Can Employee Monitoring Benefit Your Company?

Do all your employees use their computer resources and Internet connection solely for your business? Do they work as hard when you are away as they do when you are watching over their shoulders? In other words, do you suspect your employee's productivity is lacking? You should consider installing a surveillance system to address the problem.

Look no further! Refog Employee Monitor records and monitors your employee's activities and provides you on-site and remote access to employee's logs and computer screens in real time. The software-only solution can be installed in a matter of minutes, and does not require any hardware other than an ordinary PC. No special surveillance skills or security training are needed to successfully configure and operate Refog Employee Monitor.

Improve Employee Productivity

Statistics show that surveillance disciplines employees and improves their productivity. Employees tend to perform better when they are being monitored - or even when they think they may be monitored. Refog Employee Monitor successfully accomplishes this goal by constantly monitoring your employee's working environment - their computers.

Real-Time Remote Monitoring

Employees perform better under constant control with real-time feedback from their supervisor. Simply logging keystrokes and saving screen captures for future analysis is not enough. A certain level of interaction and feedback is vital for tightening discipline and improving performance.

Letting your employees know that managers and supervisors can see what is happening on their computers in real time even from remote locations provides the necessary feeling and improves discipline and productivity.

Refog Employee Monitoring Software allows managers and supervisors to monitor multiple employees remotely in real time. There is no need to leave a comfortable Executive chair in order to check each employee's PC for unauthorized activities. Capture the action and see what your employees are doing while they are still doing it, and provide immediate feedback on their activities!

Save Screens and Keystrokes

While real-time monitoring is essential to improve employee productivity, it does not completely solve the problem of employee loyalty. Hard evidence such as lists of visited Web sites, chat logs and other things typed by employees are critical in decreasing the possibilities of security breaches and identifying disloyal employees.

Invisible mode

Refog Employee Monitor is completely invisible to your employees. It runs silently and unobtrusively while logging everything that happens on your employee's computers. The product captures all keystrokes, makes periodic screen captures of employee's desktops, logs programs that are opened or closed, and records all Web sites that they visit. You can access these logs on-site or remotely; there's no need to leave your chair to check out employee behavior.

Email and FTP reports

You can easily configure Employee Computer Monitoring Software to alert you about certain events via e-mail or by uploading to an FTP server. Smart templates allow capturing only those keystrokes that contain one of the pre-defined trigger phrases, making it easy to configure for maximum security or minimal intrusion.

Conclusion

Employee Monitoring Software is a powerful tool to address lack of employee productivity while protecting your company against security breaches and disloyal employees. Download the free evaluation version, install it on all your PCs, make your employees aware of it and see how quickly your bottom line is improved!

Features

Screenshots

Abstract

This article describes a computer activity monitoring approach as means to improve employee productivity in corporate environments, investigate fraud and collect evidence in a non-disruptive way.

Introduction

The widespread availability of new technologies has changed a modern workplace dramatically. The way we do work and the way we manage employees has changed with the use of new and improved information and communication tools.

While offering the obvious productivity and cost benefits, information technologies bear a number of associated risks and concerns. Social networking and casual games lead to decreased employee productivity on Internet-connected workplaces, while companies dealing with trade secrets, intellectual property and sensitive information face increased employer risks related to employee misconduct.

Those same technologies, on the other hand, provide employers with more efficient and lower cost tools to manage the risks and address misconduct. Surveillance, monitoring and proactive data leak protection (DLP) systems are quickly gaining popularity.

The availability of effective, inexpensive monitoring tools in a situation of increased risks and constant socializing resulted in increased use of surveillance and monitoring on computer-equipped workplaces.

This paper looks at ways in which the use of software-based employee monitoring systems affects employee productivity, the enforcement of corporate policies, prevention and investigation of employee misconduct and security breaches.

