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Have you ever thought that all the purchases we make involve a buying process, prior to the time of the transaction?

We call this process customer journey and it encompasses all the phases a person/buyer persona goes through from the moment they identify they have a need until they acquire a product or service to satisfy it.

This process can be as short as a few minutes in the case of low-cost products that we buy impulsively (food in a supermarket, for example). The buying process may also last for months or more than a year (for instance, when acquiring a car or purchasing a customer experience management software).

In this article we will cover what the customer journey is, what phases it has and how we can define it in our customer experience strategy.

What is a Customer Journey?

By book definition, a customer journey is the set of interactions that a customer has with a brand in the process of buying a service or product. Put plainly, it considers the complete interaction roadmap - from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond.

The focus isn't only on transactions, but on how the customer feels after every interaction with the brand. In other words, it can be used as a strategy to gain insights on what's the experience of a customer throughout all their buying process.

The objective of a customer journey is, on the one hand, to measure and evaluate how you are taking care of your customers and, on the other, in which way you can enhance and bring further delight to their experience with your brand.

By improving the customer experience at each point in the journey, you focus your business on your customers, putting them at the heart of all. This builds a loyal fan base and keeps customers coming back time and again. This builds brand loyalty as a positive outcome, leading to having satisfied customers and an influence over their lives, choosing your brand above others.

The brands that gain the most loyalty are the ones that have influence over their clients' lives. is the outcome of so many variables -some of which we can control, and others we cannot-, and understanding how those variables play out in our markets is a crucial first step to understanding what causes brand loyalty.

If you like reading about what is customer journey, you might find interesting learning about customer journey vs customer experience: the difference.

Customer Journey stages

Now that you know what a customer journey is, it's time to look more closely at what you can actually do to commit both to your present and potential clients. Various stages make up the complete customer journey.

These three steps generally make up most journeys: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. These stages are most suitable for offline purchases.

With the progress of digital platforms, two critical additions appear in the customer experience: Retention and Advocacy. These new stages explore brand touchpoints with online shoppers.

1. Awareness

Awareness involves spreading general information about your products and services to your target audience(s).

During the awareness stage of the journey, consumers search for solutions and encounter multiple brands and products. Hint: This is the time to shine if you want to make a good first impression.

What consumers are doing: During this step, consumers are likely conducting research. This can include searching online for solutions to keyword problems, reading blog posts and news articles, browsing online forums, and first meeting brands.

What brands can do: You might think that consumers are doing all the heavy lifting at this stage because they're asking questions and browsing content.

However, you don't want to approach brand awareness passively. You have to already be there, where the consumer is looking at alternatives. By "being there", we mean taking the form of an educational blog post or video, providing the solution or information they want. Bringing valuable resources to the consumer is key in this initial phase.

Read about the consumer decision journey.

2. Consideration

Brands focus on promotion during the consideration stage of the journey. This is where customers begin to look for alternatives to past purchases. During this phase, your business strives to convince potential buyers to include you on the list of available options.

Your brand will most likely be considered alongside others, so make sure every impression you make counts.

At this point, consumers are directly interacting with your brand, and you want them to stick around for the next step in the customer journey.

What consumers are doing: Researching specific brands and products, comparing competitors, and evaluating your priorities. This could include taking a closer look at your product and service specifications, features, examining customer support policies, and turning to direct comparison reviews.

The consideration phase varies because consumer-centric channels can come in many forms.

What brands can do: Value the importance of the user experience (UX). Continuously optimize the UX across all your touchpoints, including e-commerce transaction and description pages.

Little things like making sure the descriptions and processes are clear and that all the buttons work properly go a long way when someone considers you against a competitor.

For instance, a person becomes aware they're hungry and could be scouting for a place to eat on an app like Google Maps. If your business has a strong presence there, i.e with information about what kind of food you sell, the menu, photos of the place and the food, phone number, and truthful positive customer reviews, you might make them consider that you could be a good alternative to what they're looking for.

3. Conversion

This stage prompts visitors to take a particular action. Using a dedicated call-to-action (CTA), you encourage customers to make a purchase, subscribe to a mailing list, or sign up for services. You should use this phase to sell your product as the best fit to solve a visitor's problem.

It is your moment to make or break during the Customer Journey. Once potential customers are satisfied with researching and comparing their options, they will eventually make a decision.

