Best Employee Tracking Software 2023 (2023)

Some managers love ithybrid radiationOthers hate it too, but the reality is that it will stay. Even before the global pandemic made it a necessity, many companies were already trying to enable remote work for some of their employees, even a few days a week.

However, the hybrid work model creates challenges for managers. More importantly, it leaves them at a loss when it comes to understanding the productivity of their employees. They lack the perspective they would have if employees were working locally, including not only how much work they are doing, but also the quality of the work and the reasons for any changes.

Hybrid work gives employees more freedom to manage their workday as they see fit, which many employees see as an advantage. However, some employees struggle with this self-directed model and find it difficult to manage their time. Others suffer from burnout because the line between home and office is blurred.

Employee tracking systems are one tool to address these issues and they are still evolving. In the age of the pandemic, solutions that have traditionally focused on monitoring employee activity, logging suspicious behavior, and detecting potential insider threats are now focused not only on monitoring productivity, but also on monitoring health and wellness, and even improve employee engagement.

With that in mind, it's the best employee tracking software we've tested. Check out our top picks, plus everything you need to know about choosing the right software for your needs.

Deeper Dive: Our Most Tested Picks

Buyer's Guide: The Best Employee Tracking Software of 2023

Advantages and Disadvantages of Employee Monitoring

For most of us, the idea of ​​someone else monitoring your computer use is sickening at best. We value our privacy, and that includes our computers and devices. However, our expectations for privacy in the workplace should be different than in our personal lives. Whether we work at our employer's premises or remotely, we generally do not own the equipment we use or the data that passes through our desktop computers. As such, many employers will have compelling or even compelling reasons to monitor how we use these resources throughout the day.

One reason is to measure productivity. Managers do not have the same perception of how a distributed workforce spends its time as when all employees are centrally located. The same is true when the workforce is very large and turnover is high, such as in a call center. Keeping up with productivity has become an even greater challenge since the pandemic, as many remote workers now have to juggle their nine-to-five hours with half a dozen other personal tasks, like babysitting or cooking family meals. . Working from home challenges the existing productivity tracking framework, which means tracking tools need to be rotated as well. Using tracking tools to record the time employees spend on specific tasks can give managers insight not only into individual employee performance, but also how current business processes are meeting company goals.

Sometimes this type of activity tracking can also catch bad behavior. Traditional security measures, such as firewalls, protect well against Internet attacks. However, they are less effective against insider threats when an employee has access to systems but uses that access in a way that violates company policies. In these cases, a detailed activity log can become important forensic evidence for disciplinary action or (in the worst case) prosecution.

Serious employee misconduct often involves the mishandling of confidential information. This can mean trade secrets, but it can also mean certain kinds of data that are protected by government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or the EU.DEMONSTRATION. Employee tracking systems can help provide the information needed for a compliance audit. The most sophisticated systems can even scan outgoing files, emails and employee chats and flag or block messages that appear to violate the rules before they are sent. Such measures can be invaluable in preventing big data breaches.

However, it's also important to consider the downsides of employee tracking. Employers should carefully consider the scope and degree of supervision they wish to implement. As mentioned above, many employees may feel uncomfortable being watched. A paranoid atmosphere in the workplace can contribute to low morale, which can lead to staff turnover.

It should also be noted that performance monitoring efforts can sometimes backfire, producing the opposite of what was intended. Employees who know they are being tested against productivity limits may develop a pattern of trying to cheat the system by spending time on apps and websites where they believe it is expected, rather than on activities that materially benefit the company. Similarly, managers tasked with reviewing large amounts of employee monitoring data may spend excessive time doing so, even if the reports show few problem areas.

Finally, employers should pay special attention to the potential legal and ethical implications of employee tracking. Several products we've tested allow you to install surveillance features on employees' computers without their knowledge and in a way that avoids detection, but that doesn't mean you should. This type of surveillance is not only the most invasive form of surveillance, but it can also leave you vulnerable to breaches in various jurisdictions. Countries, states and provinces and even cities will have their own opinion on this, so proceed with caution.

What does employee tracking software do?

Employee tracking systems go beyond the brandtime trackingcheck-in and check-out functionality and cargo management. While some of the service providers in this roundup are basically player trackers that have added nifty tracking features like keystroke logging, location tracking, and screenshots, others offer in-depth monitoring platforms that track all activity. of the employees. Especially for large corporations budgeting thousandsshift workersin settings for examplecall center, employee monitoring agents installed on company machines provide these companies with complete visibility and traceability of their operations.

