For others, it understandably raises legal and ethical questions.

an infographic illustrating the signs of ethical user activity monitoring for an article describing the pros and cons of productivity tracking apps

But while automated employee monitoring methods like TimeCamp monitor user activity, they do so ethically by:

Avoiding video surveillance
Forbidding email monitoring
Complying with GDPR guidelines
Not tracking sensitive information
Avoiding other questionable practices

TimeCamp cares deeply about keeping its users’ information secure and is certified for ISO27001. Not only do we stand firmly behind the California Privacy Rights Act, which safeguards sensitive employee information, but we strictly prohibit practices like tracking keystrokes (also known as keystroke logging) as part of its employee monitoring.

2. Do Productivity Tracking Tools Lower Employee Morale?

Related to privacy concerns above is the potential for employee productivity monitoring software to negatively affect performance and morale. And, let’s face it—the belief that you have to perform all the time at work may cause employees stress and anxiety. This, in turn, could potentially reduce productivity, morale, and job satisfaction—all of which increases the likelihood of employee burnout.

But the truth is these concerns are more likely connected with the culture of a workplace than they are to employee monitoring software, which is simply there to help people stay productive. Additionally, studies reflect that managing your time more effectively—a direct result of properly-implemented monitoring software—alleviates stress, anxiety, and depression.

For evidence that TimeCamp consistently improves company and employee productivity levels, view our productivity and profitability use cases.

3. Does Monitoring Software Prioritise Quantity Over Quality?

Another danger related to the pressure some may feel from time tracking is producing work that prioritises quantity over quality. For strategic or creative work, this danger could prove costly. It also invites the question of how we measure output for this kind of work. Yet this danger is not supported by the facts, with TimeCamp users across the board reporting an average 15.8% increase in productive hours since using the app.

4. What are the Technical Limitations of Employee Monitoring Software?

No doubt there are some among you thinking, “I bet I can game a productivity tracking system.” And it’s true: there are ways of ‘gaming’ time trackers at work. But proper implementation and oversight of these apps reduces this likelihood.

Productivity tracking apps have also been accused of other limitations too, such as relying overly on software metrics, inaccurate information, and being one-size-fits-all. While there may be some truth to these charges, our track record at TimeCamp shows we have improved reliability for 86.9% of users who tracked time before in other ways. We also conduct thorough training for management teams adopting our software, along with automatic onboarding for teams—all of which makes for a better user experience and employee buy-in.

What are the Best Practices for Using Employee Monitoring Apps?

Having weighed the pros and cons of productivity tracking software, let’s establish what the best practices are for company use, so you can get the balance right.

an infographic listing best practices of using productivity monitoring apps for an article about pros and cons of productivity tracking

1. Aim for Transparent Communication

Even the most sophisticated of employee productivity tracking software with the best user-friendly interfaces require a company to explain to its employees how the software works. Failure to do so will ultimately limit the productivity gains on offer with these apps.

Employees should also be told which information these apps collect and which they do not. Reassuring employees that their sensitive data is not being captured is essential to helping employees feel protected and for employee buy-in of the software. As Simon Watson, Global Head of Innovation at Kinly, states: “If people understand why they’re being monitored and it’s clearly communicated that this is for their wellbeing and a better work experience, there shouldn’t be too much of an issue.”

As part of TimeCamp’s dedicated onboarding process, we explain to you how best to communicate these matters with your team. Why not trial TimeCamp free and explore its benefits yourself?

2. Focus on Outcomes, Not Just Activity

While monitoring employee activity, and monitoring employee productivity, are great ways of improving wider workplace efficiency, they are just one piece of the puzzle. If a company is determined to track employee productivity and improve its efficiency, it should consult a range of indicators beyond raw tracking metrics.

In particular, it should consider qualitative indicators that reflect actual business impact, such as:

Project completion rates
Innovation metrics
Customer reviews
Revenue growth
Staff wellbeing

Balancing the quantitative with the qualitative will help your company maintain a sense of the bigger picture without being overly focused on instrumental metrics. See this article on time tracking KPIs for more information.

3. Insist on Ethical Data Management

Managing information ethically is critical for any company implementing productivity monitoring software and wanting to avoid data breaches caused by insider threats. Key here is establishing an employment monitoring policy that outlines information access, internet usage, storage, and user protocols, as well as putting in place mechanisms around information anonymization and protection.

