What is Employee Monitoring Software? Employee Monitoring is a method of activity monitoring used by businesses to help prevent and detect costly data breaches, boost employee engagement, and optimize inefficient workflows. Becoming disengaged can also be a result of working remotely . By using employee monitoring tactics, organizations mitigate risk and become more profitable. Data gathered with this method can be analyzed to find trends, patterns, and correlations to gain insight into the business process and how to improve it. Employee monitoring gives companies an overall picture of how work is done in and out of the office. All sorts of data make up this image, including which applications get the most use, the amount of time spent on unproductive tasks, and what time of day each employee is most productive. You can imagine the applications of this data and how it could dramatically improve your business process. Use it to determine why one sales team is more successful than another. See if you need all of those expensive software licenses. Find out the most productive time of day and assign the most critical tasks to your team then. When you’re done reading this guide, you’ll be able to determine if monitoring is right for your team, which system to choose, and how to implement it in your office.

The Beginners Guide to Employee Monitoring Download now

Types of Employee Monitoring Change in technology has opened up a wide range of options to track workers’ activities. Just ten years ago, most employee monitoring had to be done locally in the office. Not everyone works from a desk in a cubicle, though. Did you know that 43% of employees say they worked from home in 2016? Gallup says this is an increase from the 37% reported the previous year! With this change in the way work is done, companies now have the need and ability to track activities remotely, monitor telephone systems, and attach GPS location devices to company vehicles and equipment. Internet and Email Working without the internet is like driving during rush hour traffic. You may eventually accomplish what you are trying to do, but it will be full of stops, slowdowns, and it will take you two or three times longer than usual. We know the internet is essential to productivity, as long as it’s used appropriately and efficiently. Internet activity tracking programs may capture URLs, title bars, and time spent on websites. The idea is to discover how the internet is being used and see if there’s any way to improve its usage by the team. Email is used quite a bit in many offices, so it makes sense to think about it. Email messages are considered official documents by law and will stand up as legitimate evidence in court. In fact, in 2006, 24% of employers had company emails subpoenaed by courts. Executive Director of The ePolicy Institute Nancy Flynn calls email “the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence.” Companies who monitor employee email reduce the risk of litigation and other electronic disasters. Computer Activities Similar to internet monitoring, some of these programs allow employers to monitor desktop application usage. Data collected can be presented in incredibly detailed reports, highlighting how much time people dedicated to productive work, when the computer was passive, and which applications have the most usage. Keylogging Keylogging, or keystroke logging, is a process that records the keys a user is typing on the keyboard in order. These programs can also capture screenshots when triggered by predefined keywords. One use for this is narrowing the search field when gathering data. For example, it could be very helpful in detecting bullying or harassment. Setting up screenshot triggers for the types of language expected in these situations could alert management to serious cases that otherwise may have gone unnoticed or unreported. There are some drawbacks to keystroke logging, though. Some see it as violating workplace privacy. Since the tool accounts for every keystroke, it would take no effort at all to access every detail a person entered into the computer, including personal information. It’s also notorious for being used with malicious intent. Loggers collect and store passwords, bank account information, private messages, credit card numbers, PIN numbers, and usernames. With this information in the wrong hands, you’re looking at a terrible situation. Telephone You know that message you hear when you call customer support for that router that’s giving you trouble? “This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.” By being on that call, congratulations, you were an active party in employee telephone monitoring! It’s a way for a company to take control of their quality assurance and confirm their employees are providing outstanding customer service to you. GPS Tracking With GPS Tracking, a company car is monitored when in use. It may be helpful for delivery, courier, and postal companies to track vehicles, to ensure the drivers travel the most efficient routes. Take Allison. She’s a delivery truck driver and takes State Street as part of her daily route. She doesn’t realize that a different road would save her 5 minutes! GPS Tracking could help. Or, her manager can check the status of a delivery without calling her. A phone call would either force her to pull over, wait and possibly forget, or answer the call while driving and break the law. It’s also very helpful with recovering stolen or missing property and equipment. With GPS Tracking, a company car can be monitored when it is in use. For example, it may be helpful for delivery, courier and postal companies to track vehicles to ensure their employees are taking the most efficient routes not spending time running their own errands. Other uses of GPS Tracking could be navigation, recovering stolen or missing property and equipment, and safety.

