Best Employee Monitoring Software For Workplace

Employee monitoring is the systematic way of keeping track of employee activities. These include only work activities and levels such as:

• The websites they visit.
• The programming modules they make.
• The programming modules they make.
• The time they spend on various tasks.
• Their competency with your standard work expectations.
• Their efficiency and productivity levels.
• The overall work performance of your employees.

Remember that employee monitoring is different from micromanagement and employee surveillance. Plus, it is not equal or equivalent to spying on your employees. The comparison chart below will give us a better understanding:

Employee Monitoring	Employee Surveillance (CCTV)	Micromanagement and Spying
Monitors work activities only	Monitors every employee activity, mostly employee movement	Monitors every employee activity including break time, lunchtime, and personal choices
Involves employee consent	Has employee consent	Doesn't have employee consent
Is morally ethical and legal	Is morally ethical and legal	Isn’t morally ethical and legal
Doesn’t hinder employee privacy	May hinder employee privacy. However, employees can report such cases	Hinders employee privacy
Increases employee efficiency, productivity, and overall work performance	Only records employee activities and helps detect and gather evidence against unusual behavior and potential insider threats	Harms employees’ mental health causing stress, and burnout as employees start working like robots, living in constant fear of being caught at any moment
Includes time tracking	Doesn't include time tracking	Doesn’t include anything beneficial for the employees

There are 2 ways to monitor your employees. These include the manual method and using tools. However, the former is:

• Time-consuming
• Full of errors
• Inefficient
• Inefficient

The better, updated, and modern way to monitor employees is to use employee monitoring software such as DeskTrack, which provides you with:

• Real-time activity monitoring and time tracking
• Intuitive data analysis and reporting
• Screenshot monitoring
• Behavior analytics
• Keystroke logging
• Alerts and notifications. For example, the software sends alerts to superiors in case of late comings.

Employee monitoring software is the best digital solution for monitoring employees and increasing work efficiency. However, the most overwhelming thing about it is that it provides too many major and minor features.
Thus, choosing the best software for employee monitoring can be a rather time-consuming process. Fortunately, we have shortlisted the key features you need to look for:

1. Real-Time Activity Monitoring

This is the most used feature of software for employee monitoring. The usage includes monitoring every work-task-related activity of your employees and teams such as:

• URLs
• Files
• Applications
• Documents

How this works is that the software monitors and logs every detail of the various work tasks. These include the:

• Time spent doing the task
• The efficiency and productivity levels
• Key metrics

Real-time activity monitoring ensures that the employees and teams stay on track and always progress forward toward success.

2. Time Tracking

Whether built-in or integrated, this is another useful and one of the most used features of work monitoring software. Simply put or compared to its real-world equivalent. Here’s how it would work.

• Suppose every task is a person.
• The age of each person is the estimated hours it would take to complete the task.
• A magnetic timer is attached to each person.
• Whenever the task is completed, the timer stops. Here, we have 3 scenarios.
  • If the task is completed on time, the person and timer halt.
  • If the task is not completed on time, the person keeps moving, but the timer stops.
  • If the task is completed before time, the person and timer keep moving.

That’s exactly what time tracking is. Tracking the work hours of employees task-wise. Here, if the task is completed timely, we begin the next task on hand. If the task is not completed on time, that’s inefficiency, and the best-case scenario is completing tasks on time, which allows us to manage more tasks in the same time blocks.

In a nutshell, time tracking helps us improve focus, efficiency, and time management by assisting in getting rid of time-wasting activities.

3. Compliance Management

Other than the work side of your business, you also need to manage compliance and other legal documents to ensure that your business runs smoothly. These include:

• Employee policy compliance
• Labor law compliance
• Legal compliance
• Ethical compliance

The good thing about using software to monitor employees is that it keeps you updated with these laws, rules, and regulations. Plus, it also stays updated to comply with your organization’s standards and policies, ensuring that it works as per your requirements only.

4. Behavior Analytics

It’s impossible to monitor the physical and mental behavior of your employees. However, software to monitor employees and teams logs the time and activity frequency of their computer systems for the following:

• The frequency of idle time
• Keyboard and mouse movements
• How often does an employee use specific URLs, files, documents, and apps?

This way, it becomes easy to detect unusual behavior. Deciding whether that is an employee pain point or a potential insider threat on the spot becomes simple.

