It’s important to have visibility into what your onsite and remote employees are doing while on the clock. We test five employee monitoring tools for tracking user productivity, application and website activity, screen capture and alerts, and much more.
Employee monitoring is important to today’s businesses. A Gartner study found that 57 percent of businesses were planning on monitoring things like employee movement, internal texts, and biometric readings. The products allow you to keep track of your workers wherever they are, whether they’re on-site, in a satellite office, or even working remotely. These products are designed to ensure that businesses are getting the productivity they expect out of employees. They also help enforce data security policies protocols.
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.
Employee monitoring goes beyond the core time tracking functionality of tracking clock-ins and clock–outs or managing schedules and workloads. The software reviewed in this roundup ranges from time tracking players that add nifty monitoring features such as keystroke logging, location tracking, and screenshots to full-blown draconian monitoring platforms.
On the lighter, less dystopian end of the spectrum, many employee monitoring tools are focused on tracking productivity. Administrators can sort applications into productive and unproductive app groups to break down productiveness across different teams, departments, or individual employees. 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 Reddit should throw up a red flag.
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 leaderboards that show active or inactive users or the most often used apps.
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. 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.
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.
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. Some products also offer an alias feature that lets you change the name of the user in the reports you create. You can also use the same alias for multiple machines.
Beyond the images themselves, these monitoring platforms can have a startling degree of detailed visibility into every app, file, message, and even word or piece of data that appears across an employee’s screen or within their system. 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.
This applies to tracking documents and scanning file names as well. The software will often capture the attached document or file so an admin can view it. So, if an enterprise’s C-suite executives want to know whether employees are chatting internally about the company’s CEO or CTO, they could simply set up automated keyword triggers to receive an email alert or have all mentions aggregated into a report. This rules-based automation can be extended to a variety of parameters or user behaviors if a company so wishes. For instance, rules can be set to prevent employees from sending company data through personal channels or from downloading an app or file that isn’t IT-approved. Not all platforms can go this deep into automation. However, the ones that can will either trigger user notifications to stop the action, or simply send an alert or update an audit log to quantify how particular user actions or behavior factor into overall risk reports or issues. This potentially can result in managerial intervention being required.
This all speaks to a more fundamental question: Is your business investing in an employee monitoring tool primarily to improve productivity and efficiency? Or do you truly want or need full oversight into everything employees are doing and saying on company time and machines, to a meticulous degree of detail? Depending on your organizational needs and what value you’re looking to gain from implementing this kind of solution, your choice of employee monitoring tool could be vastly different.
In this roundup, we tested 10 products: ActivTrak, Desktime Pro, Hubstaff, InterGuard, StaffCop Enterprise, Time Doctor, Teramind, Veriato 360, VeriClock, and Work Examiner. The range of software we tested varied from basic time trackers that offer some added employee monitoring to full-blown, data-driven digital surveillance systems. For example, Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and VeriClock are pure-play time tracking tools that offer some deeper employee monitoring features. These products give you great core time-tracking features plus features such as mobile GPS tracking for workers in the field. They also give you attached notes and photos, screenshots, or basic monitoring of apps used and URLs visited.
Midrange employee monitoring tools, including ActivTrak, Desktime Pro, and Work Examiner, are hybrid time tracking/employee monitoring tools.
