What Is Ongoing Monitoring? Tips, Best Practices, & More

Hiring an employee is the first step in a long-term, prosperous relationship. The longer an employee stays with your company, the more their role and professional profile evolve.

But what happens if your employee does something outside of work that could affect their performance or compliance, and you don’t hear about it? What if they get added to a healthcare exclusion list or get arrested for assault? How do you keep up with professional changes, like license expiration?

That’s what ongoing monitoring is for. So, what is ongoing monitoring? Below, we look at how it works and give you tips and tools to make it easier.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Ongoing Monitoring?
2. How Ongoing Monitoring Works
3. The Importance of Ongoing Monitoring: 6 Outcomes
4. Our Top Continuous Monitoring Process Tips
5. How Ongoing Monitoring Services Streamline Your Process

What Is Ongoing Monitoring?

Ongoing employee monitoring involves continuously tracking employee licensing, criminal history, and more. Instead of relying on a single background check at the time of hire, ongoing monitoring can alert you to red flags that appear over time.

The data you gather from ongoing monitoring allows you to immediately address any issues within your workforce — before they impact business goals. Regular monitoring reduces risks related to misconduct, regulatory violations, or noncompliance.

What Do Employers Typically Monitor?

As an employer, you’ll want to monitor anything that could indicate potential performance issues for your employees. You’ll want to screen financial records, criminal records, driving history, licensing, and more. You can even periodically do drug testing or run another identity verification check.

You’ll also need alerts related to your specific industry. For example, in the trucking industry, you can receive alerts about moving violations. For healthcare, you can be alerted to things like license expirations. And for financial institutions, you’ll hear about any liens making your employee susceptible to fraud or bribery.

What Is the Purpose?

Ongoing monitoring ensures you’re well-informed about each employee’s credentials and background. You can be alerted almost instantly when something could affect your employee’s performance, and you can address it immediately.

Let’s say your truck driver had their license revoked. Without ongoing monitoring, you may not hear about it for months. During that time, your driver could still be out on the road and potentially get another violation or cause an accident. If that happens, your company could be liable for penalties and damages due to having an unlicensed driver.

Are There Privacy or Surveillance Concerns?

As with regular background checks, you must balance monitoring with employee privacy rights. Employees have the right to reasonable privacy and must consent to background checks. Local, state, and federal regulations, as well as industry regulations, require you to inform employees about monitoring practices.

Compiling the data you receive also raises privacy concerns. You should ensure you follow any regulations regarding the storage of personal information. Using data strictly for business purposes and securely storing employee information mitigates privacy concerns and maintains trust.

How Ongoing Monitoring Works

The idea behind ongoing monitoring is to keep track of your employees’ backgrounds in real-time. This way, you don’t have to do manual research, which is time-consuming and vulnerable to inaccurate, outdated information. So, what is ongoing monitoring, and what’s involved?

Data Collection

You or your trusted service provider will be gathering data from many different sources:

• • • • County, state, and federal records
      • State agencies or licensing associations
      • Financial institutions
      • And more

If you’re screening employees yourself, you’ll need to reach out to each of these institutions individually, which is a time-consuming process. You’d never be able to do this daily, let alone every few hours.

This is where a background check service provider like Cisive comes in handy. It can continuously run checks so that you don’t have to.

Automated Tracking

With a service provider like Cisive, all screening is automated. Just determine which characteristics you’d like to track, and Cisive will run the screen and provide you with a detailed report.

Automation helps reduce errors from transcribing or having hand-written documents that are hard to read. It also avoids time delays by individuals with a lot on their plates.

Regular Screening Cadence

You’ll want to review monitoring data consistently to identify concerns. Regular screening helps you detect problems early and take action. Some businesses review data daily, while others do it weekly or monthly. The frequency depends on company needs, industry standards, and security risks.

Reviewing data too often may be overwhelming, while checking too rarely may allow problems to go unnoticed. A clear schedule keeps things balanced and efficient.

Issue Flagging & Risk Identification

Monitoring tools can flag issues and risk factors like problematic financial situations, driving violations, or license expirations. With these, you can spot problems before they become bigger issues.

Alerts help you focus on serious issues that need to be addressed immediately. This lets you take a proactive approach. Once flagged, you can investigate, provide feedback, or take corrective action, all while keeping your company free from liability.

Documentation & Reporting on Findings

Be sure to keep records of monitoring results for accountability and legal protection. Clear documentation from screenings helps with audits and compliance, while the results can help you defend any disciplinary actions taken.

Remember, too, that you will need to comply with any regulations regarding the collection of private data. Follow all legal guidelines for storing and disposing of these documents.

The Importance of Ongoing Monitoring: 6 Outcomes

You want to make sure that each employee is providing safe, professional work for your clients. Here are a few reasons that ongoing monitoring can help you achieve that.

