In today’s digital world, privacy issues are less straightforward than we’d like them to be. There’s a lot of complexity surrounding technology, security and surveillance-related company policies, including employee monitoring software.

Now more than ever, the concern around security and employee monitoring is paramount as workforces around the world transition to remote work. According to Gartner, the global information security market is forecasted to grow 12.4% in 2021 indicating just how critical cybersecurity has become to businesses in recent years.

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Work-at-home policies pose a significant challenge for employers who once could observe workers in person and build a stronger sense of security with internal network protection. Employers are now forced to develop advanced, secure and compliant solutions to ensure their employees maintain the same integrity outside the office.

However, employers should consider the reality around employee monitoring: is it reasonable for an employee to have an expectation of privacy? And what rights do companies and workers have when it comes to monitoring daily activities?

In this article, we’ll dive into the ins and outs of employee monitoring software, looking at the most crucial rules, attributes and best solutions.

What is Employee Monitoring Software?

Before, these were nothing more than a way to clock in and out and manage schedules. Today, employee monitoring software is souped-up with advanced technology that allows employers to access a trail of employee activity, from simple attendance records down to individual keystrokes made during the workday.

Essentially, the software audits employee behavior and productivity to help managers identify areas in which the business could improve internally. It’s also an effective security measure for companies to implement, with many systems offering internal threat detection and other tools for employers.

What’s Being Monitored?

There’s a big difference between monitoring various types of content. Few people in any workplace would complain about employers screening for the use of pornography or visiting other similarly NSFW websites. It also seems fair for companies to monitor digital platforms for potential leaks of sensitive business data and unauthorized network activity.

The gray area comes when employers try to sniff out the personal behaviors of their employees that are irrelevant to the company. Companies can legally write policies restricting the use of the internet for personal reasons. They can also limit certain websites or eliminate personal internet usage. But going in and mining employee emails or closely inspecting browser histories can start to raise eyebrows if it’s not directly related to the business at hand.

Dorothy Dalton, CEO of 3Plus International, discussed the potentially intrusive nature of employee monitoring software, saying, “The idea where some organizations expect staff to keep cameras on all day is an invasion of privacy and will add another layer of stress which will be counterproductive in the long term.”

This is an interesting point. In a survey conducted by Clutch, only 10% of workers indicated that they would trust their employer more if tracked by employee monitoring software. Every company should consider this when using monitoring software and how it could potentially impact morale.
Dalton also touched on how using the tool could also be the cause of retention issues. “Organizations will indeed see a negative impact on morale and engagement, which will ultimately, have ramifications for retention. This is at a time when 1 in 4 employees would consider leaving their current organisation. Employers who get this wrong are going to see an exodus.”

Rigidly policing workers digitally can backfire and drive talent away from a company. In addition, this creates a negative corporate culture where everyone gets distracted by avoiding any activity that’s possibly against corporate policy. This can easily lead to lower employee productivity, creating a lose-lose scenario.

Giving Employees Notification

A significant factor in how employees feel about an employee monitoring program is whether their employer alerted them that their digital activities are being observed. Generally speaking, giving formal, written or oral notification make these types of surveillance more proper and in line with an excellent corporate culture.

Most employees come into the workplace with at least some expectation of privacy. When they receive notice and, more importantly, when workers know the reasons for employee monitoring, people are less likely to complain than if they find out after the fact. This also helps the company’s reputation if they’re transparent from the start.

In some cases, employers have a notification clause in an employee handbook. Employees may or may not read it, but it’s there as a resource for them if they have any questions or concerns.

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Key Features

On your quest to finding an employee monitoring system that best suits your business’ needs, there are several elements that you’ll want to consider. Some questions to ask yourself may include: What is my ultimate goal for my software? Security? Activity tracking? What features are a must-have?

Let’s go through the most sought out features you may want to include in your list.

Productivity Tracking

This may seem like a given when choosing your platform, as many employee monitoring software solutions make this a top priority, but there are many sub-categories to consider.

Basic time and attendance-logging capabilities are essential, especially for employees working on an hourly basis. This functionality serves as a clocking-in and out device you’d see in an office setting giving managers a clear view of when employees begin and end their shifts.

More complex features include the ability to log keystrokes, view time-per-task, screenshots, recordings of worker computer screens and more. Many software will also allow real-time access to see exactly what an individual employee is working on when working on it. This provides employers reassurance that their employees are staying on task and using company time appropriately.