Besides communicating these policies to staff and informing employees that they are being monitored (even in states whose local laws do not require this), your company should comply with laws surrounding information protection. These include:

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.
US federal laws such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 governing workplace privacy and employee monitoring regulations.
State-specific regulations in the USA, such as the California Compliance Privacy Act (CCPA). Note too that some states require organisations to obtain employee consent before implementing monitoring programs (we recommend doing this as a matter of course).

As a rule of thumb, aim to minimize sensitive information collection, ensuring all collected information is maintained securely. This will help you get the most out of employee productivity monitoring tools while respecting employee data privacy rights.

As part of onboarding, TimeCamp’s customer success managers provide comprehensive instruction on tracking productivity and managing information ethically, benefiting everyone from team leaders to new employees.

4. Make Sure to Balance Tracking with Trust

Ultimately, for employee productivity monitoring to work, you need employee trust. That’s why it’s important to select tools that provide visibility without constant oversight.

Building trust also depends on regular check-ins with your team to understand their experience of productivity monitoring software, as well as involving them in decision making around tracking policies where appropriate. So long as you communicate the benefits of this tech to employees, and it’s clear the goal is outcomes and not micromanagement—a process TimeCamp helps you with—there is every reason to expect their buy-in.

How Does Productivity Tracking Help in Remote and Hybrid Work Environments?

Having addressed the pros, cons, and best practices of productivity monitoring software above, that brings us back to remote and hybrid team working.

In order to maximise the notable productive benefits of remote and hybrid work, it is essential to implement productivity monitoring correctly. Thankfully, TimeCamp helps remote employees to log hours, track their progress, and keep managers informed about remote employee time use, no matter where they are working. For your company, this means better:

Budgeting
Transparency
Accountability
Client invoicing
Resource allocation
Performance insights
Project management

Plus, with TimeCamp’s help, you will be able to establish clear targets for remote employee work backed up by proof that work is completed. Meeting your targets is much easier with tools like Targetprocess, which integrates with TimeCamp.

Conclusion

Effective implementation of time productivity apps promises a wealth of benefits to any company or team. This includes better:

Time management
Distance working
Decision making
Team support
Invoicing
Billing

Ultimately, all these benefits point in one direction only: greater productivity and profitability. With TimeCamp’s rigorous training and onboarding support, you can enjoy all these benefits with peace of mind around privacy, trust, and work quality issues. Experience TimeCamp’s benefits for free today.

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Sources

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FinancesOnline. “Time Tracking Software Statistics.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://financesonline.com/time-tracking-software-statistics/.
Inetum. “Use Data to Make Informed Decisions. Understanding the Importance of Data-Driven Decision Making.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.nearshore-it.eu/articles/data-driven-decision-making/#:~:text=Utilizing%20Data%20Visualization%20for%20Informed%20Decisions,-Businesses%20today%20have&text=Data%20visualization%20means%20showing%20complicated,making%20defined%20as%20using%20facts.
McLean Hospital. “Do You Manage Your Time Well?” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/do-you-manage-your-time-well.
Raconteur. “Employee Monitoring: How Staff Are Responding to Being Watched.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.raconteur.net/future-of-work/employee-monitoring-staff-response.
Stanford News. “Hybrid Work Is a Win-Win-Win for Companies, Workers, and the Environment.” Last modified June 2024. Accessed January 21, 2025. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-win-win-win-for-companies-workers#:~:text=Research%20led%20by%20Nicholas%20Bloom,and%20dramatically%20boosted%20retention%20rates.
The Ladders. “Remote Work Now Accounts for Nearly 15 Percent of All High-Paying Jobs.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.theladders.com/press/research-remote-work-now-accounts-for-nearly-15-of-all-high-paying-jobs.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Remote Work and Productivity: Insights from the American Time Use Survey.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productivity.htm.
Verified Market Research. “Time Tracking Software Market.” Accessed January 21, 2025. https://www.verifiedmarketresearch.com/product/time-tracking-software-market/.

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Robert Lowton Robert Lowton is the director of Lobster Copy, a strategic copywriting consultancy focused on driving business turnover through high-quality branding, lead generation, and conversion copywriting. Rob has extensive experience as a brand and content strategist, copywriter, coach, and as an international language lecturer. He lives in Norwich, England.

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What are the Pros and Cons of Using Productivity Tracking Apps for Your Team?