Keeping employees honest using monitoring software – An employer advice

A remote web developer at Coalition Technologies happened to spend a lot of his time watching movies on his work computer; little did he know that the company’s software was watching his moves. Coalition is an online marketing and design firm which makes use of ActivTrak which is a software to monitor their employees’ use of the internet on company owned computers. This company is amongst the many that are now beginning to make use of monitoring software’s to monitor the internet activity of their employees

The software gave Coalition a report about the computer use of the web developer in question and also revealed the reason behind why his latest projects which had been submitted, had been late. The employee who was aware of the monitoring software being in place was later fired from his job due to his inability to improve upon his performance.

Considering such an example, employers perhaps do have a good reason to be monitoring their employees and making use of a web monitoring software. A survey conducted in 2014 by Salary.com showed that 42% out of 750 respondents stated that the activity which wasted their time most at work was doing things online. 26% of them said browsing the internet, 12% stated responding to emails and 4% stated that social media is what caused them to waste their time at work.

In yet another 2014 survey which was conducted by the Human Capital Institute, it was found that 65% of companies now have a policy for blocking sites at work and 60% of them said that it had been an effective measure to take as it helped in getting rid of any workplace distractions.

Despite the use of such employee monitoring software increases performance, the topic does raise concerns for those who are advocates of civil liberty at the workplace. According to the president of National Work-rights Institute, Lewis Maltby, internet monitoring has now become a trend which is growing and software’s for this purpose are being made use of by a number of employers. He also states that it could be a major setback in terms of the privacy of employees since a lot of times; workplace computers are also made use of for personal searches which may be associated with illness, disease or problems with children or one’s marriage.

Coalition Technologies makes use of ActivTrak to see the screen shots of activities on computers which are used by around 30 of its employees out of a total of 73. All that is required is that a manager selects a date, clicks on “go” and the software will show him every screen shot of the computer used by an employee for that particular date. Thus the software is pretty useful and can even provide the list of websites which an employee visited and for how long he was on the site. This is possible since the software runs in the background while the computer continues to operate and is in no way, intrusive. What businesses should keep in mind however is that soon enough, it will be difficult for them to find employees who don’t mind being micromanaged at all times.