Fair Audits and No Favouritism: The Key to Employee Retention

Employees… they are more than just people; they are the assets of your company. One cannot deny how important a place they hold when it comes to day-to-day operations and the overall ROI of a company. 

But wait. What happens when your best soldiers leave? The company kind of collapses: suddenly, you’re on a talent hunt, time invested, energy wasted, and yet you only get someone who needs a lot of training. 

The truth is, employee retention is the heavy hitter when it comes to a company’s success nowadays. However, it is also the most difficult thing to get right. Benefits here, incentives there, and still some of them just leave. Biases and internal politics are to blame here. But how to counter them? In this guide, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore. 

Why Fairness is Significant for Employee Retention 

Wanting fairness in treatment is simple human nature. And in a workplace, where a person is known for their skillset, they need justice at all costs. That said, as an employer, managing “fair treatment” across every domain can be tiresome. 

You have to have a strong grip on merit-based treatment across all decisions, from workload distribution to performance evaluations. The difference that doing so will make everything impeccable. When employees receive such treatment, their loyalty and efforts increase, as they know this is what will get them the reward.

On the other hand, biases can create divisions and reduce motivation. Over time, employees begin to detach emotionally as they assume that the system is rigged. 

How Favouritism Shows Up in Organisations

Favouritism is like a mould infestation, always there but never visible. While you remain oblivious to its existence, it infects your whole organisation. The signs of it are quite subtle – some employees always seem to get the big, high-visibility projects. Others get promotions faster or enjoy more flexible schedules, all while equally capable teammates are left behind. 

What follows is that teams stop focusing on doing their best work and start competing for attention instead. However, favouritism doesn’t always have to be intentional. Cognitive biases can influence managers without them realising it. They may naturally favour people who:

• Think like them or share similar ideas
• Communicate in familiar ways
• Have similar backgrounds or experiences

Because these biases are mostly unconscious, you, as a leader, may not even see that they are creating an uneven playing field.

The Invisible Cost of Favouritism 

Now that we know how favouritism creeps in, it’s time to discuss what it leaves you with. It’s no exaggeration to say that favouritism can leave your organisation hollow, like a termite attack. Above all, employees are the first to take the brunt of this. Here’s how:

• The top performers of your company, when they feel overlooked or unrecognised, can quietly leave. This, in turn, costs time, energy, and resources for the new hiring cycle. 
• Favouritism can also make the unrecognised employees disengaged. As a result, both employee morale and the overall team performance take a sharp dip. 
• Trust is yet another factor that suffers at the hands of favouritism. Employees, when in a state of hopelessness, give up on trusting their employer, which makes them less loyal to the company. 
• Unequal treatment can also lead to a buildup of negative emotions within the team. Such emotions can then further lead to conflicts and internal politics. 

Setting Up Fair Audit Systems that Employees Trust 

Now, all these consequences don’t actually point to a dead end. You can always take timely measures and calm the chaos or even prevent it from happening altogether. For this purpose:

• Define Clear KPIs: By doing so, it becomes clear for everyone to know what is expected of them.
• Use Competency Frameworks: Standardised expectations enable your evaluations to be more empirical rather than subjective.
• Cross-Functional Reviews: Bring in multiple perspectives for review, including HR and other authoritative roles, to reduce bias and improve fairness.
• Transparent Communication: Share the audit process openly so employees understand how decisions are made.
• Redesign Audit Cycles: Regularly review and tweak evaluation methods to keep them relevant.
• Keep Records: Ensure that you document each decision clearly, like promotions, project assignments, etc.

The Role of Employee Tracking in Ensuring Fair Audits and Preventing Favouritism 

Everything aside, all this fuss around fairness and audits–does it even work? Let’s be real for a second. We all know how even the best of intentions can fall short if you don’t have clear visibility into how the workplace is actually operating. That’s where employee productivity monitoring software can help a great deal. 

When it comes to having an oversight of employee activities, it’s basically about collecting the necessary data that can help you in carrying out fair and just assessments. The data-driven insights make it possible to establish a merit-based, transparent system across the company. 

Take TimeBee, for example. TimeBee is an employee productivity monitoring software that provides managers with a clear picture of productivity, engagement, progress, and workload distribution. When you have this level of insight, favouritism, whether conscious or unconscious, becomes a far-fetched idea. 

Here’s what makes employee tracking with TimeBee so powerful:

• Time Tracking: Punctuality and time investment are the pursuits of a dedicated employee, and with TimeBee’s time tracking feature, you can spot these assets easily. With this feature, TimeBee lets you clearly see the total logged hours by an employee, including their clock-in and clock-out times. 
• Activity Monitoring: Only investing sufficient time in a workplace doesn’t suffice. When it comes to actual work, many can get derailed from their duties and hooked to anything but work. TimeBee allows you to see which apps and sites an employee has accessed during work hours to clearly know if they have actually been working. 
• Productivity Tracking: The tracked websites and apps are further categorised as productive, unproductive, or neutral, as per the nature of one's work. TimeBee automatically generates productivity reports based on this data, so you can have a quick view of employee performance.
• Overtime Tracking: If an employee puts in extra time and effort, they deserve to be recognised. This is where the overtime tracking feature comes in quite handy. 
• Screen Monitoring: TimeBee takes periodic screenshots of an employee’s ongoing activities. This allows you, as an employer, to promote transparency and accountability across your workspace.
• Projects and Tasks: A quick glance at projects and tasks can give you an idea about workload distribution, so you can balance things out when needed. 
• Project Progress: With progress reports at hand, you can see where each team stands and which one deserves the hard-earned recognition. 

Training Managers to Create a Transparent Culture 

Yet again, the problem remains the same: even the best systems fail if managers are not equipped enough to lead fairly. That’s why training programs are crucial, as they help managers spot and remove biases and make fair decisions. 

When regular training sessions are conducted, fair treatment and the skills that are needed to make the culture transparent become second nature. As a result of these efforts, employee trust grows, and a healthier work environment is shaped. 

Focus on Psychological Safety and Trust-building 

However, if a workplace lacks an environment where employees can feel safe enough to speak, things cannot permanently stay peaceful. After all, we are all living in a time where freedom of speech and idea-sharing is advocated. So, why not promote psychological safety at your organisation as well?

When an employee feels safe enough to engage, ask questions, voice their opinion, or state their feelings, without the fear of getting backlash, ideas get shared, and growth becomes inevitable. People start trusting when they feel heard. 

Ultimately, these factors lead your workplace far from favouritism and closer to a people-centred place. Such an environment then leads you to retain employees more naturally. 

Conclusion

While seemingly subtle, favouritism’s impact on morale and trust can quietly erode your employees’ motivation over time. Small, repeated acts, like giving certain employees better projects, more recognition, or faster promotions, can create a sense of injustice that chips away at employee interest. People start questioning whether their hard work truly matters or not.

The good news, however, is that this cycle doesn’t have to keep going. By establishing clear KPIs and using employee productivity monitoring software for data-driven insights, you create a transparent, merit-based environment. As a result, your decisions will be based on solid ground and no longer influenced by personal bias.