Computer Surveillance and Monitoring Software

This paper is based on statistics collected by the use of two PC monitoring tools: Refog Employee Monitor and Refog Terminal Monitor. The tools are common representatives of their species, offering employers the ability to watch all or select employee activities such as communications with the outside world, launching applications or accessing files.

Non-Disruptive Monitoring

A major difference between passive monitoring solutions and proactive data leak protection (DLP) systems is the way they handle potential threats. Heuristic analysis and proactive filtering may seem to create a technological barrier to prevent data leaks, stop employee misconduct and combat fraud.

In practice, proactive solutions are likely to introduce more disruption in the work process, intimidate employees and do little to actually prevent fraud.

Passive monitoring, on the other hand, helps collect information about employee activities without stopping or preventing them. Collected information helps employers give quick feedback or investigate security incidents with hard data.

The Use of Proactive DLP Systems vs. Passive Monitoring

Refog Computer Surveillance Software only uses passive monitoring in its computer surveillance products, the most ‘proactive’ action being an instant alert sent to a designated security officer in a case of potential breach of security.

Here in the company, we’re convinced that this approach works smoother and more effectively while providing considerate cost benefit compared to heuristic-based DLP systems (up to 80% savings based on recent market research).

Single-Point Employee Monitoring

Refog products are designed to be used on Windows desktops and networkd (Refog Employee Monitor), while Refog Terminal Monitor is designed to monitor terminal server clients.

All user activities are centrally available via convenient administrative interface. Flexible filters and search functionality are available. All collected information is stored locally securely encrypted.

Surveillance Helps Enforcing Corporate Policies

Surveillance helps enforcing corporate policies by its very existence. The many logs and monitors implemented in Refog Employee Monitor and Refog Terminal Monitor help administrators and corporate officers to ensure employee compliance with corporate policies.

By monitoring how employees handle information and controlling their communications such as chats and social networking, administrators are able to keep track of employee activities, provide instant feedback and prevent potential misconduct before it’s getting out of control.

PC Monitoring Improves Employee Productivity

Employees perform better under when being watched. Instant, real-time feedback from their supervisor helps stop the time waste caused by casual games (“office killers”), uncontrollable chatting and socializing. Knowing exactly what, when, and for how long employees do goes miles in improving employee productivity.

Knowing they’re under control, employees spend less time chatting while concentrating their efforts on doing their paid work. Tracking Employee Activities Helps Prevent Misconduct Simply logging keystrokes and saving screen captures for future analysis is not enough. A certain level of interaction and feedback is vital for tightening discipline and improving performance.

Letting your employees know that managers and supervisors can see what is happening on their computers in real time even from remote locations provides the necessary feeling and improves discipline and productivity.

Refog Surveillance Software allows managers and supervisors to monitor multiple employees remotely in real time. There is no need to leave a comfortable Executive chair in order to check each employee's PC for unauthorized activities.

Capture the action and see what your employees are doing while they are still doing it, and provide immediate feedback on their activities!

Technical Specifications

Both products, Refog Employee Monitor and Refog Terminal Monitor, can capture a wide range of activities occurring on employees’ PCs.

• Keystroke logging

• URL monitoring

• Application monitoring

• Screenshot captures

• Invisible mode

• IM & Facebook chat interception

• Email and FTP delivery

• File tracking

• Alarm keywords

• Real-time network logs

Why You should Implement the Use of Computer Surveillance Software

Refog Employee Monitor intercepts and logs more types of events and activities than any competing tool in its class. The tool can monitor key presses, log chats and conversations, record Skype voice calls, take note of visited Web pages, identify logon/logoff events, track application usage by recording start/stop time of any game or program and illustrate all that with periodic screen captures. Below is a brief list of activities tracked by Refog Employee Monitor:

• Everything they type including Web forms
• Chats and instant messenger conversations in any language
• Communications in social networks
• Emails and webmails
• Opened Web pages
• Launched games and programs
• Logon and logoff events
• Voice calls carried in Skype
• Snapshot images of computer screens
• And much more

Advanced Cloaking Technologies

Refog Employee Monitor is designed to run silently and unobtrusively straight out of the box. Thanks to advanced cloaking techniques, our logging solution is highly discreet, and does not reveal its presence to the user. Our highly advanced cloaking technology ensures that Refog Employee Monitor does not appear in the list of processes in the Task Manager, displays no icon in the notification area, and does not appear anywhere else where it could be spotted. You can invoke Refog Employee Monitor by pressing a pre-defined combination of keys, but changing settings, disabling or uninstalling the product will require the use of a master password – the password that only you set and know.