Sometimes they find that none of the brands they've been considering offer what they're looking for. If they make a positive decision, they want to make the process easier by choosing their trusted products.

What consumers are doing: They are considering factors like price vs. value, customer service responsiveness, company values, and policies. By the time they're in the decision phase, it's not just about product specifications or the shopping experience.

Consumers want to support a brand that they can trust to provide a quality solution to their problems.

What brands can do: To anticipate this step, you have to go further. This could include marketing strategies where you offer incentives to potential customers who have already visited your website or engaged with your business.

Make sure your return and refund policies are easy to find and train your customer support team to answer key decision-making questions.
Note about the following two stages: Retention and Advocacy stages were optional in previous business models. Nevertheless, the increase in online purchases makes these stages as significant as the others.

Read about the customer value journey and what it is.

4. Retention

At this point, you already have a new customer - Congratulations! All that planning and asset building is paying off when they get to this phase. The consumer has decided to make their purchase with you, but don't assume it's a done deal.

A loyal customer brings an organization consistent business and costs less than the effort to bring in new customers. In fact, a study by Bain & Company discovered that loyal customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, in comparison to new customers.

Retention includes keeping customers happy with a relationship management/customer success team to stop customers from leaving and take as many as possible to the next and final stage - make them so loyal to your brand that they want to advocate for your product and/or service.

What consumers are doing: Depending on your business model, customers are taking advantage of this moment to buy your products online, with a physical retailer, or are booking a service they plan to experience soon.

Once they have the product or service, they will start to implement their purchase and if they go through the phase successfully, you will earn their customer loyalty.

What brands can do: Optimize the transaction experience in the Customer Journey. Ensuring the quality of your own e-commerce site or physical store, and regularly review how your competition is optimizing their customers' experience for each of the customer journey touchpoints.

5. Advocacy

Most organizations acknowledge the benefits of word-of-mouth (WOM). However, few companies commit to a plan for boosting customer advocacy. Encouraging each customer to share reviews or opinions can take time and money. Reaching out to influencers or guest bloggers is an effective alternative to traditional word-of-mouth.

Enthusiastic customers are more likely to recommend your brand and products to a friend, which for many can be a deal-breaker.

When you keep your customers happy and exceed their expectations with innovation and excellent customer service, the customer journey shortens and transaction costs decrease.

What consumers are doing: At this point, customers are using your offerings to address their needs. The better the results and experience they get with your product, the more likely they are to buy again and recommend you.

They can also begin to engage with your brand more casually on social media and plan their next purchase.

What brands can do: Take the initiative to contact customers in a friendly and supportive way. A short customer experience survey is a good way to let them know that you care about their feedback.

This could include blog content with tips to enrich your product experience, a newsletter with updates, promotions, and occasional opportunities to provide further feedback.

Benefits of understanding the Customer Journey

Identifying the journey of customers allows us to better understand how they buy to meet their needs and expectations and what role a specific business plays in this process.

Next, we will explain in detail what are the benefits of implementing a customer journey strategy in your business.

A better understanding of customer emotions:
Building a journey framework puts you directly in the mind of the consumer. Understanding the reasons why a customer makes a particular choice sets your business up for success.

Knowing how customers feel encourages you to improve how the organization functions because it allows you to clearly identify what are the friction points throughout their customer journey, making them easier to fix.
Analyze the stumbling blocks in products/services:
Mapping the customer journey gives your organization insights into where your customer communications fall short. For instance, if your support staff is undermanned, customers don't receive help when they need it. Your customers become angry because they expect prompt replies. You resolve the issue by hiring another support team member to tackle more customer questions.

Creating a customer journey map provides the customers' viewpoint of a business. The map is a visual representation of the transactions and emotions that leads through each touchpoint with customers that helps to identify weak points in your messaging.
Improve employee and customer satisfaction:
As issues are resolved, confidence levels among customers and employees alike increase. Employees are encouraged to continue doing great work, which in turn increases overall customer satisfaction.
Create a united team:
To develop amazing customer experiences, the teams in your organization need to be on the same page. Marketing, product development, sales, and customer service must work together to improve processes within the organization. As the teams work together, the efficiency and effectiveness of each team increase.

