Employee monitoring: The need of the hour

COVID19 has made industries, companies, and government offices shut down. This projected an adverse effect on different industries, mainly the services industry. Work from home was the last resort for employees as well as employers. But the technological barrier was on the troubled node. Different challenges come tagged along with work from home, such as internet connectivity, lack of proper hardware, security issues, etc. But the most troubling one among them was lack of efficiency in employees. Employees being away from the office didn’t have anyone buzzing over them to get over the work provided in the stipulated time. The absence of physical presence is what made the employees lighten their work in the first place. All the presence that the employer or supervisor could manage was being present over video calls taking mandatory progress reports of the work given. Regular surveillance was completely out of the equation. This catalyzed the growth of clinomania among the employees hence diminishing their efficiency a lot.

A one-stop solution to all such problems faced by employers is employee computer monitoring software. This software is used to supervise and administer the systems currently in use by the employees. Multiple systems can be observed and procured from a central location. This software serves the main purpose of supervising employees, tracking progress reports, avoiding leaking confidential information, etc. This software is dominantly used in the IT services industry for their employees working from home. These softwares have several employee monitoring tools.

Some of those tools are listed below:

1) Surveillance over apps and websites: By using employee monitoring software strict observation can be made on the current apps and websites in use by the employees. It also tracks the time spent by the employee on different apps and websites. Additionally, it also has the feature to categorize the apps and websites as productive or not productive. This can either be done by taking into account a pre-decided list given by the employer or by the cognizance of the software itself. This feature is very vital in maintaining the efficiency among employees even from home as the same that they had in office.

2) Screenshot alert: Services-based IT firms work on contracts with different clients. These clients can be domestic as well as international. Their demand or nature of the project might be poles apart, but the requirement that is identical in all of the clients is utmost privacy. Data leak is a big no in these firms; as the nature of work is highly confidential. To prevent these types of incidents employee monitoring softwares has a dedicated feature. This feature allows the proctor to obtain the screenshot of the employee working on a project at random times. Even if the proctor is engaged elsewhere and any employee is up to some malicious activity, then the system sends the screenshot of the employee to the proctor automatically.

3) Activity tracking: This feature is especially embedded in employee monitoring software to keep an activity log of the employees, the amount of time that the employee has been active and working, idle sitting time of the employees, etc. The threshold time limit can also be set for the employees to work or sit idle, exceeding which an info message would be delivered to both the employees and employers. The feature is very useful in counting the work hours or the ideal sitting time of the employees. Thereby providing vitals to construct the performance report of the employees. It also records the session timing of the employees.

4) Time and attendance: Employee monitoring softwares also have a specifically inbuilt time and attendance feature. It proves to be vital in maintaining the productivity of employees. It records the login and logout times of the employees. Hence clocking the amount of time for which they were present and were working. Daily attendance of the employees in a virtual manner was something that was a difficult task in these times. Without proper infrastructure, this was a big challenge. But the facilitation of employee monitoring software made these difficulties a breeze. This feature has also enhanced the making of performance reports of the employees as two vital features are involved in its attendance and time monitoring.

5) Stealth mode: Employee monitoring softwares also have a stealth mode feature on using it the software can camouflage itself. This lets the employer know about the true color of the employees. On knowing that there is no vigilance software installed within their systems, the employees will do what they want to, either the work given to them or something of their own. This helps the companies recognize their true employees who are committed to their work. They are the only one’s deserving increment, promotions, offshore posting, etc. This mode also helps catch the ones who leak the coveted confidential information related to a project.

6) Security: In a world full of hackers, crackers, cyberbullies, etc. security is quite an important aspect. To ensure proper security and protection of the clients and their precious data employee monitoring softwares take special care. It has solid security systems like network health check-ups and remote barge-in. Apart from this data security and its transfer, access to information also are some of the necessary things which it accounts for, to run the show straight, simple and secure.

7) Coordination: Any IT firm that has multiple teams for a project or multiple projects so that the employees given parts of work can coordinate with one other to get their share done and submit the work before the deadline. But what good is a team if the members can’t coordinate or communicate for that matter thus tarnishing the whole meaning of a team? With COVID still around team members cannot meet each other and other video calling platforms are a big no for obvious reasons such as performance and privacy concerns. But employee monitoring software has got your back here too with one on one interaction features between employees and managers or admins; communication isn’t a problem anymore.

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