5. Data Analysis and Reporting

Since we are talking about using specific software to monitor employees, everything is data-driven, which removes bias from decision-making. What the software does is analyze the work performance of your employees against the key metrics and goal settings in real-time to provide you with:

• Accurately detailed performance reports
• Efficient work-time utilization reports
• Real-time feedback and review mechanisms
• Continuous performance monitoring

This way, it becomes easy to detect unusual behavior. Deciding whether that is an employee pain point or a potential insider threat on the spot becomes simple.

6. Screenshot Monitoring

You can configure your employee monitoring software to take frequent screenshots of your employees' desktops. That too in real-time. This feature allows you to:

• Identify work patterns
• Spot work gaps, obstructions, and flaws.

An advantage of real-time screenshot monitoring is that you can provide efficiency-boosting solutions on the spot without disrupting workflows.

7. Task Management

This functionality of the project management feature allows you to:

• Create as many tasks, subtasks, and checklists as required by the project.
• Assign specific employee (s) to each task.

This ensures smooth workflows and that there is no confusion as to who has to do what and at what time.

We hope you now understand the key features of employee monitoring software, which you need to consider before getting one for your organization. However, you need to consider the unique needs of your business and then look for tools and functionalities accordingly.

Software to monitor employees provides you with real-time insights into the work of your employees. These useful insights help you fix and identify inefficiencies, obstructions, inaccuracies, work gaps, and flaws in the way of more productivity. Plus, since all this is in real-time, you will provide solutions on the spot without disrupting the workflow. Moreover, the software also provides you with these benefits to skyrocket your employees’ productivity.

1. More Accountability and Responsibility

Due to behavior analytics, task management, and screenshot monitoring features of software to monitor employees, your employees become more accountable and responsible. Since you have a clear idea of who had to do what and at what time, you can:

• Hold the ones responsible for incompetency and low productivity accountable.
• There will be no arguments as you will have data reports of the work.
• Your employees cannot blame each other for anything. In short, no unnecessary blame games.

2. Better Resource Management

Since the employee monitoring software monitors resource usage including:

• Time
• Tools

Using it can help you identify and make efficient resource usage to a great extent. This ensures that no resource is wasted.

3. No Virtual Slacking

Online idling, cyberloafing, web procrastination, or internet distractions are all antonyms to high productivity. Software to monitor employees monitors and logs the usage of browsers across your organization and reports non-productive use. For example, you can configure the software to detect employees playing games or browsing songs. In short, no time pass.

4. No Insider Threats

Another benefit of employee monitoring software is that it also prevents insider threats. What it does is:

• Detect unusual employee behavior with behavior analytics
• Alert superiors in case of any confidential file being downloaded to personal phones or on browsing suspicious websites.
• Provides evidence of potential insider threats via screenshot monitoring.

This makes preventing and legally punishing employees posing insider threats simple.

5. Data-Driven Insights

Due to the usage of employee monitoring software, there is no bias when giving employee feedback. Data-driven insights help you make better decisions regarding daily work tasks, which improves and earns you better progress toward success.

6. Better Communication and Collaboration

Employee monitoring software solutions also provide communication and collaboration tools, which improve teamwork and are beneficial for your remote and field employees as communicating and sharing updates, documents, and other information becomes easy, quick, and simple.

7. Improves Employee Well-Being

DeskTrack understands that employee well-being is the highest priority these days. That’s why it’s never full-time employee monitoring with it. Your employees can:

• Pause the monitoring when they need to take a break.
• Flexibly resume the monitoring when they are ready to work with a rejuvenated mind.
• Flexibly resume the monitoring when they are ready to work with a rejuvenated mind.

The cost of software for employee monitoring varies from software to software. Furthermore, the price also relies on different factors such as:

• Vendor reputation
• No of features
• Whether the charge is /month or /user/month
• The size of your teams and business
• Payment mode (subscription or flat rate)
• Whether a free trial, demo, or freemium is included or not

To give you a better idea, we have compared the initial prices of the top 10 employee monitoring software below.