Make sure to check these 10 customer journey benefits for mapping

Customer Journey Analysis

Understanding the organization from the customer's point of view brings new ideas and opinions to the table. Customer Journey Analytics does precisely that - it analyzes customer viewpoints about products so that you can make appropriate changes to keep customers loyal to your brand. Use data from customers to implement improved marketing strategies.

Here is how customer journey analysis is beneficial in gathering information:

Clearly defines all customer interaction points.

Evaluates how the journey progresses from beginning to end.

Analyzes the impact on customer loyalty and brand shareability according to customer interaction points.

Highlights areas that waste a customer's time in order to improve efficiency.

Generalize the journey of similar audiences to make improvements and keep customers satisfied.

Learn what is Customer Journey Monitoring and the benefits of implementing this systematic activity.

Customer Journey communication channels

Some places to measure experience on an ongoing basis include:

On-site: Capture feedback in the moment customers visit businesses with physical locations. For example, let's say you run a restaurant. Give diners a short survey to complete along with their bill at the end of their meal.

Email: Sending emails is one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback. Set up your sales system to trigger an email after a customer completes a purchase.

Call center: After every customer interaction, you can collect feedback by or via a phone-based survey.

In-App: For app developers, collecting responses without leaving the app is ideal. An in-app survey allows users to continue enjoying the app while still providing you with feedback.

Website: Your prospects browse your site to consider becoming customers. Once customers, continue visiting for support and account access. Gathering feedback on your is an essential part of a holistic customer experience approach.

If you like reading about what is customer journey, you might find it interesting learning about in-store customer journey: definition, importance and stages.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A Customer Journey Map (CJM), tells the story of your customer's experiences with your brand across every touchpoint - all on the same canvas. or Customer Journey Map (CJM), as a key tool to improve the customer experience. Depending on the objective of the CJM, it can be more or less complex.

The things your customer feels, sees and hears as they interact with your business builds the foundation for their experience. Understanding these experiences allows you to accurately map and control the customer journey.

Example of Customer Journey Mapping

Starbucks, for example, masters the concept of customer intimacy to control the experience. The journey is calculated from the moment you step in the door.

Imagine a trip to your local Starbucks. As you walk inside, you smell the aroma of roasted coffee beans. The barista behind the counter greets you with a smile. You feel the coziness around you as the muffled chit-chat disappears into the tranquil background music. When you receive your coffee, you see your name handwritten by one of the friendly baristas. If you're a regular, the staff knows you by name and can make your order from memory.

The coffee giant doesn't just sell a product. It sells what people are best at remembering - the experience. By packaging the product with an unforgettable experience, the company retains incredibly loyal customers. They're also able to charge up to 10 times more than their competitors. Starbucks clearly understands customer experience and infuses that into the core of its business strategy.

Your customer's journey could take place over a few hours or more than several weeks. The simplest way to start is to create a timeline. Using your customer knowledge, fill in what's happening with your customer at each stage of your timeline.

The c ustomer journey mapping framework includes the following alongside the timeline:

Actions: What is your customer doing? What are the key actions a customer takes to move to the next stage? What actions does a person take when they don't move on?

Motivations: What drives the customer to proceed to the next stage? What is the goal? Are they trying to solve a problem? What are they feeling?

Questions: What are the customer's uncertainties? Are they looking for something specific? Are they confused? Identify which stage customers have the most questions and quickly address them.

Pain points: What obstacles prevent your customers from moving on to the next stage? Is it the process? Price?

Direct customer opinions are the most effective way to get answers. Send surveys or conduct interviews to learn more about your customers and their needs. Input the data you receive to the framework above, so you can see your company from your customer's view.

Tips for conducting a Customer Journey Mapping

If you've made it this far you would agree that knowing the journey of your customer is critical to creating a great customer experience. But how do you make the most out of it?

We'd like to share with you the following tips to create an effective Customer Journey Map.
Building a customer journey map is a team effort
It is not easy to reflect on the Customer Journey Map all the interactions that a customer goes through. The task can be further complicated when the people responsible for interaction cannot be found in the different departments. This leads to taking for granted the phases or interactions that the client goes through with the company. What's worse, it sometimes leads to mapping a Customer Journey Map that has more emphasis on departmental silos than the overall customer journey.

Remember, your team cannot forget the goal. It seeks to map the Customer Experience from its perspective. This is most effectively achieved when different company profiles are brought together. Only in this way will the final result reflect the knowledge that each one has of the client.

