Employee monitoring solutions have been utilized as a form of corporate surveillance for years. Originally, the focus has been on monitoring the actions of employees with access to sensitive information as part of an insider threat prevention program. But organizations today are realizing the benefits of looking beyond what some employees feel is tantamount to spying and instead are using the visibility into workforce behavior as a means to analyze and improve employee productivity.

If you're evaluating an employee monitoring or workforce productivity tool, there is no "one size fits all" solution. The monitoring of the malicious insider and the less-productive employee have very different requirements and outcomes. This means the solution you choose needs to be carefully selected; it's important to first understand the specific goals you have. There are typically four key considerations that matter most when choosing employee monitoring and workforce productivity tools. Let's look at each of them.

Ease of Adoption

The success of your employee monitoring program rests in the adoption of the solution by both IT and employees. Traditional employee monitoring solutions take significant time to implement and configure. Most support collecting a wide range of employee activity data that may or may not be useful in your quest to improve workforce productivity. Some solutions capture nearly every employee interaction with their computer. This data often is far too granular and offers little insight into improving the productivity of the workforce. And most locally-installed solutions provide little visibility into cloud-based application usage - a real problem, given that employees have largely transitioned to working remotely, switching to cloud-based applications.

Unlike others, ActivTrak was developed as a cloud-native, SaaS application that is easy to deploy and configure. The software can be up and running in minutes to identify operational bottlenecks, flag operational compliance risks and provide valuable insights that help employees and employers improve productivity outcomes. This makes your IT team's life easier.

Visibility into Workforce Productivity

Organizations want to get the most out of their employees and most employees are looking for ways to improve their own performance. Most of employee monitoring solutions do monitor application activity and inactivity which can demonstrate who is and isn't working, but don't offer insight into what a productive employee looks like and, in turn, what changes each employee can make to improve.

ActivTrack utilizes workforce analytics to gain visibility into employee productivity and engagement. This can help you discover which applications are slowing things down and which ones increase collaboration and efficiency. Workforce analytics can not only help identify star performers, but also help all employees learn and adopt the top productive behaviors.

Ensuring Employee Privacy

Employees want privacy for two major reasons. First, they don't want someone digitally looking over their shoulder and judging every move they make. Second, they enjoy a work-life balance that at times may include personal activities on their work devices. Traditional employee monitoring solutions record every action performed, down to the keystroke and mouse click, capturing personal passwords, screenshots of employees' banking websites and more. They are somewhat configurable to not collect certain activity details, but at best it's a workaround, rather than part of a solution's design.

ActivTrak is dedicated to protecting employee privacy. Our product is Privacy Shield certified and we've purposely built the platform to respect the privacy of employees while delivering valuable productivity insights. ActivTrak avoids overbearing monitoring features that simply don't yield the increases in productivity and only lower employee morale. The data collected focuses on business intelligence, operational processes and overall workforce productivity.

Maintaining Trust and Morale

Employees want to feel valued and trusted. So, implementing monitoring programs without involvement of employees can be a valid cause for concern. Normally, employee monitoring solutions run in stealth by default, adding to the lack of transparency between the employer and employee.

Our product defaults to being run in the open, with employees being fully aware of the monitoring of their activity. It also offers the employee visibility into their own activity data and productivity insights, uniquely providing an additional layer of employee monitoring transparency.

We have evolved from our roots in employee monitoring into a powerful app that provides workforce visibility and insights while promoting trust and transparency between employers and employees. Visit https://activtrak.com to find more. Try ActivTrak risk-free by starting a free account at http://bit.ly/31ZOLfL today!