Software Name	Initial Pricing
DeskTrack	$5.99/user/month
Monitask	$5.99/user/month
Insightful	$8/user/month
Connecteam	29/month (up to 30 users) + $0.5/additional user/month
Intelogos	$4/user/month
Buddy Punch	$3.99/user/month + $19/month
Veriato	$25/user/month
Clockify	$5.49/user/month
CleverControl	$4.70/device/month
TimeDoctor	$7/user/month

Yes, you can use employee monitoring software to review the work performance of your employees. It can help you understand useful insights into the work of your employees including productivity, performance, and employee engagement. Here’s how this aspect works

1. Team Performance Reports

Accurate performance reports help you understand whether your employees’ work performance was optimal or not. Since the software evaluates work based on your metrics and goal settings, you can 100% depend on it for reviewing your employees.

2. Work Quality Evaluation

Using employee monitoring software properly will also improve the quality of work over time. Accurate reports let you check whether it stands true or not as you compare the different data.

3. Time Tracking

How much time does an employee take to complete a task? Which employees are doing overtime? Which ones are spending more time on non-crucial activities? Your software to monitor employees will give you all this data in real-time, which lets you improve time management by assisting in getting rid of time wastage

4. Boosting Accountability

Since the task management feature enables assigning the right employees to the right jobs, it helps you instill more accountability and responsibility in your organization.

However, there is the need to understand ethical considerations as well regarding employee monitoring including:

• Right to privacy
• Legal compliance

Doing so ensures you experience the maximum benefits.

Yes, employee monitoring software such as DeskTrack can seamlessly integrate with the other apps and tools you use. Moreover, some software can only integrate with a few tools while others provide more than 100 integrations.
Overall, all this depends on the size and capabilities of the software to monitor employees. Integrating your work monitoring tool with other tools and apps provides these benefits.

1. Time and Cost Savings

Integrating your software to monitor employees with other tools and apps you use saves valuable time and costs.

• Time because of directly sending data for processing to the integrated tool.
• Costs because you won’t have to buy many software solutions for different purposes.

2. Storage Savings

Individual software solutions take up space on your computer, which slows it down. However, integrating your employee monitoring software with other tools and apps saves storage space as well.

3. Better Feature Accessibility

Integrating the software for employee monitoring with other tools and apps also ensures that you can access all the required features from one platform. It is good as you don’t have to open and close multiple tools and apps, which can get very frustrating.

4. Streamlined Work Processes

Let’s understand this with an example. For instance, when it comes to payroll, this is how it will work after integration.

• You receive accurate work hours data. Here time is saved in 4 ways.
  • The data is directly sent to the payroll tool
  • Payroll is automated and salary is calculated as soon as work hours data is generated.
  • You only have to click the payroll tab to process salary and invoices.
  • You only have to click the payroll tab to process salary and invoices.

Yes, employee monitoring software can be accessed from your smartphone devices in a few ways.

• Using the mobile browser version.
• Using mobile app such as MobiTrack.
• Using mobile app such as MobiTrack.

Other than that, there are a few other types of smartphone employee monitoring solutions including:

• Mobile Device Management (MDM)
• Mobile App Management (MAM)
• Mobile Analytics
• Microsoft Intune
• App protection policies
• Android enterprise work profiles

However, you need to ensure that you use the app legally, respect device ownership, have employee consent, and never monitor non-work activities to gain these benefits to the maximum level.

1. Device Management

You can ensure that employees and employers only use business-issued devices for employee monitoring. If personal phones are used, the app can make sure that employees are not doing anything disallowed.

2. Identify Misuse

Using the employee monitoring software app ensures that your employees don’t misuse resources or waste time. This stands true even when they are out of the office for a short time because of the integration with the main software.

3. Employee Performance Optimization

All the features of the software to monitor employees are available on the mobile version as well. So you can use it to optimize their work performance, increase efficiency, and productivity, and improve time management.

Using work monitoring tools such as employee monitoring software provides you with many benefits including:

• Productivity boosts as you identify and eliminate distractions.
• Better policy compliance as employees work per your policy requirements.
• Enhanced data security as employee monitoring software prevents data leaks and insider threats.
• More employee engagement as employees work together through real-time communication and share progress.
• Remote work monitoring and support help you increase the productivity of your employees working from home
• Better training and development as you identify where your employees need more training and support.
• Accurate performance evaluations as you monitor employees’ work against your set expectations, goal settings, and key metrics.
• Improved time management as employees know the status of the various deadlines and timelines in real-time.