Employee monitoring agents also collect key data on employee performance. To start tracking your productivity, you typically divide your apps and websites into productive and non-productive categories. Next, you'll discuss the expected productivity of each team, department, or individual employee. Productivity evaluation algorithms allow you to compare people with their past performance, as well as with the performance of their peers. This data has less to do with disciplining employees and more to do with helping teams correct course and stay productive.

Personalization and user pooling are important here because an application that is considered productive for one function may be considered unproductive for another. For example,social mediamanagers spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter because it's the core of their role, whereas a sales manager who spends many hours a day on LinkedIn or other social media should raise a red flag. Automation and the ability to set email reminders and alerts are also effective ways to manage a large distributed workforce.

Some products can also aggregate real-time macro-level activity data to display on administrator and manager dashboards. It is also possible to build detailed reports to break down different performance metrics. For example, you can analyze data using factors such as the most productive or least productive employees, or compare the performance or productivity of a team or department on specific projects.

Employee tracking tools often provide a quick overviewdata visualization. Examples might include a productivity bar that breaks down the percentages of productive and unproductive applications, or lists and leaderboards that show active or inactive users or the most used applications. Many of the solutions we tested can also track and record which websites or services employees spend the most time on and which are underutilized.

Another aspect of activity tracking is keystroke tracking, which provides a benchmark for employee activity. Once you have data on how often employees are typing or interacting with their machines, you can map it to the correct factors to complete a comprehensive profile of their online activities. Examples of factors might include screenshots, activity logs, audit trails, and other deeper tracking vectors that we'll explore later.

Some of the most powerful monitoring tools we've tested can take raw keystroke data—that is, a temporal map of system keys being pressed by users at any given time—and compare it to any other metrics or activity logged. .DanishHarvested. Additionally, newer tools like Controlio can add keystrokes and sync them with video recordings for a more accurate representation of employee activity. As a result, you can see the full context of what employees did and when, and draw insights about why they did it. This level of insight is unparalleled for companies that need to collect forensic evidence, such as a regulatory compliance audit.

Surveillance systems are getting smarter

Today's employee tracking systems use new technologies such as geolocation, keystroke logging, screenshots, video recording, and even access to cameras installed on remote computers. Enabling cloud computing means you can capture terabytes of that data and store it online where administrators can easily access it. More importantly, this data isn't just sitting idle. Pattern-matching algorithms can scan them to predict insider threats, measure individual and team productivity, and trace the steps that led to problems or data breaches.

The most powerful employee tracking tools can act as an all-seeing eye. They provide information on everything from the apps an employee has opened to who they're talking to and what they're saying. They can also use automated logic, such as keyword triggers and policy rules, to tell administrators when employees are doing things they shouldn't be doing. They can often do this by running the anonymous process as a hidden process, so employees don't necessarily know when they're being monitored.

Screenshots and screen recording are among the most popular monitoring tools. Administrators can usually configure policies and settings to take screenshots at specific intervals, such as once an hour, every 15 minutes, or even every 10 seconds or less. Some tools also support live screenshots or continuous video recording, allowing managers to check in live on employee computers or view a timed recording.

Some monitoring systems store screenshots along with relevant metadata. They can be included in a dashboard where administrators can use them as additional information about any user activity or data point they are reviewing or investigating.

The latest surveillance technologies.

EfficientLab, which makes the on-site monitoring solution Work Examiner, has a more compelling cloud-based solution at Controli that combines performance appraisal with in-depth employee monitoring. Controlio represents a new way of thinking in the segment and even offers real-time video recording and synchronized live streaming with keystroke tracking.

Video recording is another frontier already offered by companies like Teramind, StaffCop Enterprise and Controlio. Access to live or recorded video gives you the most accurate forensic evidence, not to mention the ability to quickly search, view, and even use OCR technology to get every detail of videotaped documents.

Teramind Editor's Choice takes video recording to a whole new level by enabling Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that can scan video files. This means you can recognize text on the screen and in documents and enable video searches using that data. Local service provider StaffCop Enterprise also offers OCR for screenshots and documents.

Adding these kinds of live streaming and video recording features allows these offerings to surpass what was found in older solutions that focused primarily on screenshots. The new generation offers companies complete control of employee activities, which is likely to become the norm for the growing category.

Beyond the images themselves, these tracking platforms can provide an amazing degree of visibility into any app, file, message, and evenIncreasecall. Through the use of OCR, in-depth monitoring can provide much more information about how employees use computers or specific web applications.

More sophisticated employee monitoring tools can also analyze emails, chats, instant messages (IM), and other personal orteam communicationApplications Will keep track of any parameters or keywords set by administrators. Truly innovative solutions can even detect credit card numbers and other sensitive data in screenshots and videos and automatically trigger an alert.