Remote Access

You can easily access all recorded activity from a remote computer. The remote access functionality allows you to stay tuned about what’s happening on your computer.

Real-Time Alerts

Real-time alerts are delivered straight to your inbox if event from a pre-defined list happens. You can specify which events Refog Employee Monitor should report about, and maintain a personalized list of stop-words. An instant email alert will be sent if a word from the stop list is encountered. False alerts are nearly eliminated by the use of advanced pre-defined templates.

Screenshots

Refog Employee Monitor illustrates activities with periodic screen captures. These screen shots make understanding what’s happening much easier than plain text logs.

Monitor Chat and Conversations

Refog Employee Monitor can distinguish between a Web form and a chat or instant messenger application. Conversations occurring in all popular chat programs are delivered before your eyes in conveniently formatted and nicely laid out form, making it easier to review long chat logs.

Skype Calls

Refog Employee Monitor is one of the few solutions that can actually record voice calls occurring in Skype and similar VoIP programs. You can play back conversations recorded by Refog Employee Monitor with any media player.

Wasting Time at Work: Improving Employee Effectiveness

How many hours do your employees waste every day? Chatting with friends, reading news, browsing the Web and entertaining themselves with ‘office killer’ games, employees in a typical office waste as much as 35% of their working hours, according to a Microsoft survey performed in 2005 [1]. Microsoft surveyed employees of large corporations, and discovered unclear objectives, lack of team communication and ineffective meetings to be the top time wasters. But is it also true for small and medium-size businesses?

Owners of small and medium-size businesses find themselves in a different seat. Running small businesses leaves no room for unclear objectives. Small teams eliminate miscommunications, and corporate meetings are better left to those monster corporations. Does this mean that small business employees are more effective than those employed by large corporations? Not necessarily.

Small business owners often find their employees wasting time chatting, playing casual computer games, reading news or browsing the Internet pointlessly. While browsing the Web and communicating with customers over instant messengers might be a legitimate part of employees' everyday activities, it is hard to distinguish between what's being done for work and what's for fun.

Fortunately, small business owners are not left without tools that help them reduce or prevent unauthorized employee activities.

Refog Employee Monitor makes it easy to intercept and record employee activities that lead to the most time wasted. The employee monitoring tool intercepts keystrokes, tracks all Web sites visited by employees, logs chats and conversations in common instant messengers, keeps track of applications they run and files they use, and takes periodic captures of their computer screens.

Refog Employee Monitor is easy to learn and to use, and does not require business owners to become security officers. The available intelligent filters make it simple to glance through employees' essential activities while skipping assigned tasks. The intelligent chat module recognizes common instant messengers such as AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN Messenger, and produces chat logs in a legible, human-readable format. Instant alerts notify business owners if any of the pre-defined events occurs, such as if an employee types certain key phrases or runs certain applications.

With Refog Employee Monitor, it's up to the business owners whether or not to advertise the computer surveillance system to employees. The available invisible mode makes Refog Employee Monitor completely hidden from employees, while password-protection makes it impossible to circumvent, disable or uninstall. All in all, Refog Employee Monitor is an extremely cost-effective, result-oriented computer surveillance system that does not require any wiring or extra hardware.

[1] Microsoft Corp. “Survey Finds Workers Average Only Three Productive Days per Week”

Summary: How many hours do your employees waste every day? Learn how to improve employee performance and reduce the time waste with employee monitoring software.