Popular Approaches to Remote Employee Monitoring
With sites like YouTube, eBay, and Facebook and access to instant messaging and email tempting us at every turn, it can be very difficult to say no to personal internet usage at work. Although not everyone has access to the internet at work, the majority do. And as pointed out by various surveys and studies conducted by prominent media research agencies, those employees who do have access are using it.
The arguments behind using the internet at work for personal matters range from lack of access at home or having a faster connection at work, to surfing the internet simply out of boredom. Whatever the arguments employees may cling on to, employers sure aren’t happy to know that their employees are wasting company time and money to do non-job related tasks online. Most people would probably feel the same way if they were a business entrepreneur, but business principles aside, sometimes the charms of the internet can be too great to resist. Because of that, a growing number of employers have started to invest in surveillance technology to monitor the way their employees use the internet at work.
Employer surveillance is an interesting concept, although many people choose to debate its ethics. Using advanced technology tools – some of them identical to those used by malicious hackers – employers can thoroughly monitor the internet usage of all of their employees. Although the amount of monitoring needed is up to each employer to decide, remote employee monitoring can only be achieved using a limited number of techniques.
The two basic forms of monitoring employees remotely are internet surveillance and desktop surveillance. Internet surveillance denotes the active monitoring of a user’s online activity. A good example of internet surveillance tool would be a network analyzer, commonly referred to as a “packet sniffer”. This is a common instrument in the arsenal of computer network administrators, who typically use it for testing and troubleshooting network functions. However, sometimes these programs can be set up just like spyware, in the purpose of viewing and logging all data passing over network connections.
Packet sniffers allow employers to monitor their employees’ internet usage at work, including website visits, specific page views, sent emails and the information they contain, but also downloads, streaming audio and video events. This type of remote employee monitoring lets managers know exactly how much time an employee is spending online, as well as whether they are accessing material or carrying out tasks that are inappropriate at work.
Desktop surveillance is another form of computer surveillance, only it entails monitoring a computer physically, and every action taken by its user. With desktop monitoring, it becomes possible to intercept signals transmitted by an employee’s computer via software installed directly onto that employee’s machine. Depending on the situation, desktop surveillance software can be installed either directly or remotely. Much like internet surveillance, desktop surveillance also grants employers access to email and any programs, applications or files opened on their employee’s computers, but besides that, it also monitors computer usage while offline.
Such techniques may offer basic monitoring capabilities, but their effectiveness in an ampler supervising effort is actually quite limited. The interest is now shifting towards more advanced tools, some of them entirely web-based, which also allow management features like the possibility to track employee hours, keep accurate records of employees clocked hours, keep accurate records of sick and vacation days used, or manage projects down to the last detail.