It seems that the popularity of various software solutions for monitoring activities on corporate computers is growing by the day. But what exactly is this system, why is it so widely in demand and is it really affecting that much change on how companies are operating?
Let’s start with a little bit of basic background information. Monitoring software is a program that you install on all of your employees’ computers and its task is to give you data on the activities that are being performed. It monitors which apps your employees are using and for how long, but it can also track employee internet usage, measure their productivity, take attendance, and even act as a screen watching software by offering you to take screenshots of employees’ computers.
Considering all of these functionalities, how can monitoring employees on networks and tracking their computer activities change the way you run your company?
Reporting
One major shift in the business world that employee tracking software is likely to bring is greater automaticity in work reporting, which means less need for employees to justify their time or report on their activities.
The software collects data on a lot of things you need to know. Live computer monitoring software can tell you what each of your employees is working on in real-time, so finding out whether someone is available takes one less step by eliminating the need to ask them. You also get overall reports on employees’ active time. Therefore, you’re able to know what each portion of their day was dedicated to, how much time they spent on certain tasks, and if you know how to track websites visited by employees, you can also analyze how much time they waste on social and work-unrelated activities.
In a way, your company tracking employees, and especially their computer activities, is a step towards greater employee autonomy on the one hand, and yet wider manager overview of all activities on the other.
Compliance with Working Hours
A particularly useful feature of some monitoring platforms is automatic attendance tracking. Basically, the way it works is by detecting the first computer activity and registering it as a clock-in and the last activity as a clock-out. Based on this, an employee tracking system compiles automatic attendance sheets and even records overtime and calculates payroll and billable hours.
The first obvious benefit of this feature of employer software monitor system is the fact that the attendance taking process is automated, accurate and completely immune to buddy punching and other methods of time theft.
The second advantage is that it’s not directly linked to the office, but to employees’ computers, so you can have monitoring software for laptop devices. This enables more companies to embrace remote work while still maintaining compliance with office hours. And in addition, it makes flexible working hours a much more organized and reliable system.
Client Management
Software monitoring industry is a relatively young field but it’s developing fairly quickly. For instance, some sophisticated systems now offer multiple access options, and one of them is client login.
In a nutshell, you can give your clients access to your online time management system but they’ll only be able to see data relevant to their own projects. They can then see how their project is moving along, how much time was dedicated to which tasks, whether deadlines are likely to be met and how many billable hours have been put into the project.
These detailed insights into their projects accessed through the gated login can drastically change your client management strategies by creating more accountability and transparency, as well as enabling you to better estimate project duration.
Employee Evaluations
Everything about PC monitoring software is there to help you measure your employees’ performance. So learning how to monitor computer user activity to this end will open up the door for better employee evaluations.
The software will track and report on many aspects of work, such as time employees spend on tasks, the time they spend on unproductive activities, whether they’re coming to work on time, etc. It can even track productivity and calculate whether employees are improving or not.
All of this data can serve as one more factor in evaluating employees which will make your feedback more objective but which will also give you an opportunity to recognize productivity, hard work, and progress as additional metrics of success.
Conclusion
As we have seen so far, a lot of the features of computer tracking software are really useful for a company. Is this enough for it to change the entire business world? This remains to be seen if a big enough number of companies decide to implement it in order to make it a norm. But for now, one thing is certain - monitoring software does indeed change the processes and improves the accountability of every business that uses it.