Security

As workforces move to a work-from-home setting, protecting your company and employee data from lurking hackers is all-important. According to Cybint, 95% of cybersecurity breaches are due to human error, making your employees a solid target.

Luckily, employee monitoring software can act as a barrier between your company and hackers by using protective measures on both employee and employer ends. Website blocking is an excellent tool to keep employees off potentially risky sites on their work computers. Ensure workers that this is a security measure, not just another way to restrict them.

Another beneficial feature is data-transfer monitoring, which tracks information such as uploads, downloads and emails that are moved throughout the organization. If, for instance, there is suspicious activity during data transfers or any potential security breach, users will receive alerts through threat detection technology. This gives managers the upper hand in terminating risks before data loss occurs.

Administrator and Manager Dashboards

Trying to manage, track and support hundreds of employees online is close to impossible. User dashboards act as a mothership for administrators, providing them a central hub to access all data collected. A majority of systems offer at-a-glance data visualizations that make it easy to dissect your most valuable data, such as what websites were most used, time spent on projects, keystroke data and more.

With the analytical tools and reporting capabilities, employers can compare employee to employee, making it easier to spot which employees are thriving and which ones need to up their game.

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Top Employee Monitoring Software

Teramind

Teramind is a cloud-based employee monitoring software suitable for all industries. The system provides users with the ability to track employee performance, perform risk assessments, investigate data loss incidents with forensics and much more.

Its state-of-the-art intelligent behavioral analysis tool is used to detect human actions such as suspicious activity malicious intent, accidents or errors to prevent security breaches.

The various benefits and features of Teramind.

Features and Benefits

• Profile Monitoring: Configurable monitoring profiles allow users to define what actions to monitor, who to watch and when to monitor them.
• Rules and Alerts: Employers have to power to delegate specific user behaviors, including web, keystrokes, file transfers and more to trigger instant alerts. Block any instant messages, emails and downloads if it meets the requirements of set rules.
• Productivity Analysis: Receive detailed, minute-by-minute reports of employee performances to track their productivity. The platform provides a dashboard that presents a clear picture of time active, time idle and time spent on various tasks.
• Risk Management: The platform scores risks and identifies high-risk policies, system objects and users, all displayed in the risk dashboard.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer an option plan for less than five users.
• Doesn’t monitor Linux, Chrome OS or mobile-based platforms.
• Doesn’t offer a native iOS or Android app.

Pricing

The platform’s pricing is as follow:

• Starter: $10 per user/month
• UAM: $20.83 per user/month
• DLP: $25 per user/month

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ActivTrak

ActivTrak is a workforce productivity and analytics platform best suited for small and medium-sized businesses that provide data-focused insights about employee’s workday activity. The platform offers real-time monitoring, activity alarms, data connectivity and much more.

The software is composed of two parts: the agent and the dashboard. The agent acts as a collector of data and acts upon user activity behind the scenes, while the dashboard displays the information gathered by the agent.

View productivity and top users in the ActivTrak dashboard.

Features and Benefits

• Custom Reports: Using BI tools, the platform allows users to run queries, combine external data sources and generate custom reports.
• Screenshot Flagging: Administrators can set rules for the frequency and number of screenshots taken of employee screens and store them in a digital black box. The system can analyze the screenshot content and categorize unsafe images into adult, medical or violent categories.
• Native Mobile App: The solution offers a mobile app for iOS and Android devices, allowing employers to view reports and monitor employees from anywhere, anytime.
• Scheduled Monitoring: Users can create an unlimited number of personalized reporting schedules to track on specific days and times during the week.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer optical character recognition or keyword searches within screenshots.
• Can’t capture keystrokes.
• Doesn’t offer mobile device tracking.
• Can’t block the subdomain of a website without blocking the website’s main domain.
• Can’t be installed on a Linux operating system platform.
• Doesn’t provide a live video feed.
• Doesn’t provide location tracking.

Pricing

ActivTrak offers a free plan that allows administrators to monitor up to three users and store 3 GB worth of logs and screenshots. The ‘Advanced’ plan is $9 per user per month, and the ‘Premium’ plan is $15 per user per month. Contact the vendor for more further information on the pricing of its ‘Enterprise’ plan.

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Veriato Cerebral

Veriato Cerebral is an advanced security solution tailored for medical, legal and financial industries. It utilizes AI, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and user activity monitoring (UAM) to aid in data breach response (DBR).

