All eyes on you!

With the onset of covid, biometric devices are a thing of some long-lost past. Nevertheless companies have found a new way to measure diligence of their remote workforce by mandating them to connect to productivity tracking tools. This means if you have been away from your laptop for a few minutes or using social media, your employer may know! More tech-savy organizations get employees to login to VPNs and enforce them to click on a screen that prompts ‘Start Work’. From that point on, all activities of the employee are tracked. The rise of remote working has spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring software by companies who want to boost productivity — and keep an eye on workers outside the office. Some of such interesting tools are listed below:

1. Time Doctor is one of the most powerful time tracking tools. Used by organizations like Apple, Verizon and PwC, it allows you to keep a tab on the tasks your team is working on and how much time is spent on each of them. It also records the websites your team members visited during workhours along with their log in and log out timings. Whenever an employee accesses unproductive sites, the app automatically sends a pop-up asking if they’re still working. This little nudge is usually enough to get them off social media and get back to work.
2. Toggl is a great software to see if remote employees are working. It can seamlessly integrate with over 100 different tools across a range of industries. One of its key features include automated virtual timesheet generation via a powerful browser extension that can track time and activities carried out on other websites as well. It can also be used offline for areas that have intermittent internet connectivity and the reports are uploaded to employer’s dashboard as and when internet connection is available. Toggl’s team dashboard allows you to create user groups, add minimal working time for these groups and receive automated alerts.
3. Hubstaff helps you to track when your employees are working, what they are doing, and what you need to pay them when the assignment(s) is done. Once the app is running, it monitors which websites and applications your team is viewing, their screen activity, and how much time they spend on their computers. It also includes a monitoring feature that tracks your remote employee’s location during work hours while also estimating how much time your employees spend on commuting, doing personal stuff, or working from a specific location.
4. Activtrak gives management the ability to see what employees are viewing on their screen as well as KPI reporting to track activity of users. It can also be used to protect your organization from security breaches, data thefts and malware attacks. As administrators, you may install ActivTrak tracking agent on the computer you intend to monitor, after which it starts to gather and send data about website and application usage to employer’s dashboard instantly. The monitoring software will remain invisible to the user, so your employees will not know you installed it unless you want them to.
5. Timeneye is a simple and intelligent time-tracking tool, meant largely for SMBs to track productivity of their employees as well as freelancers. It can integrate with a large set of project management tools to extract detailed reports on each team member’s time usage. While allowing you to track billable and non-billable hours separately for easy categorization, this tool has an exceptionally easy-to-use interface that allows people to track time without leaving the application they are working on. Its centralized dashboard gives you a helpful overlook at the progress of all of your projects.

No wonder the application of remote surveillance tools at work is seen as an invasion of privacy. Somehow we have to be able to make both sides happy by viewing usage of such software through the lens of our workforce and come up with an ethical and trustworthy monitoring solution.

Originally published at https://siddhithakkar.com on February 2, 2021.