The ideal is to dedicate a workspace together with the different professionals, with and without contact with clients. If this is impossible, it is important to carry out at least one validation with each department. This will also allow you to turn your Customer Journey Map into a shared responsibility tool.
Know your customer thoroughly
You need to understand your customers at each intersection or checkpoint in their journey. This allows you to develop content, products, and services that meet their needs. Rather than gathering occasional data from customers, employ continuous surveys to collect information.

You'll enjoy the ability to adjust your marketing or product development in real-time to meet customer needs as the market changes.

Obtain a comprehensive view

Throughout these stages, you need to know how customers feel about your business and products. For example, do you know what factors cause customers to choose you over the competition? How do customers perceive your sales staff? What do customers like about your products? Is your support team answering customer questions with accuracy?

How to create a Customer Journey Map?

There are six main steps to creating a customer journey map:

1. Understand the target buyer's persona: An organization must define its ideal buyer's persona before customer journey mapping.

2. Acknowledge the target audience's intent: What does a buyer hope to achieve by interacting with a brand? What are their expectations?

Answer these questions by:

Then develop action plans using the results of your research to meet buyer expectations.

Note the touchpoints: Map all interaction touchpoints every time new customers visit your website or contact a sales team member. Include interactions before, during, and after purchase in your map.

Your organization should understand:

1. Where customers obtain information about your - Google search, social media, or Google ads.

2. Which pages do most customers visit? What's the average time spent on each?

3. Did the customers enjoy shopping with the organization? Did they face any difficulties, and how helpful was the customer service team?

Is my organization satisfying all the requirements of my target audience?

In which stages do customers face common problems?

Which website pages have higher bounce rates than what is acceptable?

If you interact directly with customers, be sure to ask them:

How did you know about our organization?

What were your expectations from our organization's website?

Were your expectations satisfied?

What prompted you to purchase from our organization?

1. Make a list of priorities: You can optimize customer journey mapping by identifying the areas that need immediate attention. Once you know common problems, you can take steps to limit their impact on customer loyalty.

2. Most marketers prefer drawing the entire map on a whiteboard or using Put all ideas to paper: customer journey mapping tools to create a digital customer journey. Refer to your copy when you need to make decisions to improve customer experience.

Free Customer Journey Map template

At QuestionPro we know that all this information can be overwhelming and starting to create your own Customer Journey without help can be intimidating, that is why we have created this small article where you can find a template to easily create your own journey map.

We invite you to learn more about the Customer Journey Canva

How to use Customer Journey to improve your customer experience?

Customers expect every exchange with a brand to be seamless from the start. Understanding the interactions at each touchpoint helps you satisfy customer needs and also improves the efficiency of your business.

"Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those not focused on the customer." - Deloitte and Touche

To accurately map the journey, consider each stage of buying a product. At each stage, write down what a customer feels and the actions they must take to move forward.

Examine the emotions at each touchpoint and rate the experiences. Is it positive or negative?

Begin to connect the dots and identify which gaps are falling short of your customer's expectations. This exercise will help you formulate and decipher where you can have the most significant impact on improving the experience.
Leverage customer satisfaction data for more accurate results
For example, your customer rates a CSAT score of 3 at their point of purchase and gives a score of 8 post-purchase. You immediately know that your point of purchase requires attention.

Be sure to look at multiple customer satisfaction scores to find the most crucial pain points. If there is a touchpoint that ranks poorly for most customers, start your improvements there.
Start following your customer's journey.

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Customer Journey: What is it, How to use and Examples | QuestionPro

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Have you ever thought that all the purchases we make involve a buying process, prior to the time of the transaction? We call this process customer journey and it encompasses all the phases a person/buyer persona goes through from the moment they identify they have a need until they acquire a product or service to satisfy it.

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Pitch Deck page 9: The 2023-2028 World Outlook for Employee (Automated) Monitoring Solutions

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Pitch Deck page 9: The 2023-2028 World Outlook for Employee (Automated) Monitoring Solutions

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Pitch Deck page 9: Employee Monitoring Statistics Companies Need to Know for 2022

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Pitch Deck page 9: Employee Monitoring Statistics Companies Need to Know for 2022

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https://biz30.timedoctor.com/employee-monitoring-statistics

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Employee monitoring is a great way to keep your company data safe and ensure compliance, accountability, and productivity among your workforce.

