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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an abrupt shift in the operational model of businesses across the globe, forcing them to make transition from on-premise operations to the remote work culture.
So, to keep up with this paradigm shift, businesses must adopt the use of innovative tools and techniques, especially when it comes to tracking employee productivity. Just by measuring and tracking employee productivity, businesses can reduce their costs considerably, which could help deal with the economic slowdown.
Quite a few businesses have turned the tables by permanently shifting to the remote work culture, in a bid to reduce costs and improve employee productivity.
In fact, a recent study carried out at CTrip, a leading Chinese Travel and Leisure company indicates that WFH increased employee productivity by close to 13%. Such a tremendous increase in productivity can help organizations cover up their losses to a great extent.
Let us now look into how companies can use technologies to track employee productivity, but before that let us find out why employers must monitor remote employees.
Why do employers monitor employees?
Human Capital is the biggest investment that IT and Engineering companies make. This includes everything from recruitment to periodical training sessions to upgrade professional skills.
So, the only way businesses can get the most out of their investment is by monitoring employees. While this is the most common reason for employers to monitor employees, there is more to it. Let us now discuss why employers should keep an eye on their employees, while they continue to work remotely.
To Boost Productivity
Employees working from home are likely to be more laid-back and take longer breaks in-between work. While this might be okay for some business processes that do not have a time-constraint, it is still quite undesirable. Irregular logging in makes it difficult for managers and payroll personnel to keep track of employee attendance.
It becomes difficult to confirm whether an employee is working for an X amount of time. However, that problem can be overcome with employee productivity tracking software.
With the many functions that employee productivity trackers perform, it becomes easier to keep track of employee engagement. Such tools make it easier for managers to measure productivity, and for the payroll personnel to track attendance before releasing paychecks.
Protect Customer Data
Most B2B companies enter into service agreements with their clients, which requires them to protect customer data. This could be product design, software, or anything else that is being developed for the client, by the service providing company.
Therefore, the service provider often cascades this obligation to its employees, through employee agreements. As these employees have access to confidential customer data, monitoring them is the only way to comply with the service agreement. Also, doing this provides immediate access to useful data in case of internal investigations or legal disputes.
Prevent Insider Attacks
Most B2B companies enter into service agreements with their clients, which requires them to protect customer data. This could be product design, software, or anything else that is being developed for the client, by the service providing company.
Therefore, the service provider often cascades this obligation to its employees, through employee agreements. As these employees have access to confidential customer data, monitoring them is the only way to comply with the service agreement. Also, doing this provides immediate access to useful data in case of internal investigations or legal disputes.
As the term ‘insiders’ includes employees, it becomes essential for the employer to track employee activities to ensure better security. Companies can do this by keeping track of employee productivity through software like EmpMonitor which shows application-wise usage. Moreover, the only way to control insider threats is by monitoring and tracking employee activities.
How do Employee Monitoring Software Track Employee Productivity?
Businesses were never confined to the brick-and-mortar work culture but remained so until the pandemic changed everything. With remote work culture becoming a way of life, businesses need to find better tools and techniques to keep track of employee productivity. However, before you pick one and get started, there are a few things you need to know. Therefore, we decided to give you a 360-degree view of how employee productivity tracking software works. This would help you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of employee surveillance software.
How Does it Work?
Employee monitoring apps capture, record, and store user actions that help the Manager or Business Owner determine employee productivity. Through special functions, employee productivity trackers record user activities and let the manager access it. Sounds complicated? Let us simplify it by breaking it down further to understand how companies use technology to track employee productivity.
Keeps track of login and logout timings
Your employees are no longer swiping their access cards while entering office premises, which makes it difficult to keep track of their login and logout timings. This problem can be easily solved by using employee tracking and monitoring tools like EmpMonitor. Basically, when the user logs into the monitored system, the software identifies the user and starts monitoring that specific user based on login credentials.
