Employee Internet Monitoring Software
BrowseReporter is an easy-to-use employee internet monitoring tool for tracking the web pages visited throughout an entire network—even on Terminal Server and Remote Desktop Services!.
Collect and compare application and internet usage data to detect insider threats, investigate who is visiting certain sites, and get alerts of users using company computers inappropriately.
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What is Internet Monitoring?
Internet monitoring is the practice of collecting and analyzing the data of websites visited by users, departments, or individual devices.
When monitoring employee internet use with internet monitoring software this data is gathered into reports for review by business owners, human resources, and management to address bandwidth usage, employee productivity, and inappropriate internet usage.
The Goals of Employee Internet Monitoring Software
Internet monitoring software has a variety of potential functions depending on the needs of your organization.
Improve Productivity
Monitoring network activity with an internet monitoring tool allows you to see how much time an employee spends on the internet during the work day. The purpose behind tracking employee productivity is clear – you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Employee Internet monitoring tools include reports that provide a valuable data-informed baseline to manage productivity by measuring project progress and employee output alongside trends in their Internet browsing habits.
Productivity Coaching
Employee Internet monitoring reports can act as an important performance monitoring tool in conjunction with other metrics when addressing productivity concerns during coaching or performance reviews.
When there is a noticeable decline in engagement or productivity you can track employee web activity to identify trends in how their web browsing habits have changed and have an open discussion about their workplace satisfaction, productivity blocks, and job expectations.
Managing Your Employees Effectively
One of the key benefits of implementing software to monitor online activity is that you can collect the data you need to make informed decisions when managing your employees, giving you another avenue for staying in touch with trends in your workforce during moments where you cannot always be there in person.
Know How Employees are Spending Their Time
Tracking employee web activity with employee internet monitoring software gives you insights into how your employees interact with the devices on your networks with reports for not only Internet usage but software application usage as well.
If you typically expect that the majority of your customer service department’s workdays would be spent using your helpdesk software application, you may be surprised to see a sudden spike in their Internet usage or an unexpected drop in their helpdesk software usage – is the helpdesk down?
Are your employees suddenly on strike or are they frantically searching the web for troubleshooting and customer support numbers? With employee internet monitoring software you can configure alerts when usage activity falls out expectations, giving you insights into these sort of unexpected changes in your workforce.
Balance Workloads
If your software to monitor internet activity allows for reports based on user or device groups, you can organize your monitoring data into departments or project teams to compare their web and application usage to that of your other teams/departments to determine if workloads need to be adjusted.
If a given department is frequently an outlier for excessive non-work Internet usage it may indicate that that department is either blocked in their tasks or they are underworked in comparison to your other teams/departments.
Improve Visibility of Remote Workers
Remote workers can sometimes have a difficult time having their contributions noticed and demonstrating that they are working at a level that is expected of them. By monitoring both your in-house and remote workers you can readily compare your reports from both arms of your organization to ensure they are matching expectations.
Track Bandwidth Usage
Streaming a 4K Ultra HD Netflix video consumes 7GB of data per hour. Employees that misuse the internet in their workplace aren’t only harming their own productivity, they also strain the available bandwidth and make network speeds slower for their coworkers.
Your IT department can use internet monitoring software to track bandwidth usage for these unwanted bandwidth hogs so they can be addressed.
- Internet Connections: Reduce latency by monitoring your network for users and computers with excessive bandwidth usage
- Network Upgrades: Collect the bandwidth usage data needed to determine whether upgrades are truly necessary or if the problem lies with the misuse of technology by a large number of users
- Threat Detection: Detect unexpected bandwidth usage spikes caused by dangerous P2P file sharing programs and malicious software.
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BrowseReporter – Employee Internet Monitoring Software
BrowseReporter provides an in-depth analysis for monitoring internet activities and usage of your employees. It features extensive reports and dashboards with data about your employee’s web browsing activity.
The Report Manager offers the flexibility of analyzing the data based on your employee’s internet usage. Reports such as sites visited, duration of visit, time of visit and bandwidth consumption are presented at both the detail and summary levels.
BrowseReporter’s monitoring solution can monitor internet activity of a specific user or computer. If an employee or a student uses multiple computers, BrowseReporter will track the browsing activity of this user on all the corresponding computers.
Employee Computer Activity Dashboards & Reports
BrowseReporter’s user activity dashboards and computer usage reports give you the insights you need to identify productivity leaks, detect excessive bandwidth usage, reduce software costs, and improve business intelligence.