However, employee monitoring trends keep changing with changes in technology, work style, and data protection and privacy laws. As a result, every employer should watch key employee monitoring statistics to stay updated on the latest trends.

In this article, we’ll share some insightful employee monitoring statistics and trends. We’ll also highlight the major benefits of employee monitoring and an effective software solution for the same.

This Article Contains:

(click on the links below to read a specific section)

Insightful Employee Monitoring Statistics and Trends for 2022

The Rise of Employee Monitoring in Numbers

What do Companies Monitor?

Employee Monitoring From Employers’ Perspective

What Employees Feel About Being Monitored

The Future of Employee Monitoring

Why Should Companies Monitor Their Employees?

Time Doctor: An Effective Productivity Monitoring Solution

Let’s get started.

Insightful Employee Monitoring Statistics and Trends for 2022

Employee monitoring is the set of workplace surveillance systems and practices to keep an eye on the activities of employees.

Businesses usually rely on security cameras to monitor their office premises and surveillance software to track company servers and employee workstations.

During the Coronavirus lockdown, remote employee monitoring software has become an essential part of the business toolkit for many companies.

While a solid monitoring software solution is essential, it’s also important for employers to have a holistic view of the entire monitoring process. It’ll help them tackle privacy concerns and win employee trust.

So here are some interesting stats and trends around employee surveillance to give you deeper insight into why and how you should go about it:

A. The Rise of Employee Monitoring in Numbers

Employee monitoring has been on an upward trend since the early 2000s — thanks to the rise of the internet and cloud computing.

With company data moving from physical files and folders to digital ones, monitoring software became essential to secure information from malicious and accidental insider threats.

For example, an American Management Association study found that the percentage of major companies monitoring employees rose from 35% in 1997 to 78% in 2001.

Employee monitoring saw yet another sharp rise during the pandemic induced lockdown. Companies unsure about the remote work trend felt an increasing need to track the activities of their employees working from home. This resulted in a sharp rise in the use of remote monitoring tools.

Let’s check out some insightful findings of various studies and researches tracking the growth and extent of employee monitoring:

As per an Opinium survey on 2,424 remote employees in the UK, 32% affirmed to being monitored by their employers in October 2021, up from 24% in April 2021.

The same survey also reported that the number of employees monitored at home using cameras has more than doubled (from 5% to 13%) in the same time period.

Research by 2021 Top10VPN showed a 54% rise in the demand for employee surveillance software since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic.

A collaborative survey by ExpressVPN and Pollfish revealed that over 78% of the 2000 participating employers track their employees using monitoring software.

In 2018, 94% of organizations deployed some method of monitoring employees (compared to 42% in 2017), as reported by an Insider Threat report.

Check out useful remote work statistics in 2021 to gain a deeper perspective on these trends.

B. What do Companies Monitor?

Let’s explore some interesting and insightful trends and stats to highlight what and how do companies monitor their on-site and remote workers:

The 2018 Insider Threat Report by Crown Research Partners highlights that 44% of the participating employers consider User Activity Monitoring (UAM) as their top solution to counter insider threats.

A close second is tracking server logs, used by 42% of respondents.

According to the 2018 Gartner survey on 239 large corporations, 50% gather employees’ biometric data and monitor the contents of employee emails and social media interactions.

GetApp surveyed 100 businesses to find that 74% of them spend up to 8 hours tracking employee hours every two weeks.

The study also states that  14% of the companies employed either part-time or full-time employees to handle time tracking for their staff members.

Businesses may have different needs and goals when it comes to monitoring employee activity.

Some of the standard things that companies track include:

The login credentials employees use to sign in to their work devices (to prevent buddy punching).

Employee attendance, punch in and punch out times, and GPS location.

Computer activity during work hours – keystroke logging, internet use, file transfers, etc.

Time spent on their daily tasks as well as breaks and meal times.

Applications and websites employees use during work hours.

All external and internal communications (instant messages, customer chats, emails, phone calls, voice mails, etc.) via the company network.

Storage and peripheral devices (printers, webcams, flash drives, etc.) connected to employee workstations.

Find out more about computer monitoring using this informative guide.

C. Employee Monitoring From Employers’ Perspective

So it’s evident from the stats above that employers are increasingly monitoring their employees.

But why exactly do they feel the need to monitor their employees?

