MONITORING SOFTWARE BLOG

If you run a company, you know how difficult it can be to manage your employees. Some employees think that they can skimp on work, procrastinate on projects, and still get paid.

Staying on top of the inner workings of your business is critical to its success. You would not let employees slack off if you were sitting right next to them. Employee monitoring software allows you to have a similar oversight level, even in large companies or when working with remote employees.

Additionally, any business can be susceptible to a malicious attack. Whether it is through negligent employees or weak firewalls, you need to have another set of eyes on all your digital assets.

Running a business is hard work. But you should not feel like you have to be in more places than one to get a handle on some of its fundamental workings. User activity monitoring (UAM) can help a business stay on top of unruly employees and keep assets safe.

Workplace and employee monitoring are extremely common. However, many people believe that employee monitoring is illegal. This belief is understandable when you consider that there are a number of workplace privacy laws in place to restrict the invasiveness of employee monitoring. 

Employee monitoring, such as employee surveillance in the workplace and the use of employee monitoring software, is completely legal, but privacy laws will vary by jurisdiction. When you think of employee monitoring, know that it comes with its restrictions and that not all the myths that you’ve heard about it are true. 

While medical experts have long been predicting another pandemic, COVID-19 still came as quite a surprise. Few could have anticipated the nearly immediate global impact and company-wide and industry-wide lockdowns that followed. Overnight, projects and initiatives were put on hold as employees and IT teams focused on redirecting all workflows through remote access, while also ensuring that security remained a top priority. 

Any business managing a remote workforce could fall victim to a cyberattack either from external malicious attackers or from insider threats. Your remote workforce needs to be secure enough to protect your company assets even when a remote team is navigating in and out of company files on their own personal networks. 

From unprotected personal networks to lax security on a personal device, your remote workforce could be at risk and you would have no way of knowing. 

Monitoring employees in the workforce is necessary for your business’ survival. As your company grows, so too will the level of access to sensitive information, unknown people, and moving parts. You want to have employee monitoring in place early so that it can scale as your business grows. 

Employee monitoring might consist of monitoring at a physical location or using employee monitoring software. Depending on its uses, employee monitoring software in particular may seem too invasive and a form of computer spyware. 

Employee monitoring software and computer spyware are extremely different. And, in fact, employee monitoring may be able to help a company track and stop computer spyware before it’s too late. 

This article describes how to automatically lock workstations in Windows by implementing workstation locking policy. This will improve security by locking unattended workstations, when users walk away and leave sensitive information on their screen.

SoftActivity announces the release of SoftActivity Monitor version 12.4, its leading user activity monitoring (UAM) solution helping thousands of organizations improve their employee productivity.

By popular requests it now allows our customers to track employees idle time, which helps improve team productivity, especially for remote teams handling challenges of working from home.

What’s new in version 12.4:

• Idle time tracking. Attendance view in web console now shows idle intervals, i.e. for how long a user was away. This lets you track if employees are away from their computers, or actually working. Adjust the idle timeout in minutes in All Agents – Properties – Monitoring tab in Monitor app. Default idle timeout value is 5 minutes.
• Attendance view in web console: Zoom to Sessions button to quickly switch to a work day, instead of manually selecting start & end times.
• fix: [web console] clean up of old logs previously could take a lot of RAM on the server and fail.
• other fixes and improvements