Employee monitoring means comparing agreed tasks, deadlines and requirements with what a person has submitted. This requires a work plan, confirmation of the result, a short report on deviations and a manager who makes decisions about them. You can start with a report on what has been done and a plan for tomorrow: these show the work without watching an employee's every move.
By evening, the chat once again says “Moving it to tomorrow”. In the morning, this task was the priority. During the day, you asked for another document to be prepared urgently, then the employee received an assignment from another department. By evening, everything is listed and the person has been busy all day. But now you have to think back to remember exactly when they were supposed to finish the original work.
That is the problem. If tomorrow's plan keeps replacing today's, you lose track of how long a task has been delayed. Asking for more detailed reports adds text, but the original promise will not appear in it on its own. Time tracking software will not explain which of your requests displaced the previous one either.
The goal of employee monitoring
The goal of employee monitoring is to give the manager time to intervene while the commitment can still be met, and to show what repeatedly gets in the way of work. An employee has not received the data, has made a mistake while preparing a document, and has put a task aside for a new assignment: these are three different grounds for a decision.
I think a business owner should start with one rule: a new assignment does not silently cancel an old one. The rule also applies to the owner's own requests. If you add urgent work, the manager must say what will be pushed back and agree that choice with you. Otherwise, by evening you are assessing the employee against a plan you changed yourself without recording the change anywhere.
That gives monitoring three specific tasks:
- Notice a risk to a deadline before it passes. The report shows what data is missing, when it will be needed and who must provide it.
- Distinguish a mistake in carrying out the work from a change in priority. The first needs a review of the work; the second needs a decision on what the company is prepared to postpone.
- Confirm that the result is ready. A submitted document has a recipient and requirements against which it is accepted.
If the employee's task is to be at reception from nine in the morning, being there at that time is part of the commitment. But when preparing a calculation or a set of documents, hours at a computer provide only part of the answer. To judge whether the work is complete, the manager needs the calculation or the documents themselves.
Monitoring employees' work
Monitoring employees' work starts before the evening report. First, the manager and the person doing the work agree on what must be ready by the deadline and who will use it. “Work on the documents” does not define a result. “Prepare the shipment documents, check the details and contents, and hand them to the coordinator by 16:00” makes it possible to accept the work.
For recurring tasks, write down the requirements once. The daily plan only needs the name of the result, the deadline and a link to the requirements. New work needs a separate conversation: what the employee has been given to start with, what is missing, and which part they can finish without someone else's decision.
Completed example: six done, two promises outstanding
Suppose an employee must prepare six sets of documents for shipment: tasks A, B, C, D, E and F. During the day, the manager adds two urgent sets, G and H.
By evening, A, B, C, D, G and H have been submitted and accepted. For E, the warehouse has not confirmed the shipment contents. F has been postponed by the manager to make time for the urgent G and H. “Plan: six, done: six” looks fine, although two original commitments remain open.
The counts must be kept separate:
- Original plan: four sets out of six accepted — around 67%.
- Added work: two sets out of two accepted.
- Remaining from the original plan: one is waiting for data, one has been postponed by the manager.
The percentage here shows how far the original promises have been kept. It must not be used to judge the employee's effort: the priority change is recorded as the manager's decision. If the manager agreed to postpone F, it counts as an agreed change when assessing performance. F still remains visible in the work history: the company must remember which deadline it gave up to deal with urgent work.
Here is the employee's completed report. The task references identify the illustrative assignments, and the document links in a working report lead to real files.
Promised for today: sets A–F, hand over to the coordinator by 16:00.
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Submitted and accepted: A, B, C, D. Files attached to the tasks; the coordinator has confirmed acceptance.
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Added during the day: G and H. The manager marked them as urgent at 12:00; both sets were accepted by 16:00.
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Remaining: E — the warehouse has not confirmed the shipment contents; request sent at 11:00. F — the manager postponed it to make time for G and H; new handover tomorrow by 11:00.
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Decision needed: for E, a response from the warehouse manager is needed today by 17:00, otherwise tomorrow's shipment will still not have a complete set of documents.
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Plan for tomorrow: F — hand over by 11:00; E — put together after the warehouse confirms the contents, agree the handover deadline with the coordinator. The deadline for the warehouse's response has not yet been agreed.
That final sentence prevents another convenient way of fooling yourself: the employee does not set another department a deadline it has not agreed to. The manager receives an unresolved question and must get an answer. Simply writing “E — tomorrow” would hide the need for the other department's response.
Daily report template
You can give this template to a manager without having to design a separate form:
- Promised: the result and deadline from the previous plan.
- Submitted: the result, where to open it, who has accepted it or by what time acceptance is expected.
- Changed during the day: what was added or removed, who decided, which previous commitment was pushed back.
- Remaining: exactly what is unfinished, since which day, and why.
- Help needed: whose decision is required and by what time it would still be useful to receive it.