1. Ensure Continuous Compliance

Ongoing monitoring of employees lets you confirm that every person in your business is up to date with licenses and other requirements for their role. By ensuring everyone is fully qualified, you stay compliant while providing the best work possible for your clients.

A steady screening process also helps you comply with industry, state, and federal regulations regarding background checks. Many industries are required to run periodic checks, often annually, on employees and to address any issues found. With continuous monitoring, you don’t need to mark your calendar for the next check.

2. Enhance Business Performance & Profitability

When employees have financial red flags, recent assaults, or other severe offenses, your business is at risk.

Let’s say you have a finance worker who has just had a lien put on their house. This means, primarily, that this employee is under a huge amount of stress. Maybe they are missing deadlines and doing tasks incorrectly that other employees need to handle. This also puts them at risk of fraud or bribery, and it could make you non-compliant.

Being aware of the situation lets you address it quickly and efficiently. By following compliance guidelines, you can provide better client service and increase your efficiency and profitability.

3. Improve Operational Efficiency

Doing manual background checks periodically is a time-consuming and tedious process. It can take forever to send out requests and get the information back.

Using ongoing monitoring services frees up time for your staff to handle other, more important tasks. With fast reports and high accuracy, services like Cisive handle the checks, so you don’t have to.

4. Build Trust & Facilitate Staff Career Development

When employees consent to ongoing monitoring, they know their fellow workers are also consenting. This can create strong trust amongst their group. It removes the opportunity for whispers and rumors to dominate the day.

The topic of monitoring also provides a great opportunity to develop your staff. You can hold training on topics like industry compliance, fraud detection, and how to spot money laundering. Sharing these topics can help them be more aware of potential issues within their teams.

5. Maintain Your Organization’s Reputation

As a company executive, you must protect your company’s image and credibility. Monitoring helps you prevent noncompliance, fraud, customer complaints, and negative press.

When employees have valid licensure and no recent criminal history, your business stays compliant and trustworthy. A strong reputation leads to better customer relationships and more business opportunities.

6. Peace of Mind

You want to feel confident that your business is running smoothly. Monitoring gives you real-time insight into employee red flags. It reduces uncertainty by helping you detect risks before they become bigger issues.

With ongoing monitoring, you know every day that your employees are just as risk-free as they were when you hired them. Knowing your company is protected and running well gives you consistent peace of mind.

Our Top Continuous Monitoring Process Tips

Here are some ways to refine your employee monitoring process to be more accurate and efficient.

Automate When Possible

You can save time and improve accuracy by using automated monitoring tools. Automated systems collect data in real-time and reduce human errors.

They also help you identify risks faster. With automation, you can focus on decision-making instead of manual tracking. Choose tools that fit your company’s needs and ensure they work smoothly with existing systems.

Have Clear Tracking Goals

You need to know what you are monitoring and why. Clear goals help you focus on useful data instead of collecting everything. Decide if you are tracking licensing, financial risk, criminal history, or all three. You should also determine how this fits into privacy regulations and data handling.

In addition, you should set goals for what to do when a risk factor is identified. A clear plan prevents confusion and ensures monitoring supports business success.

Have Real-Time Alerts

You need to know about problems as soon as they happen. Instant notifications help you immediately detect security risks, compliance violations, or other issues. Automated alerts notify you of expired licenses, specific arrests, or financial risks.

You can set up custom alerts to focus on what matters most. This lets you act quickly and prevent even bigger problems.

Conduct Regular Reviews

You must check monitoring data regularly. A structured review schedule helps you ensure employee compliance and lets you adjust roles or take other actions when needed. Reviewing data weekly or monthly ensures you stay informed without overloading managers.

Use a Trusted Ongoing Monitoring Partner

Choose a reliable monitoring provider to ensure accuracy and security. A trusted partner offers tools that fit your business needs and comply with privacy laws.

Working with a professional service reduces risks and helps you get the most from monitoring. The right partner helps you maintain compliance, improve productivity, and protect company information without overcomplicating the process.

How Ongoing Monitoring Services Streamline Your Process

Automated ongoing monitoring tools like Cisive help you simplify employee monitoring with real-time tracking and data insights. You no longer have to worry about whether the whispers about an employee are true; you can get accurate updates almost instantly from your dashboard.

With these tools, you reduce manual work while improving efficiency, compliance, and security. Their system quickly detects risks, ensuring issues are addressed before they become bigger problems. Secure data management and expert support let you focus on business growth while maintaining a safe, high-performing workforce.

Cisive Is Your Reliable Partner in Ongoing Monitoring

What is ongoing monitoring? It’s the most reliable way to keep your workforce moving forward with fewer violations, disruptions, and drawbacks. Ongoing monitoring gives you the right information at the right time to help keep employees, patients, and clients safe.

Cisive’s monitoring platform gives you the tools you need to obtain accurate, current information. Contact us today for a free demo of your tool/product or book a consultation from a Cisive expert.