Employee online monitoring programs are becoming more popular these days. Some employers are still reluctant to pay attention to their employees’ internet use. However, there are a couple of reasons it is important to do so:
- It is necessary to prevent social loafing. Lost productivity from online distractions costs employers an estimated $650 billion a year.
- It is also important to prevent employees from accessing malware.
Since both Windows and Linux machines are used in many organizations, it is important to have monitoring programs that are compatible with both systems.
Monitoring Employees on Both Linux and Windows Machines
There are a variety of new applications developed by various companies to increase productivity and prevent employees from accessing malware-infected sites. Their ultimate purpose is to monitor what employees do during their working day. In other words, they try to control and quantify what employees do while they are working with their computers.
These applications solve many security problems for the company, as well as address the costs of social loafing. These applications basically prevent access to certain web pages that have no relevance for work and could expose the network to viruses, Trojans and other harmful software.
Your employees may not like being monitored. These tools may restrict their freedom and communicate a lack of trust. However, they are important for many reasons. Employees may feel frustrated by not being able to access certain websites, but they need to accept that they cost the company a lot of money. The cost of malware is now over $100 billion a year. Although most monitoring tools don’t fight malware directly, they help make sure employees don’t visit sites where malware is spread, which indirectly curbs the risk.
According to Kickidler, social loafing is a growing concern as well. Kickidler has Stealth mode, no icon and task manager processes, which are all ideal for monitoring employee activity. Some of the benefits are covered in this video.
However, some of these tools are not great at improving productivity. If they do, they do so marginally by helping to avoid distractions, or by preventing us from devoting ourselves to things that have nothing to do with the business. Their true purpose is to preserve the security of the company’s computers and their information.
This means that we need more sophisticated programs that monitor both Windows and Linux machines. These monitoring programs are more capable of monitoring employee activity overall. They don’t just prevent them from accessing certain websites. They help you assess what employees are doing online. If they are engaging in time-wasting activities, you will know and can take appropriate corrective and disciplinary action.
There are a number of Windows and Linux applications that have caught my attention. Their purpose is to increase productivity through a strict control consisting of knowing all the things that an employee does. They track their online activities minute by minute while using the company’s computers. This saves companies thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity.
These types of programs are dedicated to monitoring incoming and outgoing Internet traffic. They make it possible to control both workers within the company and virtual workers outside your walls. You can even use geolocation tracking programs with these tools to know where they are. But they don’t just stay there; they also allow you to know which computer programs are used and for how long they use them. In other words, they spy on workers from inside their jobs.
Some people argue that these tools may not be all that useful. They may discourage people from using tools that their employer may not see as being tied to work, although they are good at getting the job done.
While this is a legitimate downside, the benefits outweigh the risks for many workplaces. If you have a team of employees that are not very motivated, then you might be spending a tremendous amount of money on wages due to lost productivity.
We are well into the 21st century for a few years now, but there are still entrepreneurs and managers who have not realized that the productivity of workers needs to be monitored better. They are slowly realizing that they need to put better controls in place.
