Whether your workforce is remote, on-site, or a hybrid mix, using employee monitoring software is an easy, empowering way to boost your productivity. It does this by providing employers with greater insight into their employees’ work habits, including when they work and a great deal about how they work.
In the hands of a progressive organization that knows what it’s doing, employee monitoring software is the easiest way to check for productivity indicators that can contribute to employee engagement.
Before you rush out and buy the first employee monitoring package you see, though, don’t miss our buying guide to today’s best employee monitoring software!
What is Employee Monitoring Software?
Put simply, employee monitoring software is a collection of activity monitoring methods that businesses have used for some time. The benefits they can have are almost unlimited: they help employers know where their employees are at all times, allowing for upgraded security and assisting employers in optimizing their inefficient workflows.
How to Choose Employee Monitoring Software?
The best SMBs didn’t just get to where they are by adopting the first employee tracking software they found: they also chose an employee monitoring software that fostered team communication. Having a solution that can adequately alert you when employees are unproductive, idle, or even attempting to leak business information can go a long way towards ensuring business success.
Here are the main things you should look for to choose an employee monitoring software:
- Content Filtering Features: A must-have for any modern employer since they allow you to control your employees’ internet time and directly reduce the amount of time they remain idle.
- Keylogging Features and Screenshots: If you want to have even greater insights into employees’ productivity, keylogging capabilities are also useful, along with solutions that take frequent screenshots of employees’ monitors.
- Blocking Features: Equally, if not more, immediately desirable in employee monitoring technology, as you can use them to block major social media or video sharing sites like FaceBook, YouTube, or even Instagram.
- Website, Email, and App Monitoring: You should also put some thought into the areas of computer activity you wish to track. Comprehensive employee tracking solutions will keep detailed logs of the apps your employees use, the emails they open, and the websites they visit.
- Support and Ease-of-Use: Good employee tracking solutions should always be easy and intuitive to use, with visually uncluttered UI. However, if you run into issues, you always want to work with a company that offers immediate and comprehensive support for its employee tracking software products.
The Only Buying Guide to Employee Monitoring Software You’ll Ever Need!
Managing productivity can be difficult, especially during a global pandemic, when half of your workforce has to stay home. Employee monitoring solutions are an immediate fix to the problems of a hybrid workforce, and below, you’ll find our picks for the best employee monitoring software on the market today:
One of the best employee monitoring software packages, Teramind has made a name for itself with the most over-the-top employee monitoring methods you’ll find. The software gives you immediate access to many monitoring methods, like live views of employee PCs, keystroke loggers, and even tracking emails on their work accounts.
Pros:
- A comprehensive suite of tracking tools.
- Intuitive and easy-to-understand UI and dashboard.
- It comes with keystroke loggers for employee PCs.
- Easily deployable across Cloud-based or on-premise work environments.
Cons:
- The one glaring con of Teramind has to be that most of its in-depth monitoring features are extremely hard to use and usually require a tutorial beforehand.
ActivTrak has become equally famous in the employee monitoring software market because of two main things: a simple primary interface and monitoring methods that focus on boosting worker productivity. It has built-in solutions for tracking remote workers, which is a significant blessing for any company forced to distance employees because of the pandemic.
Pros:
- Easy agent installation that you can complete in a few minutes.
- Can determine when employees are accessing significant sites like YouTube and Facebook.
- Tracks employee productivity at frequent checkpoints and provides a per-project view.
- Employers and supervisors can use monitored insights to improve the quality of employee coaching massively.
Cons:
- Doesn’t include keystroke logging solutions.
- It has to be fine-tuned before you can utilize the user and group productivity metrics.
One of the best employee monitoring software built for larger companies and SMBs, InterGuard comes with an optimized user interface and a treasure trove of productivity monitoring features. This software package has automatic alerts designed for larger businesses, and just like ActivTrak, it is also customized to work exceptionally well for SMBs with a remote workforce.
Pros:
- You get a broad selection of add-on features and modules.
- Convenient search function to quickly bring up any employee’s metrics and charts.
- Comes with helpful endpoint lockdown capability.
- Includes automated reporting and notification functions to make the job easier.
Cons:
- Not made for smaller SMBs, as more than ten licenses are required.
- Modules are costly, and you should think carefully before buying them.
One of the best lower-end Employee monitoring software solutions we’ve seen, VeriClock is an excellent time tracking solution for SMBs, and also comes with an easy-to-use and intuitive, if somewhat barebones, mobile app.
Pros:
- Ideal for managing a small team of remote work employees.
- Very affordable pricing makes it appealing.
- Includes versatile clock-in options like mobile, SMS, or phone.
Cons:
- The UI can feel very bare at times.
- The mobile app opens several commonly used functions in a browser window instead.
Veriato Cerebral is undeniably one of the best employee monitoring software we’ve seen. It delivers a complex and yet easy-to-use employee management platform that does a robust job of boosting employee productivity while also minimizing the risk of internal threats.
Pros:
- Unmatched insights into employee activity.
- Powerful and robust insider-threat detection.
- Helpful risk-score dashboard for on-the-go threat detection.
- Veriato can measure and analyze employee engagement.
- Combines monitoring solutions and analytics capabilities in one interface.
Cons:
- The pricing plans can start getting ridiculous if purchased for larger teams.
- Massive size can sometimes cause lag on unoptimized systems and servers.
The Pandemic Effect
The ongoing pandemic has introduced several challenges that prevent companies from operating at 100% capability. Ensuring proper business continuity and optimized work productivity, and enforcing data security compliance outside premise walls have become some of the biggest challenges yet.
And that’s not it: the immediate shift to remote working has put power in the hands of cloud-based competitors in every field since they already had the infrastructure set up for an entirely remote workforce.
If you want your company to stride ahead, using Employee monitoring software is more or less a must. The usefulness of these innovative data collection methods skyrockets when you apply them in the context of the modern workplace. Modern employee monitoring tools help you, the employer, analyze the performance of your employees and increase work productivity by monitoring and analyzing work behavior.
Conclusion
Regardless of challenges like the pandemic, teams still need to work together towards common goals, and supervisors must meet productivity quotas. Employee monitoring software systems might be seen as invasive. Still, careful planning helps you ensure that these innovative tracking solutions can be added to your human resources process to further boost your company’s productivity!