How to Handle Employees Circumventing the System

As a Traffic Manager, your most critical role is to ensure all employees within the office are working together seamlessly with no miscommunications or missed deadlines. Therefore, relying on workflow software is the bedrock of your management foundation, ensuring you’re able to monitor every interaction, communication, project assignment, and so forth.

As a result, you need all employees to be compliant with system use. But, as we know, it’s not always easy to make people do things they don’t want to do. Chances are, you manage a few employees that try to override the software from time to time. How are you to handle this discrepancy?

Here are our tips:

  1. Show the Convenience: Humans are lazy, which is why you need to demonstrate the convenience of your workflow software. Many times, employees are simply unable to figure out how to leverage the software in a compatible way with their workday and, instead of admitting that shortcoming, just bypass it altogether. Sit down with them and show them how easy it is to automate certain tasks, while completing others quicker than ever before. We end up procrastinating, commonly, because we simply don’t know how to do the task at hand.
  2. Provide an Intro Class: If you’re subjecting new employees to your workflow software without any on-boarding process, how are they to know anything about its functionalities? It’s in your best interest to put together a quick virtual class or tour they can take, outlining everything they need to know. You can even host this class yourself, once per month, for people who feel like they need to brush up on their understanding.
  3. Provide an Incentive: Humans respond well to incentives, which is why you should create an incentive that encourages collaboration within the software. One easy way is to create a competition between employees; for example, rewarding those who most frequently log their time. Come up with some kind of metric system, and reward one person at the end of each month.
  4. Communicate Your Expectations: Lastly, have you really taken the time to underline how important it is that your employees use the software? If they never really received that message, how are they to know? Send around email updates and be frank with your employees. You owe them honest transparency if you want them to really make a change.

CurrentTrack®

Managing employees and changing their habits can be a frustrating requirement, no doubt. That’s why we provide you with a comprehensive workflow management solution that will take care of everything from document organization to time tracking.