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As a result, you can see the full context of what employees were doing, when they were doing it, and a good indication as to why they were doing it. Once an incognito agent is installed on a machine sometimes hidden in the Running Processes list under disguised names , the most powerful employee monitoring tools can act as an all-seeing eye. It can see into everything from what apps an employee has open to with whom they're chatting to what they're saying.
It can even use automated logic such as keyword triggers and policy rules to let an admin know when employees do something they're not supposed to do. This all starts with screenshots and customizable employee screen recording options. Depending on the employee monitoring tool, company admins can configure rules and settings to take screenshots at particular intervals, either once per hour, every 15 minutes, or even every 10 seconds or less.
Some tools also support live screenshots or continuous video recording where an admin can check in live on an employee's machine or pull up the timestamped recording of a particular period of time. Most importantly, stored screenshots also carry metadata and can be incorporated throughout the monitoring dashboard to be pulled up as supporting evidence or supplementary data for whatever user activity or data point an admin is reviewing or investigating. However, beyond the images themselves, these monitoring platforms can have a startling degree of detailed visibility into every app, file, message, and even word or piece of data that appears across an employee's screen or within their system.
Some of the most advanced enterprise monitoring solutions offer optical character recognition OCR on a user's screen to perform session mining on particular keywords. Whether by OCR or by enabling support for monitoring specific desktop or web apps regularly used by employees, the most piercing employee monitoring tool will parse email messages, chats, instant messages IMs , and other personal or team communication apps.
They'll monitor whatever parameters or even specific keywords an admin has set.
This applies to tracking documents and scanning file names as well; the software will often capture the attached document or file so an admin can view it. So, if an enterprise's C-suite executives want to know whether employees are chatting internally about the company's CEO or CTO, they could simply set up automated keyword triggers to receive an email alert or have all mentions aggregated into a report.
This rules-based automation can be extended to a variety of parameters or user behaviors if a company so wishes. For instance, rules can be set to prevent employees from sending company data through personal channels or from downloading an app or file that isn't IT-approved. Not all platforms can go this deep into automation. However, the ones that can will either trigger user notifications to stop the action, or simply send an alert or update an audit log to quantify how particular user actions or behavior factor into overall risk reports or issues.
This potentially can result in managerial intervention being required. This all speaks to a more fundamental question: Is your business investing in an employee monitoring tool primarily to improve productivity and efficiency?
Or do you truly want or need full oversight into everything employees are doing and saying on company time and machines, to a meticulous degree of detail? Depending on your organizational needs and what value you're looking to gain from implementing this kind of solution, your choice of employee monitoring tool could be vastly different. In this roundup, we tested 10 products: The range of software we tested varied from basic time trackers that offer some added employee monitoring to full-blown, data-driven digital surveillance systems. For example, Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and VeriClock are pure play time tracking tools that offer some deeper employee monitoring features.
These products give you great core time tracking features plus features such as mobile GPS tracking for workers in the field. They also give you attached notes and photos, screenshots, or basic monitoring of apps used and URLs visited. These kinds of tools place an emphasis on measuring employee effectiveness, activity levels, and productivity.
In these tools, you'll find app and website monitoring features plus screenshots, alerts, keystroke and file tracking, and broad admin customization. However, these capabilities are all positioned within the context of productivity. All of the data is funneled into reports and dashboards that focus monitoring on aggregating productivity metrics and insights-driven business reporting. This is the "GA for your office" tier. Finally, there are the platforms that feel almost omniscient in the depth of monitoring, automation, and comprehensive data they provide.
These tools are the closest to Big Brother-like internal surveillance systems, depending on how deeply an admin wants to customize what data and monitoring vectors are being tracked for each employee, or how much automation and alerting to layer on top.
On top of their far-reaching and scarily precise monitoring capabilities, this tier of tools also provide what is essentially full-blown business intelligence BI reporting and data analytics on the back end to process and analyze all of the employee data being collected. Pricing varies for all of these tools.
But most employee monitoring tools set their price by the number of users or endpoints, meaning the number of employees for which agents are installed on their machines. Costs tend to scale based on user capacity and volume discounts kick in for larger organizations. However, tools such as InterGuard and Veriato also offer additional add-on modules for premium functionality. If you're looking for software you can buy outright rather than via a monthly or annual subscription, then both StaffCop Enterprise and Work Examiner offer perpetual licenses per user, though this involves on-premises versus cloud-based installation.
Ultimately, the Editors' Choice awards for the products tested in this roundup went to Teramind for enterprise-level monitoring and to ActivTrak for productivity-focused monitoring that's better suited to small to midsize businesses SMBs. While InterGuard and Veriato have comparably vast feature sets and monitoring capabilities, Teramind stands alone in the level of automation admins can configure when it comes to user-specific rules and alerts, and additional advanced functionality such as live OCR, historic playback mode, remote desktop control, and audio support for microphone and headphone monitoring in call centers.
StaffCop Enterprise packs a selection of monitoring tools and automation features to match Teramind, but their value is lessened by a painstaking on-premises setup and virtual machine VM provisioning process as opposed to Teramind's seamless installation. Teramind also provides a more intuitive, cloud-based management user interface UI and user experience UX than either InterGuard or Veriato Teramind was also one of the easiest tools we tested to install agents, configure the admin dashboard, and get up and running fast without much hassle.
ActivTrak, on the other hand, is an ideal option for SMBs or even enterprises that don't need the full-blown Big Brother oversight of Teramind and want an easy-to-use platform for tracking employee productivity and efficiency metrics. It's a "Google Analytics for your office" and the best of the productivity-focused tier of monitoring products we reviewed.
It is also worth noting that for the time tracking products reviewed in this roundup, we did not change the existing ratings or awards. So, while VeriClock is rated as a 4.
In the future, we'll update our reviews as new features become available for each individual product. So, as a living and breathing document, some of the tools listed today in this roundup may not be listed in a year, as scores may change and new products may be added to the roundup.
As you try solutions, be sure to check in with us to see if any new software has been added to this roundup. Regardless of why your business needs this kind of software, employee monitoring tools should be handled with the utmost respect for privacy. For admins, the power that accompanies this kind of software should necessarily surface concerns when it comes to handling confidential or personal data, overseeing managerial access rights over whom they can monitor, and maintaining a level of transparency as to what constitutes "work hours" and whether employees are aware they're being monitored.
The vast majority of the tools in this roundup include strict access controls that allow managers and supervisors viewing admin dashboards to see only the employee profiles and monitoring data of workers they are directly managing and authorized to see. When choosing an employee monitoring tool, another factor to consider is whether the software lets your business decide if the monitoring agents installed on company machines will be visible to employees, disguised under different app or process names or completely incognito. Some platforms let you turn agent visibility on and off and customize program names.
However, in other platforms, a completely stealth agent is the default option. This is also a key factor depending on compliance laws. You can see all the online searches and view both sides of IM and chats. CyberPatrol monitoring spy has shown gradual improvements with its new version. It is very easy to install CyberPatrol, and includes superior quality features, and standard computer monitoring tools especially for parents who want to have a close eye on their children.
The pricing structure of the product is unique, and it provides many valuable monitoring tools, reporting abilities, and blocking applications. You can easily install the PC Pandora that will allow you to know about the emails, word processing, chats, and many other activities in visible and stealth mode. Therefore, you can pick the top PC monitoring software of your preference and find out all the activities taking place on your computer by your targeted family members or any other outside person visiting your home.
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