- Plan for tomorrow: continuing commitments and new tasks with a clear result.
The employee records the relevant changes. There is no need to copy the task's entire history into the report: keeping it accessible is enough. If no help is needed, say so. A blank line leaves the manager guessing whether the person forgot to fill it in.
An employee monitoring system
An employee monitoring system connects the plan, submission of work and the manager's response. You can set it up in the task list you already use. A separate service comes in once the work it will handle is clear.
The first decision is where the original plan is kept. It must not be replaced by a new list without a history. If a date is moved, the old date, the reason and the person who agreed to the change remain alongside it. If an assignment is cancelled, it is marked as cancelled instead of disappearing from yesterday's record.
The second decision is who accepts the result. The person doing the work marks it as submitted; the recipient confirms that it meets the requirements or returns it with a specific comment. A response of “Redo it properly” means the requirement needs to be clarified. Until acceptance, the work remains submitted but not accepted; both dates are visible so that a delay by the recipient is not counted as the employee being late.
The third decision is when the manager responds. An evening summary works for the day's results and tomorrow's plan. If today's shipment has stalled at midday, there is no point waiting for the summary. Choose a communication channel for urgent alerts in advance, and a deputy for when the manager is absent. Link the response deadline to the event: the answer is needed while there is still time to prepare the documents.
And the fourth is what to use as individual performance targets, meaning measures of the employee's work. For identical recurring tasks, the proportion accepted on time and the proportion returned for correction will work. In the document sets example, a postponement decided by the manager is recorded separately. You cannot compare the preparation of a standard document with the approval of a complex contract just by counting completed tasks: first, you need comparable types of work.
Separately, track what happens to early warnings. If an employee reported missing data in time and the manager did not respond, more frequent reports will not fix anything. The overdue request to the manager must stay on the list too.
Employee monitoring across an organisation
Employee monitoring across an organisation requires a common procedure for handing work from one department to another. Each manager still has their own tasks and measures, but waiting for someone else's response must not disappear from the shared list of commitments.
In our example, the employee sent the request to the warehouse at 11:00. That is not enough to consider the response deadline agreed. The warehouse manager must confirm who will provide details of the shipment contents and when. If there is not enough time, the managers agree on a different way to carry out the work. Only choices they do not have the authority to make go to the business owner: for example, which important order to postpone.
To put this procedure in place, the business owner only needs to give the manager of one department the following assignment:
By Thursday, use our current tasks to prepare one completed employee report and one manager's summary. Keep the original deadlines, and show my urgent assignments and the work they displaced separately. For unresolved issues, state who needs to respond, the response deadline and what to do if no response comes. You will handle the daily review; bring me choices between commitments that go beyond your authority.
Assess this work using a specific postponement: the original promise, the change, the decision and the new deadline should all be visible. If answering the question still means piecing the history together from private messages, the form needs more work. It is too early to buy another tool.
In sales, this procedure also includes promises to customers and the status of enquiries. The signals to check daily are covered separately in “Monitoring salespeople's work: what to check every day”. Here the task is broader: to preserve agreements between people, even when their work does not end in a sale.
Employee monitoring tools
Choose employee monitoring tools based on which fact is being lost. A small team can manage with a task list that keeps a history of changes, shared folders containing the results, and a short report. Recurring work needs an acceptance checklist. If the data is already in the system used for work, ask the manager to use it so the employee does not have to retype the same information in different places.
Quality checks cannot be reduced to a polished self-report. The manager compares some of the submitted work with the original requirements, including tasks that have received no complaints. For work with serious consequences, set a separate acceptance procedure: a daily summary does not replace it.
When employees send their results as voice messages or free text, bringing them into a comparable format is a separate difficulty. RENTROP has two services for tasks and reporting: AI Revizor and AI Raport. Raport turns an employee's voice message or text into a business report, calculates individual performance targets and finds deviations; Revizor breaks a goal down into tasks with checklists and checks submitted work before closing them.
The manager sets the rules described in this article. An automatically compiled report does not by itself decide which promise matters more and which can be postponed. For monitoring sales — money, speed, salespeople and channels — the company has a separate product, AI ROP. This is a different task and should not be mixed with collecting employees' daily reports.
What the business owner should be left with
The business owner needs a summary of the reasons for recurring delays and the choices they need to make. Suppose F keeps being postponed in the same way: the owner would have to decide how much urgent work the company is prepared to accept on top of the plan. Buying another monitoring tool will not make that choice.
To keep the discussion from turning into a judgement of the manager's character, base it on what they do with the warnings they receive. This is the subject of “No one is monitoring this at the moment. So what is the head of sales doing?”.
The line “Moving it to tomorrow” must retain yesterday's deadline and the person who agreed to the change. Then the company can see which commitment it postponed for another and takes responsibility for that choice. This is the point at which monitoring stops depending on whether the business owner remembers everything personally.