Advantages of Employee Monitoring We now know that when appropriately implemented, an employee monitoring system: Enables employers to analyze business processes

Creates a more engaged team

Saves money on employee retention

Provides data transparency

Protects against data loss Effective Management Insights from gathered data will help you build a more efficient team by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of your employees. Seeing where people struggle and where people shine gives you the power to delegate tasks more efficiently. Matching the strengths and skills of your team members to the right job is incredibly vital and enables the team to produce their best work! Recognizing the weaknesses in team members is just as important. Employee monitoring systems that focus on behavior metrics help you identify where team members need extra training or coaching. You may discover it’s taking someone an unusually long time to finish a project. Check in with them. See if they understand how to use their tools and set up a training session if they don’t. Investing in your employees’ career development is one way to increase engagement and happiness for the team. Discover Unrealized Revenue from a Fully Engaged Team Gallup found that 67% of workers worldwide are not engaged in the workplace for many reasons. Their report finds that people who can’t use their strengths are less productive, less creative, and don’t develop positive relationships with coworkers. Maybe you’ve been one of those people and can relate. They report feeling “miserable” with their company and as a result, become actively disengaged at work. In her article on Recruiter.com, strategic growth manager Shaley McKeever calls active disengagement the “silent killer.” Sound scary? It should! She explains that not only is an actively disengaged worker unhappy and not performing their job properly but they “act out their unhappiness,” and by doing so, “undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.” Sadly, when workers become disengaged, they typically don’t care about the company’s goals or success. They only show up to get a paycheck. With 67% of the worldwide workforce disconnected, can you guess how much employers lose each year in the American economy? If you guessed $350 billion, you’d be right! Behavior analytics will show you who on the team is disengaged or headed that way. For instance, data will show how much time employees spend in unproductive applications. Take that information and display it in a graph over time, and you’ll see whose productivity has increased, decreased, or remained the same. With this knowledge, you can meet with the team member if it’s needed. See what’s going on and find out how you can help. Financial Growth The Centers for Disease Control found that $1,685 per employee is lost per year due to unproductivity. You can cut down on this loss by implementing an activity tracking program. Successful, data-driven companies use the metrics tracking software gives them to increase productivity, revenue, sales, employee retention, happiness, and efficiency. Look at the restaurant industry as an example. An MIT study found that when restaurants started monitoring employees, revenue increased by 7%. The reason? Research scientist Andrew McAfee says, “As far as we can tell, performance improved simply because people started doing their jobs better.” Also, the types of data collected with employee monitoring software allow you to make better-informed business decisions. You may realize you have too many people assigned to one task. Why not make better use of time and the company’s resources by assigning a few of them a new project? Or, figure out which software (that you’re paying for) does not see much usage. Get rid of what you don’t benefit from and stop wasting money. Security and Safety Data breaches and cybersecurity should always be a concern for businesses. Hackers are super smart! They invent new methods of accessing data every day. 2017 marked the highest number of data breaches in history with a record-breaking 1,579 breaches, including one of the worst in history. Nearly half of America had their names, social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and driver’s license numbers stolen from the consumer-credit reporting agency Equifax. Sometimes the threat comes from the inside. Employees admit to it— 85 percent self-report taking company documents and information with them when they leave a company. Employee monitoring in all its various forms provides supervisors a clear view of what people are doing and when. And in the event of any breaches or legal issues, the data logs act as your company’s “black box.” Your task of discovering the “who, what, when, and where” of the incident becomes a little bit easier.

Disadvantages of Employee Monitoring and How to Address Them Wow! There are a lot of amazing benefits! What’s stop stopping you from getting started now? Well, you may have to deal with a perception issue. See, your purpose for analyzing your employees’ activity should be to create a company culture where everyone can perform their best and work cohesively as a team—not to spy on them. But your team may not see it that way at first, creating a few disadvantages. Privacy Activity monitoring comes with the concern of privacy. People use work computers for personal reasons, and they want to keep their activity private. Also, people just don’t like the idea of someone “watching their every move.” It’s creepy! Reassure your employees that their privacy is crucial. You aren’t watching them; you’re dissecting data. You’re not interested in personal information like passwords, driver’s license, passports, and social security numbers. Trust One problem people have with monitoring is the trust factor. If they perceive that what you are doing is spying, they can have feelings of anger and dissatisfaction and turn to disengagement. That’s pretty counter-intuitive to your goals. You can gain employees’ support by demonstrating you are monitoring for the right reasons. Don’t track just to track and don’t be invasive without good reason. The best practice is to be transparent, so stress to your team that the monitoring system is only used as an analytical tool. Increased Stress Level Knowing that their activities are tracked, a person may instinctively work harder, take fewer breaks and worry about their productivity. All of that could lead to an increase in stress levels for your team, leading to both a drop in morale and employee turnover – the exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish! If you take steps to explain the types of data you are gathering and why, you can help alleviate these worries. Follow through with your plans to use the software only for purposes related to analytics. Don’t abuse your tools like the manager described in an article from Psychology Today. This boss would flash a message over and over to an unproductive data processor. The note said, “You are working less hard than the person next to you.” Legal Concerns There’s a lot of murkiness around the legality of tracking activities. One of the reasons is that there are so many different laws on what is and is not allowed. We’ll get into this more in the section below, but for now, know that the legality of employee monitoring is completely dependent on where you care located. That doesn’t mean this type of data gathering is out of the question, though. There are ways to analyze day-to-day activities in accordance with your local laws.

