In this highly digital age, hardly anyone is expected to run a business manually. Now you have all these tools that can help you optimize your business processes, enable easier collaboration, maintain fast long-distance communication and organize your workflow and project management. Among these useful tools, there’s screen monitoring software – a sophisticated solution which can help you automate and improve a couple of different aspects of your business.
But first, how does employee tracking software work? Basically, it monitors and records which apps employees are using and which websites they’re visiting and how long they spend there. This information can be built upon with additional features, and ultimately you’ll get a software solution that can provide you three major benefits: control, data security and productivity measurements.
Control
The most fundamental benefit of every monitoring software is in the fact that it helps you solve the issue of how to monitor PC activity of your employees and therefore gain more control over your business processes.
We’ve mentioned that this software can tell you exactly which apps and websites your employees access, but it’s equally important to note that you can get this data both in real time and as a daily or weekly report. This means that you can have an overview of your employees’ computer activities at any given time, but you also have historical data in case you need to refer to a past activity.
This aspect of monitoring software for network computers can be expanded to include not just individual employee data but also aggregated overview and reports on specific teams and even an entire company.
As an additional layer of control, you can have screen monitoring software that lets you take screenshots, which can also help with increasing security.
Security
As hinted, apart from providing greater control, some aspects of a tracking system can also help with improving data security. These features include screenshots, keystroke loggers and other screen monitoring software functionalities.
Let’s take screenshot feature for example. Employee screen capture software allows you to take a screenshot of your employees’ computers manually at any time or set automatic periodical screenshots. This means that you’ll know which files your workers are accessing, whether they’re sharing them, etc.
This way, screen monitoring software helps boost information security in two ways. First, it acts as a deterrent and discourages any internal leaks. This is, of course, provided that your employees know about the monitoring software, which is advisable either way.
The second security benefits is that, although this system can’t prevent breaches from happening, it can be an invaluable resource for investigation if something like this does happen. And similar thing goes for keystroke loggers and other similar advanced security features.
Productivity
Besides the security and control features of screen monitoring software, tracking tools have one more aspect to them that even employees themselves might grow to appreciate – it’s a very useful productivity analysis tool.
The productivity functionality of app and web browsing monitoring software relies on your categorization of those apps and websites into productive and unproductive based on whether they are work-related or not. You can do this for each team, or even each employee individually. After this initial step, the software does the rest.
You can see how much active time is spent productively, what happens during unproductive time, whether productivity increased or decreased compared to the previous period and by how much, how many employees are working and how many are slacking off at any given moment and so on. This data is packed in a variety of ways for easier and cleaner overview – you can get specific statistics, individual daily productivity timelines, team biorhythm, etc.
All of this productivity analysis data gives you a unique opportunity to find weaknesses and problems that prevent higher efficiency and start working towards improving employees’ performance.
Conclusion
As we have seen, there are at least three good reasons why computer monitoring software is getting more popular over time. Whether you decide to use it in order to increase control and security or to improve your employees’ productivity, implementing this system can definitely offer some direct value to your business.