User Activity Dashboards
- Use the collected data to review aggregated results of your entire workforce or drill down to individual users
- Select the date range and activities you want to populate the dashboard with
- Use the activity log to review raw data; add/remove columns, sort data, and export to .XLSX or .PDF
Track Productive vs Unproductive Time
- View time spent on productive vs unproductive web browsing & app use
- Customize to what is considered productive in your organization
- Compare trends in aggregated & individual productivity over time
- Use IP-based location tracking to compare productivity levels between time spent in-office vs time spent working remotely
Idle Time Tracking
- Find out when remote employees are idling for too long or spending too much of their working hours on non-work related activities
- Customize idle time based on the last keyboard/mouse inputs
- Discover which departments or employees are the most active
Bandwidth Monitoring
- Detect bandwidth-hogging websites on your network
- Review bandwidth usage trends to inform network capacity planning
- See which individual users or groups have the greatest bandwidth usage
Track Website & Application Usage
- Detect the use of unauthorized software applications
- Track which apps & sites employees use solo, as a team, or as a company
- Determine software adoption rates with usage data for apps and SaaS sites
Take Screenshots Of Your Employees’ Desktops
- Capture high-resolution and compressed screenshots of your employee’s desktops to see exactly what they're doing on their computers.
- The employee screenshot monitoring software feature can be configured to automatically delete older screenshots to reduce storage requirements
- Screenshots are tagged with the website or application that was being used, the time, and the name of the computer that was captured
Keep a Pulse on Team Activity
- Get high-level views of the recent activity of individual users and teams
- Easily see who is online now and who hasn’t logged in today
- Track your users’ most recent productivity, activity, availability status
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Flexible Deployment Options
On-Premises | Remote Workers | Self-Managed Cloud Platforms
When you use CurrentWare's solutions the data you collect remains solely in your control, giving you the flexibility to decide where data is stored and for how long. Your employee’s data cannot be accessed by CurrentWare.
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Deploy the Software
Install the Console & Server on a computer, server, or a cloud platform of your choice. Then deploy the Clients to your users’ computers.
Manage your Users
Organize your PCs/Users into custom policy groups. Get advanced awareness & control over how technology is used in your organization.
Ready to Monitor Employee Internet Use?
Analyze your employees’ work habits and productivity
How to Prevent Excessive Usage of Distracting Websites with Internet Monitoring Software
If you do not wish to explicitly block access to certain websites or website categories, you can approach your employee monitoring and productivity strategy by tracking employee web activity for excessive usage of non-work websites rather than blocking those websites entirely.
Set specified limits for how long a given website can be used per day
Use time-based filtering to prevent access to websites outside of designated hours (breaks, before their shift, before peak working hours).
Have your internet monitoring software alert management of excessive non-work Internet usage only after your determined threshold is exceeded (time spent as a percentage or after a determined amount of hours/minutes.
Learn More: How to Monitor Internet Usage
Website Categories That Are Often Monitored
The websites that are monitored by your organization will likely fall into general categories.
Many internet monitoring software solutions can be configured to generate reports when websites within this category are accessed, alerting you to employees that are using your organization’s network inappropriately.
Common categories include: Adult-Oriented, Sexually Explicit/Pornographic Content, Vulgar Themes/Profanity, Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco, Gambling, Dating, Chats, Computer Games, Hate, Humor, Malicious Websites, Virus Infected Sites, Phishing Scams, Spam, Social Media, Warez Sites, Torrents, Software Cracks, Online Piracy, Illegal Video Streaming.
Should You Block or Monitor Internet Use?
You have the option to either proactively prevent access to websites that are deemed inappropriate for your workplace or you can have website access reports generated for review, giving greater flexibility.
When potentially inappropriate websites are accessed by your employees, employee internet monitoring software can generate reports and send them to designated persons that have a legitimate business need for that data such as managers, information technologists (IT), or human resources (HR) staff.
Whether a given website or website category is monitored or filtered depends on your reasons for monitoring internet activities, your organization’s needs and values, and the nature of the websites that are being accessed by your employees.
Websites that clearly have no legitimate business reason for being accessed at work in most workplaces (such as pornography or dating websites) are often proactively filtered to prevent access altogether in an effort to not only prevent distractions and increase productivity, but also to prevent the formation of a hostile work environmen.
Learn More: Internet Monitoring Software vs Web Filtering Software
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How to Address Objections to Internet Monitoring Software?
The world of employee monitoring is a bit of a double-edged sword. As an employer you want to use software to monitor internet activity to keep your data and systems secure and use the data you collect to better manage your workforce, but for your employees the feeling of having an all-seeing eye watching over them might make cause privacy concerns or the feeling that they aren’t trusted to manage their own workstyles.