Here are some eye-opening stats to give you a perspective on why employers choose to track their employees:

The 2020 Insider Threat Report highlights that 68% of respondents feel vulnerable to insider attacks and affirm that such attacks have become more frequent.

63% of the organizations felt that privileged IT users and admins pose the biggest risk, closely followed by regular employees (51%) and contractors or temporary workers (50%)

The commonly reported damages due to data breaches are operational disruptions (54%), loss of critical data (50%), and damage to brand image (38%).

The 2020 Cost of Insider Threat Global Report 2020 reported 4,716 insider incidents with an estimated annual average cost of USD 11.45 million, a 31% increase from 2018 (USD 8.76 million).

62% of these incidents are caused by employee or contractor negligence.

Credential thefts are the most common form of a data breach with an estimated annual cost of USD 2.79 million, followed by personal, medical, and bank data.

Intermedia’s 2017 Data Vulnerability Report states that almost all of the surveyed US workers (99%) admitted to conducting at least one potentially dangerous act that could result in a data breach.

Companies stake sensitive data and risk non-compliance with state laws without an effective monitoring program. It could result in legal actions and further loss of business.

The numbers above speak for themselves and show why employers have no choice but to monitor each worker actively.

Now, let’s look at things from the other side of the table.

D. What Employees Feel About Being Monitored

Employee perception about monitoring is usually shaped by how a company executes its program.

It’s natural for employees to have apprehensions about their privacy when there’s a lack of transparency from the employer’s side.

On the other hand, employers who actively engage their staff and educate them about the benefits and usage of monitoring tools manage to win their trust.

Here are some stats that present the employee’s perspective on being monitored:

Clutch.co surveyed 400 U.S. employees and reported that only 21% believed their company is monitoring them using a software tool.

49% of employees said that their company isn’t tracking them, while 13% were unsure.

Only 22% of employees aged 18-34 years are concerned about their employers having access to personal information and activity from their work computer.

72% of respondents say monitoring apps wouldn’t affect their productivity, while 13% said it would increase productivity.

Employers may overlook the importance of employee engagement in building trust and boosting employee morale. Fully engaged employees are more likely to actively come on board with your monitoring program.

Interestingly, you can also use monitoring systems to track employee experience and gauge your team’s mood.

Improve transparency and compliance by developing an employee monitoring policy using this detailed guide.

E. The Future of Employee Monitoring

With the rate at which the use of employee monitoring software is growing, they are bound to see many updates to their capabilities soon.

Let’s explore three advanced technologies that could become standard features in employee tracking software in the future:

1. AI-based Behavioral Analysis

User behavior analysis has already made its way into many employee monitoring tools.

However, with growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can expect highly capable tools to precisely monitor employee behavior and spot red flags.

For example, a US military-backed project aims to leverage artificial intelligence to detect micro-changes in the behavior of employees with access to sensitive information.

It can predict the risk factor associated with each employee so that an employer can take the necessary precautions. If it lives up to its promise, such a system could soon become a standard feature in employee surveillance and HR software.

2. Employee Turnover Prediction

Another use case of employee behavior analysis in monitoring software is the ability to predict employee turnover.

It can analyze the general mood of your team and identify unhappy and actively disengaged employees. These are the employees who are more likely to quit the company in the future.

Employers can take proactive steps to retain such employees with this vital information.

With such cutting-edge technologies coming together to shape a super-efficient workplace, the future certainly looks promising.

For now, let’s look at how employee monitoring could help businesses.

Why Should Companies Monitor Their Employees?

Today, a growing number of companies monitor their employees’ work hours and computer activity, be it on-premise or remotely.

This is, in part, due to the frequent number of data and time theft incidents that even big companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and LinkedIn have not been immune to.

Let’s check out how exactly employee monitoring helps companies:

Boosts Productivity: When monitored, employees tend to stay more productive and avoid indulging in non-work-related tasks during working hours.

Cost-savings: Monitoring will minimize instances of time-theft, saving you money in payroll and productivity losses.

Enhances data security: Effective surveillance reduces the risk of insider attacks, keeping your sensitive data and business secrets safe.

Ensures compliance: With your data safe, staying compliant with privacy laws and standards like ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), HIPAA, etc., becomes easier.

Understand the relation between worktime and employee well-being through this compilation of useful work hour statistics.

