Work from home challenges the pre-existing structure for productivity tracking, so many of these solutions will require rejigging or substantial pivoting to continue to be effective for today's needs and individual use cases. Administrators can sort applications into productive and unproductive app groups to break down productiveness across different teams, departments, or individual employees.
Productivity scoring algorithms make it possible to measure individuals against their past performance as well as against their peers. This data is less about disciplining employees and more about helping teams course-correct and stay productive. It's important to have customization and user grouping here because an app that's deemed productive for one job function may be considered unproductive for another.
For instance, social media managers spending all of their time on Facebook and Twitter is core to their role whereas a sales manager spending many hours a day on LinkedIn or other job sites should throw up a red flag. Automation and the ability to set alerts by way of email reminders and warnings are also effective ways to manage a large, distributed workforce.
This activity data can also be aggregated on a macro level in real-time admin and manager dashboards as well as in detailed reports, slicing and dicing productivity metrics. You can drill down into the data using factors such as the most productive or unproductive employees, or compare team or departmental efficiency or productivity on specific projects. Often, employee monitoring tools will give you at-a-glance data visualizations such as a productivity bar that breaks down productive and unproductive app percentages, or lists and leader boards that show active or inactive users or the most often used apps.
Many of the solutions we tested track and log which websites or services employees spend the most time on and which ones are underutilized. This helps managers decide which tools and subscriptions aren't being used and can be discontinued, which frees up their budget for more necessary items. The other side of activity tracking is monitoring keystrokes. Logging keystrokes is essentially a baseline for employee activity. Once you have granular data on how often employees are typing or interacting with their machine, it can be mapped against corresponding screenshots, activity logs, audit trails, and all of the deeper monitoring vectors we get into later to fill out a complete profile of employees' online activity.
Some of the most powerful monitoring software we've tested can intake raw keystroke data—meaning, a timestamped mapping of what system keys users pressed at any given time—and cross-reference that against any of the other metrics or captured activity data collected. Newer tools like Controlio can aggregate keystrokes and sync them to video recordings to form a more accurate picture of employee activity.
As a result, you can see the full context of what employees were doing, when they were doing it, and a good indication as to why they were doing it. This level of oversight is unmatched for companies requiring forensic evidence even as employees could find it terribly invasive.
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The issues facing companies due to the pandemic include ensuring business continuity and productivity across distributed teams, securing company data and IP on remote PCs, as well as enforcing compliance outside company walls. The shift to remote work has also played into the hands of competitors who offer their solution as cloud services. A distributed workforce, needs a similarly distributed solution. One that's quick to deploy and easy to manage remotely. EfficientLab, who makes the on-premises monitoring solution Work Examiner, has a more compelling scalable cloud-based solution in Controlio, which mixes productivity scoring with in-depth employee monitoring.
Controlio represents the new way of thinking in the segment and even has real time video recording and live streaming capability that's also synced with keystroke tracking.
The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2021
Editors' Choice selection Teramind, takes video recording to a whole new level by enabling Optical Character Recognition OCR which can run through video files and recognize text on screen and on documents and make video searchable. On-premises vendor StaffCop Enterprise also provides OCR functionality for screenshots and documents as well as video recording. The inclusion of video recording and live feeds leapfrogs screenshots and offers businesses a gapless oversight of employee activity and will likely be the norm moving forward.
Employee engagement and work focus may no longer be the most viable objectives for performance evaluations. Pandemics, after all, have a way of turning things on their head. Teams, however, still need to work towards common goals, and managers are expected to afford employees some leniency on defining how best to get their work done.
10 Best Phones Monitoring Apps
With that in mind, the importance of organizational tools and systems becomes even more critical for distributed teams working outside of established office structures. The challenge becomes ensure that these tools can serve as helpful human resources HR solutions in addition to monitoring engines. When larger employers hire new workers, they need to find a way to ensure that the employee is getting the supervision, training, and support they need out of the gate. That's enough of a challenge that market research firm, Statista , identified it at the top of a list of challenges that surveyed HR professionals associated with onboarding.