The key to a successful employee monitoring strategy is to foster employee buy-in. Your employees need to know that their privacy is respected, that they are trusted, and that the data collected isn’t going to be used as the only context for validating their performance.
When you develop your employee monitoring policy, it helps to get feedback from your employees and really show them the benefits of your strategy. By giving your employees an element of input during the process they’ll feel less like employee monitoring is being forced on them and more like they had an opportunity to contribute to the development of a policy that is fair for both parties.
Be Transparent About Employee Activity Monitoring
Employees that are not aware that they are being monitored, why they are being monitored, and how they are being monitored are less likely to find the use of employee computer monitoring software acceptable.
CurrentWare’s employee and computer monitoring software solutions can be deployed with an optional stealth mode or configured to periodically notify employees that they are being monitored.
- Turn on BrowseReporter’s End Users Reports feature to give employees access to their data. This gives them the autonomy to monitor their own productivity.
- Disclose the scope of employee monitoring during onboarding and within company policies.
- Make sure employees understand how data is being collected, what data is being collected, and how it will be used.
How to Increase Buy-in for Employee Monitoring
- Consult your employees. Involve a representative sample of employees to ensure that their voices are heard. Allow them to voice any concerns they have regarding your use of employee computer monitoring software.
- Do not track more than necessary. Only collect, store, and use the types of data that are adequate and relevant for the stated purposes. Overly invasive monitoring methods such as capturing individual keystrokes and webcam feeds are highly likely to infringe on employee privacy rights unless there is a legitimate business need that cannot be adequately met through less invasive methods.
- Limit access to employee monitoring data. Restricting access to monitoring data to a “need to know” basis limits opportunities for misuse. Use CurrentWare’s operator permissions to password protect the console and limit who has access to certain features.
Protect Employee Monitoring Data From Misuse
Employee monitoring data can be sensitive. Organizations need to ensure that administrative and technical security measures are in place to prevent data from being misused or leaked to unauthorized parties.
- Password-protect employee data. The CurrentWare Console can be password protected to limit who has access to employee computer activity data.
- Limit data access. With CurrentWare's Operator Accounts you can provide a manager with access to their department's data without providing them with the data of other departments. You can also use the email reports feature to automatically send data about specific users/PCs on a regular basis.
- Only use employee computer activity data for its intended purpose. If employees consent to their data being collected for the purpose of enforcing acceptable use policies it is critical that it is not reappropriated for another purpose without their explicit and informed consent.
Only Monitor What is Needed
Employee monitoring is unique for every organization, and yours is no exception.
When you monitor your employees the best practice is to only monitor what is needed to meet your organization’s goals.
Rather than monitoring every single action your employees take without a clear reason to do so, you should map your clearly defined goals to the data points you need to collect in order to meet them.
This ensures that the monitoring methods used are as minimally invasive as is needed to meet your goals. You’ll also improve buy-in by clearly demonstrating the intended purpose of the monitoring.
Get Informed Consent From Monitored Employees
When implementing an employee monitoring solution, get explicit and informed consent from your employees that they are going to be monitored.
Even if there are no laws that specifically require that you disclose to employees that they are being monitored, it is the best practice to do so anyway.
How in-depth you explain the process is up to the discretion and unique needs of your organization, however it is best to be as open as possible and have your employees read and sign an employee monitoring policy.
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Learn The Best Practices for Monitoring Employees
Follow these best practices to increase buy-in for employee monitoring. Learn how to create a monitoring strategy that is transparent, fair, and respectful of employee privacy.
Employee and Computer Monitoring Features
Computer Activity Reports
Reports and dashboards for monitoring computer activity
Screenshot Monitoring
Take automatic screenshots or remotely view desktops
Track App Usage
Track employee computer usage on Windows applications
Idle Time Tracking
Track mouse and keyboard movement to monitor inactivity
Bandwidth Tracking
Find users that are hogging the network's bandwidth
Tracking Scheduler
Only track user computer activity during work hours
Internet Monitoring
Monitor web browsing, keyword searches, and more
URL Category Tracking
Each website is automatically categorized to help identify URLs
Email Reports
Automatically send computer activity reports to designated inboxes on a set schedule
Email Alerts
Send email alerts to authorities when user browsing has exceeded company web policies
End-User Reports
Provide your employees with on-demand access to their own user activity data
Stealth & Transparent Modes
The software can run silently in the background or be configured to alert users
Centralized Console
Manage all your users from the
centralized console with Active
Directory import or syncing
Platform Security
Protect your CurrentWare console
with 2FA, passwords, privilege
management, and more
Offsite Management
Monitor remote employees and students no matter what network they connect to
SQL Server Supported
Database scaled for enterprise and
large business operations using
Microsoft SQL Server
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