Thanks for checking out the latest CurrentWare Video. In this video, we’re going to cover the reasons why you should monitor employee computer activity.
If you like this or other videos we’ve produced, hit the subscribe button below. Stay tuned to the end to learn how to get a free trial of all of the software I demo today.
Employee monitoring involves understanding how your employees are using company provided technology during work hours. There are five main benefits and considerations to employee monitoring that we will cover today:
So let’s start off with how monitoring can help employee productivity.
44% of employees admit to being distracted by the internet at work, and employees in the US have admitted to wasting 1-2 hours a day browsing the internet.
Employees that know they’re being monitored will avoid excessive personal usage of the internet and computer applications. In addition, in the event an employee is underperforming, employee monitoring reports on their computer activity can be used to help the employee understand their actions and enhance their productivity.
The second important reason to monitor activity is to address inappropriate internet usage & avoid legal liability.
As compliance requirements increase for various businesses, industries & jurisdictions, employers have a responsibility to ensure their employees are complying with regulations such as HIPAA, CCPA, CIPAA and GDPR.
By enabling computer monitoring, you can ensure that your staff are complying with these requirements. In addition, by monitoring & setting alerts, you can instantly be notified if employees are visiting inappropriate websites such as pornography, adult or other websites.
The third reason to monitor computer activity is for cybersecurity purposes & to prevent data loss.
By knowing which websites an employee is visiting, which files are being downloaded or shared, and which external devices and endpoints are being used, company administrators can manage cyber security risks and data loss prevention efforts.
Data breaches and associated risks can cost businesses millions of dollars in damages along with reputational risk, so being aware of these risks and monitoring them can provide significant benefits for every organization. In addition, by using alerts, and setting up risk profiles for users, you can audit activities and groups for questionable employee behavior.
Due to Covid-19, the year 2020 has seen a significant shift to remote work for various companies and organizations. This brings us to our 4th reason to monitor an employee’s computer usage: remote workforce management.
52% of CIOs surveyed suspect that one or more of their mobile workers have been hacked or caused a mobile security issue in the last 12 months. Employee monitoring software can be used to monitor for high-risk activity and verify that employee activity on company networks is legitimate.
The final reason to monitor employees is for bandwidth management purposes. With CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter tool, you can determine who is hogging bandwidth by streaming videos and uploading/downloading excessively large files.
Employees who are hogging bandwidth can slow down the entire network, negatively affecting the productivity of other employees and reducing the performance of business critical operations.
That’s it for this video. If you have any thoughts on this video or other reasons why computers should be monitored, feel free to comment below.
If you’d like to give any of CurrentWare’s computer and device monitoring solutions a try, please check out our free trial at currentware.com/download or get in touch with us and we’d be happy to help!
Note: The above video showcases a legacy user interface for BrowseReporter. To see the most up-to-date features and interface please visit the BrowseReporter product page
It’s a common myth that workforce analytics tools such as employee monitoring software is for spying on employees and micromanaging how they spend their time at work.
In reality, modern workforce analytics software tools are incredibly valuable for collecting and analyzing the employee data that business leaders such as HR professionals, managers, and IT professionals need to make data driven decisions about employee performance and workforce management.
They help predict and inform business outcomes with consistent, continuous measurement over time. This continuous data analysis provides far greater opportunities for workforce planning than traditional point-in-time surveys or subjective manager assessments
In this article I will outline the key benefits of workforce analytics with an emphasis on how collecting employee related data with CurrentWare’s computer monitoring software can help you make data-informed workforce management decisions.
Table of ContentsEmployee data is incredibly powerful for making informed management and business planning decisions. Workforce analytics data allows you to identify and track trends in employee engagement and make informed workforce planning decisions,
A Gallup report found that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $450 to $550 billion per year in lost productivity.
Without workforce analytics tools these actively disengaged employees will fly under the radar, giving them ample time to make poor business decisions and spread discontent among the entire organization well before their lack of job satisfaction is known.
Workforce analytics tools provide human resources professionals with the metrics they need to track the progress of key performance indicators that affect both individual performance and high-level business outcomes.
For example, worker related data such as internet and application usage can be used by HR teams to identify computer usage trends that negatively impact performance such as anomalous spikes in personal web browsing.
Employee performance monitoring and analytics tools provide insights on both a granular level (individual users or workgroups) and on a high level (departments, offices, and regions).
HR professionals can use the data gathered to compare the work habits of their most productive and engaged employees to those that appear to be struggling, giving them a suitable baseline for predictive analytics.