Legal Considerations for Employee Monitoring What are the rules that govern monitoring in the workplace?

When is it okay to monitor? How does this differ between countries?

What do you have to do before you monitor? Is Employee Monitoring Legal? It’s time to address the elephant in the room. There are several misconceptions about the legality of data gathering which may turn you off of it. Is employee monitoring even legal? In short, yes! In the U.S., employees mostly have no right to privacy. If the company owns the computers, they’re legally allowed to monitor all activity on the device, including email when sent through the company’s internet. As of now, the only restriction involves phone calls. It’s illegal for an employer to monitor an employee’s personal phone calls unless that employee knows and consents. For any other activity, permission isn’t needed by the employee if they’re using company-owned equipment. Some states have taken a step towards privacy, though. In Connecticut and Delaware, employers must provide notice to employees before monitoring them. Before you install a software, be sure to check for any state-specific laws. The law may be different in your country, though. The European Union nations believe in the right to privacy at work. Employers have to be more upfront when they implement activity tracking. All persons in the EU must consent to personal data collection, and they must be informed of how and why it is being collected. Check your country’s laws just in case. For best results and to foster a culture of trust, we recommend telling your employees you plan to install the software. They’ll be aware of the types of data gathered, when and for what reasons. The more transparency there is, the less likely you’ll have to deal with legal issues. Monitor Your Team with ActivTrak CREATE ACCOUNT Is it Right for Me? Before we get into choosing the best employee monitoring software for your team, you need to be absolutely certain it’s the right thing for you. This type of software can be used for all the wrong reasons that completely miss the point. It’s pretty easy to determine if you should take the next step, though. Just consider the following: What are my goals? Think about the goals for your business. Write them down with space for notes. Here, we’ll help you along with some possibilities. Cut Expenses

Improve Customer Service

Secure Data Better

Employee Retention

Relocate Office

Become More Efficient

Implement More Legal Protection

Get Better at Micromanaging Will Employee Monitoring Software help me reach these goals? Take a look at what you wrote down, then write down how activity tracking could help. Cut expenses – Learn which software isn’t used and get rid of it.

Improve Customer Service – Look at the workflow for reps and analyze its efficiency. Speed up response times.

Secure Data Better – Using alarms, receive alerts to data breaches in progress. Redact sensitive info with DLP.

Employee Retention – With productivity reports, see which employees are becoming more and more disengaged and find out why that is. Show your team you want to keep them on the team and ask how you can help them feel more valued.

Relocate Office – Probably more of an indirect result. Perhaps by cutting expenses, you could relocate and measure whether or not that effects your team’s productivity.

Become More Efficient – Take a look at your business process. Remove employees from projects where they aren’t needed and assign them to new projects.

Implement More Legal Protection – With a virtual black box of all computer activity, you’ll have a trail of data to investigate and to provide in a court setting.

Get Better at Micromanaging – Hmm. This is your goal? While you could technically use Employee Monitoring software to reach this goal, is it the right goal to have? Is adopting a Behavior Analytics Software worth it to me? This one’s easy. What is the value of improved customer service? How about secured data? Better efficiency? More legal protection? Compare the value of reaching your goals to the cost of a potential software. With most software, it just makes sense to track activities at work. But ultimately, it’s up to you to weigh the pros and cons.

Do Businesses Like Me Reach Their Goals with Employee Monitoring Software? Employee monitoring isn’t about supervision, it’s about data. At the time of the writing, the tools that gathers that data are a $200 million industry and thriving. In the next few years, we will see more companies investing in software and other solutions that track workers’ activities. Insurance companies, colleges, design firms, schools, and large international corporations are just some examples of teams who chose to analyze behavior. Even restaurants use a form of software that monitors waitstaff, tracking every relevant activity. Companies of all types are successfully improving their business process from metrics gathered by employee monitoring software.

