Readit NewsGenerally, it's up to you to trust your employees or to use such or other methods of control. The most easy and legal way: count finished tasks. If there are not enough tasks done, get rid of. No need to think whether the employee is to dumb, lazy, cheating.. But aggregation across all tools and services is kind of control that an employer should be ashamed of. No trust, bad employer.
Europe is not the center of the world. It may be different in other countries. Would also like to hear what guys from such countries say about such levels of control :)
Companies are legally and morally entitled to monitor communications of their staff on the company's resources. Even so, we're not actually reading the internal messages, just taking metadata. The concerns aren't primarily around privacy, but rather compliance and security, which we'd need to officially demonstrate (ISO, SOC2) for orgs to implement the solution.
While I do trust the core team we have now, there are always people who will take advantage of you, as they did in our case. I have no love for them and I can't be rid of them quickly enough.
Finally, I want to push people to perform at their best. This does mean working longer, but I don't want to push people already at their limit, it's demoralising and risks burning them out.
While I may sound somewhat abrasive, after 10 years of running companies, I believe the industry needs to stop pretending. We're not a family, we're a sports team, and underperformers need to gooo.
I have seen similar results, in capabilities and revenues (income). I advocate for it at places I contract, but, unfortunately, many never adopt and realize the long term gains.
So I would say, to answer your question, self/skill/career development has been the 20% with the best ROI
Maybe, somewhat to the opposite side (and morbidly), I have pondered as I make choices with my time, "is this something, when I'm on my death bed, that I will wish I spent more or less time doing?" So I stopped watching video based entertainment (tv, movies, Netflix, et al) and that may actually be far more significant of the choices, as it gave me the time to use for self improvement. Not sure where I'm going with this, food for thought anyhow.
Oh, that hit deep: "is this something, when I'm on my death bed, that I will wish I spent more or less time doing?
I'm going to implement that into my life outside work.
website-> www.parceltracker.com