A growing number of businesses are allowing their employees to work remotely for at least part of their work week. Right now, it’s estimated that 42% of workers in the U.S. are working from home.
Even though working from home is becoming more common, many companies have still not taken the necessary steps to complete their digital workforce transformation. The key to successfully shifting to remote work is keeping tabs on your team with the help of employee monitoring software.
How Can Software Help Employers Monitor Remote Workers?
Monitoring software is designed to help managers keep tabs on their remote employees’ digital activities. It records every digital move that your employees make and presents this data to you in easy-to-read dashboards and reports.
What Types of Digital Activities Does the Software Record?
This software is used to monitor and record various types of digital activities, including:
- Screenshots
- Web searches
- URLs
- File uploads/downloads
- Emails
- Instant messages
- Application/program use
- Social media sites
- Use of USB devices
- Print history
- Keylogger
The software will provide you with a record of everything your employees do on their company-owned devices. You can track as little or as much information as you would like.
For example, if you only want to see what websites your employees are visiting, you can adjust the software settings to ensure it only records this specific activity.
Why is Monitoring Remote Workers Important For A Digital Workforce Transformation?
The use of software to monitor employees is important for every business, but this is especially true of businesses that are in the process of transforming to a digital workforce.
Studies have shown that working remotely can improve employees’ wellbeing, increase their job satisfaction, and help them find a better work-life balance. It can also increase employee retention. In fact, more than 75% of employees surveyed said they would stay at their job as long as their employer allowed them to work remotely.
There’s no doubt that there are countless benefits to allowing employees to work remotely, but there are also some drawbacks. Employees who aren’t used to working remotely may struggle to adapt to their new isolated environment. They could also find it harder to stay on task due to the many distractions that are present at home.
It’s important for managers to quickly spot the signs of a distracted or disengaged employee, but this is challenging due to the lack of in-person communication between managers and remote workers. Without face-to-face interaction, managers may find it increasingly difficult to keep tabs on who’s working hard and who’s hardly working.
Fortunately, there’s remote employee monitoring software to help managers overcome these challenges and effectively manage remote workers.
What Are the Benefits of Monitoring A Digital Workforce?
If you are in the process of shifting to a digital workforce, it’s in your company’s best interest to install software to track your remote employees’ digital activities. Some of the many benefits of using this software include:
- Increase Productivity
- Identify Knowledge Gaps
- Ensure Compliance
- Detect Insider Threats
- Recognize Disengaged Employees
- Simplify Workplace Investigations
Increase Productivity
You can use the data collected by monitoring software to make smarter business decisions that will improve your team’s productivity.
For example, use the data to determine each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. If one employee is better at performing a certain task than everyone else, keep this in mind when delegating assignments.
The data can also help you identify the members of your team that are working the hardest so you can ensure they are recognized and rewarded for their efforts.
Of course, the data will also show you who isn’t pulling their own weight on your team. Addressing the issues that are causing these employees to fall behind will benefit the team as a whole.
Identify Knowledge Gaps
A “knowledge gap” is a term used to describe a discrepancy between what an employee should know to perform their job duties and what they actually know. By using software to monitor remote workers, managers can quickly identify and address these gaps.
For example, you may analyze the data collected by this software and discover that one employee on your team takes twice as long as everyone else to perform a certain task. This could indicate that the employee needs additional training on how to perform this task. Setting up this training could drastically improve the employee’s job satisfaction and the entire team’s productivity.
Ensure Compliance
Use this software to ensure that your employees are complying with laws, regulations, and internal company policies.
For example, many companies are legally obligated to comply with the terms of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). You can use this software to ensure compliance by keeping tabs on how employees handle sensitive information.
You can also ensure that employees are complying with internal policies. For instance, the software can help you determine if employees are violating an internal policy by visiting restricted websites during work hours.
Detect Insider Threats
Insider threats pose a huge threat to businesses of all sizes. The best way to protect your company from an insider threat is early detection with the help of employee monitoring software.
Monitoring software is designed to analyze each employee’s digital activity to look for actions that fall outside of their normal behavior. If an action falls outside of this normal range, the software will immediately flag it as suspicious.
You will then receive a notification so you can investigate the matter further and prevent the potential threat from turning into a serious problem.
Recognize Disengaged Employees
Disengaged employees may get easily distracted, spend a significant amount of time on non-work-related tasks, and complain about their job to others. But these signs are difficult to spot when the employee works remotely.
However, monitoring your remote workers gives you the opportunity to quickly recognize these signs that an employee on your team is becoming increasingly disengaged.
For example, you may be able to tell that an employee is becoming disengaged by reading the text of their instant messages or emails to coworkers. You could also identify a disengaged employee by reviewing the software’s productivity report to determine if an employee’s productivity is declining.
If you suspect that an employee is disengaged, you can provide the additional support and mentoring that they need to reconnect to their work.
Simplify Workplace Investigations
The data collected by software that tracks employees’ digital activities can be used to assist workplace investigations into harassment, discrimination, wrongful termination, or other issues. An investigation into misconduct will no longer be a case of “he said, she said.” Instead, you will have irrefutable evidence in the form of screenshots, web searches, emails, and more.
How Can You Start Monitoring Your Digital Workforce?
Setting up software to monitor your employees’ digital activities is easy even if your team has already started to work remotely. Veriato employee monitoring software is deployed remotely, which means you won’t need physical access to your employees’ devices in order to deploy this software. It can be installed on your remote team’s computers in stealth mode, so they won’t even know it’s working behind the scenes to track their activity.
Complete your digital workforce transformation by installing Veriato software. Schedule a demo, start your free trial, or take an online test drive to learn more today.
Insider Risk – How Prepared Are You?
Not every company is equally prepared to deal with insider risk. This report outlines the four stages of insider risk maturity and explores how to improve your insider risk preparedness.
About the author