This deep tracking also applies to document tracking and file name scanning. The software can often capture the document or attachment so that the administrator can view it. For example, suppose a company's management wants to know whether employees talk internally about the CEO or the CTO. In this case, they can set up automatic keyword triggers and receive automatic email notifications or reports.

Policies can often be set to prevent employees from sending corporate data through personal channels, downloading applications or files not approved by IT, or even accessing USB drives from corporate computers. Not all platforms provide this level of automation, but those that do can alert the user to stop, or simply notify an administrator, or update the audit log.

Weigh the perspectives of employees

As mentioned above, not all of these will sit well with the employees you plan to supervise. Clear and full engagement means you'll know exactly what your employees are doing during working hours and how well they're doing it. But the desire for this level of insight must be balanced with your fears. The pandemic has had a huge impact on employee morale and motivation, so much so that many do.to look for a new jobor even the total withdrawal from the labor market. The sudden introduction of a Big Brother-style environment to an already stressed workforce could be a blow.

In fact, the challenges of monitoring employees lie primarily in the human side of the process, with objections raised by both employees and managers. Many employees will be concerned when they hear that surveillance software has been installed on their computers or, even worse, when they discover it. Managers, on the other hand, only have a certain number of hours to look at hundreds, if not thousands, of screenshots of their subordinates' work days.

While some companies will have a legitimate need to monitor without the knowledge of their employees, we recommend that most organizations do not take this approach. Arguing in a forum about why you need to monitor can be embarrassing, but it's nothing compared to the backlash you'll get if you're caught monitoring people without their consent. Such covert tracking could even get you into legal trouble in some jurisdictions.

Open communication is certainly a better solution. Understanding how your employees spend their time is something you've already done while they were in the office, so it makes sense that you'd want to do it now that they're working remotely. This shouldn't be hard to explain even to skeptical employees.

And while the deep surveillance capabilities described above can be intimidating for the average worker, there's no reason to use them across your entire workforce. Limiting them to only those employees who regularly access highly sensitive data or applications is probably all that's needed, and that's a scenario these employees are likely to understand.

size and security

Two important criteria to consider before launching one of these systems are the size of the workforce you want to manage and the level of data security you need to maintain. In turn, they are related to understanding what you want to track.

Is your company investing in an employee tracking tool primarily to improve productivity and efficiency? Or maybe you really want or need a complete overview of everything your employees do during their working hours in the company, down to the smallest detail? The answers to these questions relate to the size of the workforce, as we are talking about the potential to collect massive amounts of data in near real time. This perspective creates problems not only with storage, but also with analysis.

A tracking system that needs to scan the feeds of 200 employees for trigger URLs or keywords in real time will provide faster and more accurate results than having to do the same for 20,000 employees. And it will certainly be easier than a system tasked with looking up detailed data from 20,000 employees using OCR or video analytics.

This means that the evaluation process for each of these platforms must include all of the alerts, data collection, and analytics that you intend to use in real life. You then need to compare this to system performance to see how it compares to the actual number of employees. Only this type of analysis can give you a good idea of ​​how much data you can collect and what type of alerts and analysis you can perform.

Once you've collected that data, you need to protect it. Employee tracking data is just as sensitive as your customers' credit card numbers or other financial documents. If a data breach occurs, hackers could gain access to everything from employees' financial information to photos of their homes and children.

This is why it is so important that IT administrators build an accurate data lifecycle map for that information and ensure that both the organization and the monitoring service provider have the appropriate security measures in place. At a minimum, you should include access control not only for administrators, but also for third-party applications (such as analytics tools), with at least one layer of encryption.

Ask your legal team for guidance on security issues. Different states and municipalities have different guidelines and even different definitions of what exactly constitutes surveillance and how far it can legally go. This discussion is not only about what can be recorded, but also what types of analysis can be done with that data and how it should be stored. These decisions have become even more complex since the pandemic, as your employees are likely spread over a much wider geographic area than when they all reported to headquarters.

Dive

In general, you should carefully consider the needs of your organization and the value you want to gain from implementing an employee tracking solution. Next, you should choose a tracking tool based not just on what it can do, but also on how you'll use it and how much knowledge your employees will have about the process.

There are compelling arguments about the value of an employee's time and effort, and the new reality of remote work has made it even more important. It is now difficult for managers to determine and monitor the productivity of their employees, especially now that a distributed workforce means more flexible and uneven work schedules.

However, teams must still work toward common goals, and if you're a manager, you're expected to give employees a degree of freedom to decide how best to do their jobs. With this in mind, organizational tools and systems become essential for distributed teams that no longer work within an established office culture. Careful planning can ensure that these tools are useful.Human Resources(HR), except the control motor.

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