Veriato Cerebral Screenshot

Features and Benefits

• Video Playback: The platform provides users with playback of an employee’s on-screen activity that can then be exported as JPEG or AVI files.
• Geolocation: It tracks mobile device activity and alerts users when a device has entered a restricted location or moved from a specified geographic area.
• Psycholinguistics: The solution’s AI algorithms can uncover dissatisfied employees through email monitoring. The language used within the emails can trigger alerts by identifying changes in sentiment, signs of threat and disengagement.
• Keystroke Logger: It records keystrokes and can identify hidden characters and combinations.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide a native Android or iOS mobile app.
• Doesn’t offer optical character recognition (OCR) within screenshots.
• Doesn’t allow screenshot blurring to protect personal data.
• It doesn’t support the recon analysis facility for user behavior analysis on Android devices.
• Doesn’t provide a live video feed.
• Remote desktop control isn’t available.

Pricing

Contact the vendor for pricing information.

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InterGuard

InterGuard is an employee monitoring software suitable for all business sizes that offers users a cloud-based and self-hosted interface. The platform can record all employee activity and store it in a central user interface both online and offline.

Users can block various websites from employee usage.

Features and Benefits

• User and Entity Behavior Analytics: Allows users to set goals of acceptable activity levels and will receive notifications when these goals are surpassed or not met by employees.
• Data Loss Prevention: Administrators can find, report and block sensitive data leakage via cloud storage, email and removable media.
• Social Media Monitoring: This tool provides users insights into an employee’s social media usage during work hours. It gives a list of sites visited, time spent on the sites, accessed chat apps and activity stamps.
• Time Tracking: Administrators can track employee’s attendance, GPS location on iPhone and iOS devices, productivity and active and idle times. Using user activity heat maps, real-time desktop screen capture, productivity time and more, employers can view at-a-glance team tracking data.

Limitations

• Doesn’t run full optical character recognition (OCR) within screenshots and is limited to keyword searches.
• Doesn’t provide a mobile app.
• Doesn’t provide screenshot redaction or blurring to protect sensitive data.
• Doesn’t provide a live video feed or real-time screen viewing.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $9.99 per user per month for the Cloud Hosted version, offered only on an annual contract for 11 users or more. Contact the vendor for a quote for On-Premise and Enterprise plan pricing.

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Workpuls Employee Monitoring

Workpuls Employee Monitoring is a cloud solution that provides information on how employees spend their time. It is suitable for all company sizes, from start-ups to large enterprises, offering features such as attendance sheets, activity-based payroll calculators and reports.

Users can view productive, unproductive and neutral times.

Features and Benefits

• Hidden Mode: Activating this mode allows employers to remain undetected by employees while keeping track of suspicious activity.
• Productivity Tracking and Monitoring: Review employee’s productivity with charts for teams, individuals or the entire organization. Administrators can label specific websites and applications as productive, unproductive or neutral.
• Manual Time Entries: It allows employees to manually enter offline activities into their time logs, approved or rejected by management.
• Rest API: This functionality allows users to integrate with any other application or service via the Workpuls Rest API.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide native apps.
• Doesn’t provide optical character recognition searches in screenshots.
• Doesn’t redact or blur sensitive personal information in screenshots.
• Doesn’t provide a live video feed.
• Doesn’t offer remote control.
• Doesn’t provide location tracking.

Pricing

The pricing for the platform is as follows:

• Employee Monitoring Plan: $4.80 monthly per employee (billed annually).
• Time Tracking Plan: $6.40 monthly per employee (billed annually).
• Automatic Time Mapping: $12 monthly per employee (billed annually).
• Enterprise: Contact vendor for pricing information.

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Wrapping Up

Employee tracking systems serve as a helpful hand when running an at-home workforce for both security and employee tracking purposes. Despite its clear benefits for employers, there are still looming concerns surrounding employer’s accessibility to employee data.

It’s fair for employees to have these unsettling feelings, especially when it comes to suspicions that they’re being hovered over or even spied on. With these worries in mind, it’s your responsibility as an employer to reassure your employees of the true purpose behind implementing monitoring software or omit it altogether.

Letting employees know exactly what information you will have access to can give them peace of mind. The bottom line is, companies need to be transparent and uphold ethical standards within the organization if they plan on using monitoring software.

In an age of technology, where everything is at risk for exposure, keeping imperative data private, both personal and corporate, is essential.

Which employee monitoring software you are using to monitor your employees? Which features are most important to your business? Let us know in the comments below!

Contributing Thought Leader