How to Reveal a Toxic Employee with CleverControl

A team's success is based on each employee's accountability, efficiency, cooperation and a delicate balance of personalities and behaviours. A single toxic employee can lead to losing customers and have a detrimental effect on the team's morale, the company's reputation and the business's success. Detecting a toxic employee may not be easy, but monitoring with CleverControl will make building a healthy work environment less complicated.

An advertising agency implemented CleverControl to monitor their staff's productivity and look for the possible hidden potential. One of their departments was showing satisfactory results, but the executives were sure the team could perform better. First, they needed to find any possible bottlenecks, which is why CleverControl was implemented. In addition to the default recording options, the software was set to make additional screenshots of chats and sound recordings from the computers' microphones. The management presumed that the employees spent much time on unproductive activities, such as social networks or chatting with colleagues, which prevented them from doing their best at work.

Monitoring showed surprising results - Cecile, one of the employees, unintentionally held up the whole department's work. The managers knew that Cecile was a complainer and a notorious gossip. But they did not suspect her behaviour impacted work in the department so negatively.

The problem was that Cecile's continuous grumbles and slanders distracted her colleagues and did not let them focus on their tasks. Cecile would work for 20-30 minutes, then start whining about the cold weather, traffic jams, bitter coffee in the vending machine or the creaky chair.

When she did not complain, she gossipped. CleverControl's sound recordings proved that Cecile would start a chat every so often. Of course, it distracted other employees in the room from their work, and in most cases, they would have to join the conversation. When they did not and asked her to be quiet, she would take offence and instead message one of her work buddies to complain about her 'rude' co-workers. When the managers compared logs of Cecile's colleagues' activity, they found that employees could not focus on work for another 15-20 minutes after such distractions. They could get back to work just by the time Cecile had another complaint to share.

The manager temporarily moved Cecile's workplace to another room to prove his observations. CleverControl demonstrated an immediate increase in her colleagues' productive activity. KPIs also showed that those employees performed better now. Later, the colleagues confessed to HR that they could not work in such an environment and were annoyed by Cecile's constant chatting.

As for Cecile, the manager had an explanatory conversation with Cecile. Now she is under the manager's special monitoring with weekly reports of the results of her work.

• Sound Recording

  Recordings helped the management to reveal the cause of distractions and the department's underperformance.
• Social media monitoring

  Monitoring employees' social media at work revealed that they did not waste time there. One of the employees' messages were the source of distractions.
• Event log

  Events in the activity logs demonstrated that the employees had difficulties focusing on work because of the chatty employee.