Friday, October 15, 2010

Be Aware Of Your Employees With A Desktop Remote Monitoring Service

Countless studies have revealed that a majority of employees who have access to the internet during their workday spend a lot of time conducting non-work related web browsing at the expense of their employer. The result is hours upon hours of lost production and potential profits. But there is a way to effectively increase production and it comes in the form of a desktop remote monitoring service.

You may have tried various tools and tactics to keep your employees on track, only to find that you were wasting your money. Cutting internet access is probably not an option. Using internet filtering services may block websites that your employees need to access to do their jobs. Restricting access to the internet is too costly and time consuming.

With a desktop remote monitoring service, you can have specialists monitor the productivity of your employees without restricting their internet accesses. You can ensure that their internet activities are work-related and not just for pleasure. Furthermore, employers can use these services to verify that employees are not accessing websites that can be harmful to their networks or make sure that confidential data is not being leaked.

There are many tools available to choose from. Some things that a business owner needs to consider are the cost of the services, what is monitored, and how the data that is being monitored is accessed. Monitoring internet usage can be a full time job for one or more people, so the employer also needs to think about the additional manpower and resources that will be needed.

As technology costs get lower, monitoring software and services also get cheaper. In fact, some basic software packages are free. Online services will provide the programs that you need without business owners having to invest in costly tools or worry about upgrades.

You will also have to consider how in depth you want the monitoring to be. Basic monitoring programs keep lists of what websites your employees viewed without much additional data. More advanced programs can capture detailed information about their internet activities, such as how much time was spent on each website or what was downloaded or uploaded to and from the website. Other programs even log employee keystrokes, capture emails, and can even record voice.

They will also have to determine what kind of techniques they want to use to monitor the data. Online services offer the ability to have data monitored from remote locations. The benefit of this is that more people from a monitoring company can filter through much more data for a lower cost than on-site monitoring office. On the other hand, this may expose the confidential data of your company to the outside world. In house defeat this negative aspect, but are much more expensive.

Regardless of what type of service an employer ultimately chooses, they have the legal responsibility to inform their employees that their activities are being monitored. In many places, not making your employees aware of this constitutes illegal search and seizure and employers can be sued, fined, and even imprisoned. Having employees sign a legal document stating that they consent to monitoring is a simple way of informing them of monitoring without violating their rights.

Using a desktop remote monitoring service is a highly effective way of increasing productivity. It allows employers the ability to keep tabs of their employees while they are working at computers throughout the work center. In most cases, the cost of these services is offset by the amount of profits that can be regained by the increase in productivity.

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