Managers need to keep track of distributed teams and their productivity. We test and rank the top employee monitoring systems to see whether they can really help you navigate the new normal.
Some managers love hybrid work and others hate it, but the reality is that it’s here to stay. Even before the global pandemic made it a necessity, many companies were already moving toward allowing remote work for some portion of their workforces, if only for a few days per week. Yet the hybrid work model creates challenges for managers. Crucially, it leaves them hanging when it comes to understanding their employees’ productivity. They lack the insights they would have when employees are working on-premises, including not just how much work they’re producing but also the quality of the work and the reasons behind any changes. Hybrid work gives employees more freedom to conduct their business day as they see fit, which many workers see as a plus. Yet some employees struggle with this self-directed model and have difficulty managing their time. Others suffer from burnout because the line between home and office has blurred. Employee monitoring systems are one tool to help address these concerns, and they’re still evolving. In the pandemic era, solutions that have traditionally focused on tracking employee activity, logging suspicious behavior, and sniffing out possible insider threats are now pivoting to not only track productivity but also monitor health and wellness and even improve employee engagement. Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring For most of us, the idea of someone monitoring our computer usage is off-putting, at best. We value our privacy, and that extends to our PCs and devices. Nonetheless, our expectation of privacy in the workplace must necessarily be different than in our personal lives. Whether we work on our employer’s premises or remotely, typically neither the equipment we use nor the data that crosses our desktops belong to us. As such, many employers will have valid and even essential reasons to monitor how we use these assets throughout our day. One reason is to measure productivity. Managers don’t have the same visibility into how a distributed workforce spends its time as they do when employees all report to a central location. The same is true when the workforce is very large and turnover is high, as with call centers, for example. Tracking productivity has grown even more challenging since the pandemic because many remote workers must now juggle their nine-to-five jobs with half a dozen other personal tasks, like minding children or cooking family meals. Working from home challenges the pre-existing structure for productivity tracking, which means monitoring tools need to pivot, too. And using monitoring tools to log how much time employees spend on specific tasks can give managers insight into not just how individual workers are performing, but also how well current business processes are meeting company goals. Sometimes, this type of activity monitoring can also uncover bad behavior. Traditional security measures, such as firewalls, do a good job of defending against internet-based attacks. Still, they’re less effective against insider threats, where an employee has access to systems but uses that access in ways that violate company policy. In such cases, a detailed activity log can become important forensic evidence for disciplinary action or (in the worst cases) a lawsuit. Serious cases of employee misconduct often involve mishandling of sensitive information. This might mean trade secrets, but it could also mean specific classes of data that are protected under government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or the EU’s GDPR. Employee monitoring systems can help provide the information needed for a compliance audit. More sophisticated systems can even scan employees’ outgoing files, emails, and chats and flag or block messages that seem to violate policy before they’re transmitted. Such measures can be invaluable for preventing serious data breaches. However, it’s also important to consider the downsides of employee monitoring. Employers should consider carefully the amount and degree of monitoring they want to deploy. As mentioned earlier, many employees may feel uncomfortable with the thought that they’re being watched. An atmosphere of paranoia in the workplace can contribute to low morale, which could lead to staff attrition. It’s also important to note that productivity-monitoring efforts can sometimes backfire, yielding the opposite effect of what was intended. Employees who are aware that they’re being measured against productivity quotas may develop a pattern of trying to game the system by spending time in the apps and websites they think they’re expected to, rather than on activities that have material benefit for the company. Similarly, managers who are tasked with reviewing mountains of employee monitoring data might spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, even when the reports show few problem areas. Finally, employers should give special consideration to the ethical and potential legal ramifications of employee monitoring. Several of the products we tested allow you to install monitoring functions on employees’ machines without their knowledge and in ways that elude detection, but that doesn’t mean you should. This type of covert surveillance is not only the most invasive form of monitoring, but it could also run you afoul of laws in various jurisdictions. Countries, states and provinces, and even cities will all have their own thoughts on this, so tread carefully. What Does Employee Monitoring Software Do? Employee monitoring systems go beyond the core time tracking functionality of clock-ins, clock-outs, and managing workloads. While some of the vendors in this roundup are essentially tracking players that have added nifty monitoring features such as keystroke logging, location tracking, and screenshots, others offer deep monitoring platforms that track all employee activity. Particularly for large corporations that schedule thousands of shift workers in settings such as call centers, 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. To get started with productivity tracking, you’ll typically sort applications and websites into productive and unproductive categories. You’ll then break down how productive you expect each team, department, or individual employee to be. Productivity-scoring algorithms make it possible to measure individuals against their past performance, as well as that of their peers. This data is less about disciplining employees and more about helping teams course-correct and stay productive. Customization and user grouping are important here, because an app that’s deemed productive for one job function may be considered unproductive for another.