How to Pick The Best Employee Monitoring Software Alright! You’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided you can reach your goals with activity tracking software! We’ll be frank; there are many different types of employee monitoring software. Making a decision can be overwhelming! Let’s make it a little easier. FREE DOWNLOAD Download Internet Usage Policy Template DOWNLOAD NOW Develop an Employee Monitoring Checklist Before spending a lot of time shopping around, you can start by developing a checklist of features your company needs. You may or may not need features like: Website blocking

Real-time monitoring

Full access to SQL data

Screenshot capture and export

USB-use alerts

Data Leak Prevention

Keystroke logging

Time spent on activities

Ability to categorize activities as productive or unproductive Also, a major consideration is the way the system operates. Most can be put into two categories: User Input and Always On/Scheduled. Some activity tracking software gives the control to the employee to keep track of each task. They use an application to record when they start, stop, or pause the project. All the data collecting is only done during this period. Others gather data as long as the computer is in use, allowing employees the freedom to work without having to think about logging. Most times, there’s an option to schedule this recording by an administrator. It comes in handy if you only want to track during business hours. The upside to this type of tracking is it provides an unbiased data set. Without user input, you have just the facts that can’t be manipulated. Once you have narrowed down which features are most important to you, you can then start comparing which service offers those features and which one will meet your needs the best. Now it’s time to REALLY trim the fat. These three informative questions are great for both small and enterprise businesses to ask when picking out the right behavior analytics system. Employee Monitoring With ActivTrak ActivTrak is an unobtrusive method for tracking and measuring employee work activity. Without a software like ActivTrak, it’s impossible to understand how work is being completed unless you’re looking over someone’s shoulder. Our cloud-based employee monitoring software equips organizations with the necessary tools to understand how work gets done. The software is easy to install and the data is available within minutes. Here are a few reasons why ActivTrak is an ideal solution for Employee Monitoring: Monitor computer activity in real-time.

Use the unbiased data to make informed employment and operational decisions.

Review screenshots and screen recordings to provide visual context for an employee’s activities.

Compare productivity levels between individuals, groups, or get an overall view of the entire organization.

Customize your ActivTrak account to sync up with your business’s structure, organization, and policies. What is the real cost in money AND time? Licenses Some SaaS businesses structure their prices on seats or per-user, meaning they bill you a set amount of money per person that uses the service. Others charge per machine. What’s best for your organization? Keep in mind; the pricing structure should be scalable so you can add new team members as they join with ease. Hardware Are there any pieces of hardware you’ll need with the system? You may choose a software that is hosted onsite instead of in the cloud. You may do this if you need to have all data stored and processed onsite for extra protection against potential data theft. This will probably include the added cost of hardware. Most cloud-based software, however, doesn’t need anything extra. Professional Help Will you need an I.T. professional for installation? If you don’t have one on your team, you’ll probably need to hire one depending on the complexity of the installation process. If you can’t work that into your budget, opt for a software that you can install in a snap without professional help. Training The learning curve is something else you need to consider. Sometimes implementing new software takes up time with training sessions. The more time you spend on training, the less time you have to do awesome businessy things! First, figure out who will be using the software directly. Who are the admins and who are the front end users? Then find out from a sales rep at the software business how difficult the product is to master.

How long before I can benefit? Time to see data Consider the length of time from installation to receiving reliable data ready to be analyzed. How long does installation take across your network? Do results start flowing into the analytic dashboard once installed, or is there a delay? Customization Customization is great, but if there aren’t enough default settings at the beginning, setting up all of your accounts and users could be a daunting and lengthy task! Plan accordingly for this period. Are experts needed? The software might require an expert that you don’t have on your team. You may need someone to maintain the software, or a data analyst to interpret your results. Factor in time to either find the right person or train a team member on the appropriate skills. Learning Curve Like most new tools, there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve for most users at the beginning. Some training may be necessary on all of the features available to you. For you to realize the full potential of your software, it may take some time.

What are its limitations? Scalability Scalability is the capability of the software to grow with your business. It needs to be able to handle high volumes, surges in activities, and increasing number of seats or users. It should also process quickly and store massive amounts of data reliably, regardless of the number of members on your team. You don’t want your employee monitoring software to fail if you’re an eCommerce company needing to measure productivity on Cyber Monday! Size, Speed, and Storage Check and see how the software processes data, which servers they use, where data is stored, how much storage is available, and if there are any limitations on the volume of raw data that can be processed. If you don’t quite know the ins and outs of data processing, talk to a representative of the company. Explain your needs and see if their system can hold up! Customization Sure, it may have all the features on your checklist, but are you able to change, modify, delete or add to them? Some businesses would prefer to mark social media sites as unproductive. But if your company relies heavily on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for your marketing, then you might need to classify those sites as productive so you can factor that data in when you are analyzing performance. Every company is different. One size does not fit all. Customization is key to making the software work for you. Playing well with others Employee monitoring software has been known to have complications with some anti-virus software. Prevent headaches. Ask a sales executive if there are any known complications with your anti-virus software. With the right combinations of programs, the effectiveness of an employee monitoring system can be increased exponentially! Integrations with the software allow many apps to be automated or to talk to other apps. Find out if the system you are considering has this capability to make your life easier.