For further insights into employee productivity trends, an organization’s historical computer usage data can be integrated with existing data into business intelligence tools such as Tableau or BigQuery.
By leveraging historical data businesses can better understand productivity and engagement trends throughout their workforce.
It’s perfectly natural for employees to occasionally browse the internet for non-work purposes throughout the workday. So long as employees are meeting their objectives and not causing harm to others this practice is often overlooked entirely.
You trust your employees. You probably don’t care about a modest amount of personal browsing as long as the total time they spend on unrelated tasks isn’t excessive.
But how do you define excessive usage? Even with a definition in place you can’t measure it without accurate browsing data.
Once a threshold is established, self-monitoring becomes an important practice for keeping personal computer usage within an acceptable range while giving employees the autonomy to manage themselves.
From a business intelligence point of view this very same data can show you which employees or departments consistently spend a significant amount of time on unrelated websites and applications.
Consistent excessive browsing may be a sign that employees are underutilized or they may have excess downtime due to undiagnosed bottlenecks. With this data you can start asking the right questions to diagnose the issue at hand and reallocate resources as needed.
Replacing lost human capital carries a significant financial and logistical burden for HR leaders. Work Institute’s 2020 Retention Report found that it costs employers 30% or greater of a worker’s annual salary to hire a replacement if that worker leaves.
Between recruitment costs, lost productivity, and impacts on employee experience businesses need to focus on employee retention to stay competitive and retain their top talent. Focusing on an individual employee’s success both during hiring decisions and throughout the employment lifecycle is crucial for driving the overall success of an organization’s workforce.
Workforce analytics software is one of several tools available to HR departments to discover employee burnout risks so they can advocate for the redistribution of workloads before their high performers choose to leave.
How Analyzing People Data Helps Identify Burnout Risks:
A remote workforce provides unique management challenges. Monitoring the computer activity of off-site employees helps reduce the visibility gap and provide managers with actionable insights.
Monitoring remote workers provides business leaders with the insights they need to make educated resource management decisions. They can see exactly how employees are working and when they typically work so they can adjust their management style accordingly.
In addition, workforce analytics help organizations determine if allowing their employees to work from home will be beneficial for them. With workforce analytics software that can track progress and confirm that employees are productive when working from home
This data collection gives organizations the peace of mind they need to implement further initiatives such as flexible schedules and greater WFH opportunities in the near future. With these initiatives in place organizational teams will benefit from a greater global talent pool.
When you’re in charge of managing a remote team or a large department it can be difficult to get a feel for how well your team is using the resources available to them. Employee monitoring software can generate computer usage reports that help managers understand how their employees are using the internet and computer applications.
A shocking example of this is TechWiss Inc. They manage a distributed workforce across three different continents. One of their coders was repeatedly missing development milestones and they were faced with uncertainty as to why the developer was underperforming.
After reviewing the application usage data of the lone developer they realized that they weren’t using the company’s team chat platform as expected. When they looked into it they realized that the developer needed training and coaching to learn how to collaborate effectively with the software. The developers application usage history helped make this knowledge gap more apparent and prevented them from slipping through the cracks.
“Shadow IT” – also known as Stealth IT, Client IT, or Fake IT – is any system, solution, or software that’s used by the employees of an organization without the knowledge and approval of the corporate IT department. Research from Everest Group estimates that shadow IT comprises 50% or more of IT spending in large enterprises.
It’s true that unknown and unmanaged applications are a potential security vulnerability, though that’s going to be of more interest to your IT department. From a manager’s perspective, shadow technologies are often productivity boosting solutions that could be officially adopted for everyone’s benefit.
By monitoring computer usage managers can receive an overview of the programs and web-based tools used by their department. This gives them the opportunity to learn about these solutions so they can advocate for their official adoption. Once cleared by the corporate IT department these innovative solutions can be shared within the workgroup.
Tracking application usage is a critical component of an effective software asset management strategy.
Underutilized software cost businesses in the US and UK an estimated $34 billion per year. With the increasing popularity of software-as-a-service solutions businesses need to understand the utilization rate of the software they pay for to save on operating expenses.
Application tracking gives you the data you need to determine if existing solutions need to be decommissioned or if a greater volume of licenses are required.
For smaller teams much of this data can be readily found through team meetings but as the organization scales the increased visibility offered by computer monitoring software helps the company run leaner by identifying and decommissioning software that is no longer needed.
In addition, individual teams can use cloud and desktop applications usage data to demonstrate the need for software upgrades and additional tools.