While that's slightly outside-the-box thinking for employee monitoring technology, it clearly shows there's flexibility when it comes to using these solutions. While that's something to keep in mind when reading our reviews of these services, we did decide to focus our testing on the category's core mission: maximizing worker productivity. These products are designed to ensure that businesses are getting the productivity they expect out of employees. They also help enforce data security policies and protocols which are even more important now that company data is as distributed as the workforce that manages it.
Particularly for large corporations that schedule thousands of shift workers in settings such as call centers , for instance, employee monitoring agents installed on company machines give these businesses complete visibility and traceability into their operations. The employee monitoring agents also aggregate key data on employee productivity. For organizations such as government contractors or businesses that deal with sensitive financial, medical, or other personal customer data, ensuring compliance rules while keeping an eye on employees can be even more critical.
So, if you are looking for comprehensive employee monitoring tools that offer a Big Brother-level of omnipresent oversight or if simply want Google Analytics GA to track office productivity metrics and improve efficiency, there is a range of employee monitoring tools available to fit your particular needs. Today's employee monitoring technology offers unparalleled monitoring capability and can track employee's from any conceivable frame of reference.
Using geolocation, keystroke logging, screenshots, video recording, and even access to web cams installed on remote PCs. Cloud computing offers the ability to capture terabytes of data which is stored online and easy for managers to access. More importantly, this data doesn't just lie dormant, it can be run through complex algorithms to anticipate insider threats, measure individual and team productivity, as well as retrace various steps leading to any problems or data leaks.
Once an incognito agent is installed on a machine sometimes hidden in the Running Processes list under disguised names , the most powerful employee monitoring tools can act as an all-seeing eye. It can see into everything from what apps an employee has open to with whom they're chatting to, what they're saying.
It can even use automated logic such as keyword triggers and policy rules to let an admin know when employees do something they're not supposed to do. Thanks to advanced automation, software can now set various alerts and triggers to find patterns and compile employee transgressions into reports that can later be used to build disciplinary cases against employees. Today's tools can be installed on stealth mode, running in the background of user's PCs, or they can be applied with the user's knowledge so employees are aware that their PCs and smartphones are recording their every move.
This all starts with screenshots and customizable employee screen recording options. Depending on the employee monitoring tool, company admins can configure rules and settings to take screenshots at particular intervals, either once per hour, every 15 minutes, or even every 10 seconds or less. Some tools also support live screenshots or continuous video recording where an admin can check in live on an employee's machine or pull up the timestamped recording of a particular period of time.
Some tools let you play, pause, or download screenshots. Most importantly, stored screenshots also carry metadata and can be incorporated throughout the monitoring dashboard to be pulled up as supporting evidence or supplementary data for whatever user activity or data point an admin is reviewing or investigating. The challenge still remains on the human end of the process, managers only have so many hours to pore through hundreds if not thousands of screenshots throughout an employees workday. Video recording is the next frontier and is already being offered by the likes of Teramind, StaffCop Enterprise, and Controlio.
Access to live or recorded video offers the most accurate forensic evidence and the ability to quickly search, scrub, and even search using OCR technology will make video the key differentiator for companies choosing the best solution. Beyond the images themselves, these monitoring platforms can have a startling degree of detailed visibility into every app, file, message, and even Zoom calls that appear across an employee's screen or within their system.
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Some of the most advanced enterprise monitoring solutions offer optical character recognition OCR on a user's screen to perform session mining on particular keywords. Whether by OCR or by enabling support for monitoring specific desktop or web apps regularly used by employees, the most piercing employee monitoring tool will parse email messages, chats, instant messages IMs , and other personal or team communication apps.
They'll monitor whatever parameters or even specific keywords an admin has set. The more advanced solutions can even find credit card numbers and financial records through screenshots and videos, and send corresponding alerts triggered by these very specific details. This deep tracking applies to tracing documents and scanning file names as well. Feb 27, Version 8. Ratings and Reviews. App Privacy See Details. Size 8. Category Travel.