So, from the very moment an employee logs into his or her system, the monitoring begins. The employee monitoring software starts capturing user-specific data, including login and logout timings, which helps keep a tab on your employees.
Employers can also check the exact duration for which the employee has remained logged in. However, since the software makes use of sensitive employee details such as login credentials, employers must invest in secure software that identifies users solely based on username, without storing or recording the passwords.
Captures Application-wise Usage
After logging into the system, your employee is most likely to log into work-specific applications such as Word, Excel, or something else, in order to complete the assigned tasks.
As most employee tracking software captures application-wise usage, it becomes easier for the employer to find out whether the employee is being productive or not.
After all, there are a lot of things your employees can do after logging in, such as listening to music or podcasts, playing games, or spending time on social media. No employer would want to pay an employee for engaging in such unproductive activities.
By providing useful insights, employee monitoring software enables employers to reduce their costs by choosing not to pay remote employees for unproductive hours.
Website Usage
Want to know the most frequently visited websites by your employees? You can do this effortlessly with employee trackers that pull out data straight from an employee’s browser history.
So besides tracking employee productivity, you can also keep track of potentially dangerous websites that the employee might be accessing.
Also, if your company has imposed restrictions on the use of public email service providers such as Gmail or Yahoo, then it becomes easier to keep track of it. Quite a few companies restrict it in order to prevent security breaches that could occur from its use. Also, it minimizes the possibility of unauthorized transfer of sensitive data.
Screenshots
While your employees are busy at work, you may be tempted to pick up the phone and call them. That strong desire to know what your employees are up to comes from your previous management style. While your employees worked on-site, you probably used to walk up to your team to get a glimpse of what they were up to.
That is no longer possible due to the remote work culture but there is a viable alternative. Managers can still get a glimpse of what their employees are up to, by capturing screenshots through an employee productivity tracking software.
Moreover, these screenshots can be timed or randomized according to the user’s preference. It is recommended that you randomize it so that your employees are caught off-guard, which gives you a more transparent view of their activities.
Keystrokes
Keystroke monitoring, also known as keylogging, refers to recording and storing every keyboard-related action of the employee, including the copy-paste actions. It is one of the most powerful weapons in your employee monitoring arsenal because you don’t miss out on any detail.
Keylogging lets you dig deeper into what your employees are up to and although it may seem a wee bit intrusive, keystroke monitoring can be useful in preventing many breaches. Managers can use it to ensure the proper use of database access and licensed software.
Since the company owns the database and the software licenses, these are corporate assets and must be monitored. Finally, if such breaches do take place, then keystroke monitoring can help track the culprits.
Idle time
Remote work culture is a two-edged sword that can either result in high productivity or entirely the opposite. While your employees are working remotely, there is no way to find out if they are working or enjoying a nap. Since you cannot keep a tab on their activities, physically, you can’t figure out how much idle time you are being billed for.
Not keeping track of this could result in an increase in overheads. For this reason, businesses make use of employee productivity trackers, but did you know that only some of them take note of idle time? So, to get the most out of your employee monitoring software, you must pick one that knows when to stop.
So, if there is no user activity such as keystrokes, then the software must stop recording the time. Also, the software must not log employee hours when the computer is in sleep, idle or locked modes.
Reports
While looking for an employee monitoring software, make it a point to look for one that lets you generate employee performance reports. Some tools allow users to pull out both individual and team-wise reports, which makes it easier to figure out where things are going wrong.
So, if the team is repeatedly missing deadlines, then a quick glance at this report will tell you who is to be blamed for it. Also, it makes the process of providing one-on-one feedback much easier.
Final Conclusion
As you may have realized, employee tracking software can be pretty invasive, and one may wonder if it is legal to monitor employees so closely. To be honest, there is no definitive answer to it, but in most cases, employers can monitor their employees. Particularly, if the employer owns the computer which is being monitored.
As the asset is owned by the company, keylogging, or grabbing screenshots by the owner of the asset should be okay. Now that you know how companies use technology, it is time to pick an employee monitoring software for your business.