Upgrading network infrastructure is time consuming and expensive. Oftentimes slow network speeds can be readily diagnosed by monitoring bandwidth usage for excessive consumption.
For example, streaming a 4K Ultra HD Netflix video consumes 7GB of data per hour. Rather than investing in costly upgrades the company can provide guidelines for the acceptable use of technology in the workplace.
Bandwidth usage data provides an objective overview of how much bandwidth is consumed, which departments require the most bandwidth, and whether that bandwidth consumption is a result of genuine business need or as a result of a misuse of company resources.
CurrentWare’s computer monitoring tools provide key features such as workforce analytics dashboards that allow you to analyze data on both individuals and groups.
The CurrentWare Suite can collect data on:
The data from CurrentWare’s computer usage monitoring tools can be exported in .xlsx format, allowing you to combine its data with traditional workforce analytics and business intelligence tools.
Employee monitoring software collects valuable computer usage data. By integrating this data into existing analytics processes you can gain advanced insights into the behaviors of your entire workforce. These insights help you make data-informed decisions that improve the productivity and future potential of your business.
Ready to get advanced insights into how your employees spend their time? Reach out to the CurrentWare team for a demo of BrowseReporter, CurrentWare’s employee and computer monitoring software.
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
__cfruid | session | Cloudflare sets this cookie to identify trusted web traffic. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement | 1 year | Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional | 11 months | The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". |
JSESSIONID | session | The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. |
LS_CSRF_TOKEN | session | Cloudflare sets this cookie to track users’ activities across multiple websites. It expires once the browser is closed. |
OptanonConsent | 1 year | OneTrust sets this cookie to store details about the site's cookie category and check whether visitors have given or withdrawn consent from the use of each category. |
viewed_cookie_policy | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
__cf_bm | 30 minutes | This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. |
_zcsr_tmp | session | Zoho sets this cookie for the login function on the website. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_calendly_session | 21 days | Calendly, a Meeting Schedulers, sets this cookie to allow the meeting scheduler to function within the website and to add events into the visitor’s calendar. |
_gaexp | 2 months 11 days 7 hours 3 minutes | Google Analytics installs this cookie to determine a user's inclusion in an experiment and the expiry of experiments a user has been included in. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_ga | 2 years | The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors. |
_ga_GY6RPLBZG0 | 2 years | This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. |
_gcl_au | 3 months | Provided by Google Tag Manager to experiment advertisement efficiency of websites using their services. |
_gid | 1 day | Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. |
CONSENT | 2 years | YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_opt_expid | past | Set by Google Analytics, this cookie is created when running a redirect experiment. It stores the experiment ID, the variant ID and the referrer to the page that is being redirected. |
IDE | 1 year 24 days | Google DoubleClick IDE cookies are used to store information about how the user uses the website to present them with relevant ads and according to the user profile. |
NID | 6 months | NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. |
test_cookie | 15 minutes | The test_cookie is set by doubleclick.net and is used to determine if the user's browser supports cookies. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 5 months 27 days | A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. |
YSC | session | YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. |
yt-remote-connected-devices | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
yt-remote-device-id | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
yt.innertube::nextId | never | This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
yt.innertube::requests | never | This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_dc_gtm_UA-6494714-6 | 1 minute | No description |
_gaexp_rc | past | No description available. |
34f6831605 | session | No description |
383aeadb58 | session | No description available. |
663a60c55d | session | No description available. |
6e4b8efee4 | session | No description available. |
c72887300d | session | No description available. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-tracking | 1 year | No description |
crmcsr | session | No description available. |
currentware-_zldp | 2 years | No description |
currentware-_zldt | 1 day | No description |
et_pb_ab_view_page_26104 | session | No description |
gaclientid | 1 month | No description |
gclid | 1 month | No description |
handl_ip | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_landing_page | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_original_ref | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_ref | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_ref_domain | 1 month | No description |
handl_url | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_url_base | 1 month | No description |
handlID | 1 month | No description |
HandLtestDomainName | session | No description |
HandLtestDomainNameServer | 1 day | No description |
isiframeenabled | 1 day | No description available. |
m | 2 years | No description available. |
nitroCachedPage | session | No description |
organic_source | 1 month | No description |
organic_source_str | 1 month | No description |
traffic_source | 1 month | No description available. |
uesign | 1 month | No description |
user_agent | 1 month | No description available. |
ZCAMPAIGN_CSRF_TOKEN | session | No description available. |
zld685336000000002056state | 5 minutes | No description |