All ready to reap the benefits of effective employee monitoring?

Let’s check out an excellent employee tracking solution you can start using today.

Time Doctor: An Effective Productivity Monitoring Solution

Time Doctor is a popular time and productivity tracking software trusted by major companies, like Verizon and Ericsson, and small businesses, like Thrive Market, to manage employee performance.

It offers a ton of monitoring features to track your in-house and remote team, as well as on-contract workers.

With Time Doctor, you can:

Track employee work hours using either a manual or automatic mode.

View the time an employee spends idle or doing non-work-related tasks.

Take screenshots of employee screens at regular intervals to see what they are working on.

See detailed reports to monitor employee productivity and attendance in real-time.

Minimize time-theft and financial losses by mapping the actual billable hours to your payroll.

Track time in popular project management tools using powerful a Chrome extension.

Note: Time Doctor does not log keystrokes. It only checks for keypresses and mouse clicks to determine the idle time. Moreover, screenshots containing personal or sensitive information can be deleted or blurred to protect employee privacy.

Time Doctor has strict privacy and data security policies to protect the confidential company and employee data. The software has advanced security features like encrypted data transfer, email verification, and two-factor authentication.

This way, it offers a reliable and employee-friendly way to kickstart your employee monitoring program with its robust time tracking and productivity management functionality.

Final Thoughts

Employee monitoring is an effective way to track your team’s adherence to company regulations and improve workplace productivity. It’ll also help you minimize financial losses due to lost productivity and incorrect payrolls while ensuring compliance with privacy laws.

Use the stats and trends shared in this article to gain vital insights into on-premise and remote employee monitoring and boost your surveillance program.

And if you’re looking for the best way to monitor employee productivity, Time Doctor is the tool for you.

So why not sign up for Time Doctor’s free trial to get started today?

Lauren Soucy is the VP of Marketing for Time Doctor, the world’s leading time tracking and productivity software. She has 15+ years of experience in marketing at fast-paced companies. Her first passion is SEO, she can’t start her day without coffee, and she enjoys spending time at the beach with her two boys and her husband.

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Employee Monitoring Statistics Companies Need to Know for 2022

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Explore vital employee monitoring statistics and discover the benefits of monitoring your team’s work hours, along with the best tool for the job.

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Pitch Deck page 9: Employee Monitoring Software Trends in 2022

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Pitch Deck page 9: Employee Monitoring Software Trends in 2022

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https://www.top10vpn.com/research/covid-employee-surveillance/

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Remote Work & The Rise of Employee Surveillance Software

A third of the U.S. workforce shifted to remote work as a result of the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by MIT.[1]

Fearful this could lead to a drop in productivity, employers have turned to remote monitoring software to ensure their staff work effectively from home.

This software is capable of recording almost everything an employee does on their computer, from covert webcam access to random screenshot monitoring.

The rapid rise of such invasive software risks setting new standards of workplace surveillance and dramatically undermining employees’ right to privacy.

Demand for employee surveillance software shot up by 80% in March 2020 compared to the 2019 monthly average, the same month the global pandemic was declared and lockdowns imposed. It remained high the following month too, at 65% compared to 2019.

Over two years on, hybrid working is being touted as the future of employment, with its mix of remote work and days in the office.

The prospect of working from home becoming permanent, even if only for part of the week, appears to have prompted a resurgent appetite for this intrusive computer surveillance software.

Employee monitoring software demand has been 75% higher on average since the start of 2022 than it was in 2019. For comparison, demand over the pandemic to the end of 2021 was 57% higher than 2019.

Chart showing month-by-month increase in demand for employee surveillance software compared to the 2019 monthly average

As the above graph shows, the average monthly demand for employee surveillance software actually intensified over the second year of the pandemic, rather than fading away.

Demand for the software was on average 58% higher in 2021 than it was before the pandemic, compared to the 54% average uplift during the pandemic months of 2020.

That difference is greater still if you discount the initial spike in interest over the first three months of the pandemic. Looking at only the months in 2020 after that initial surge, average monthly demand was “only” up 48% compared to 2019.

Why Are We Tracking Employee Monitoring Software Demand?

Previous international crises have shown that once heightened surveillance measures are introduced they are often never reversed.[2]

The developers of employee surveillance software also do their best to guarantee that their products become permanent fixtures of the modern workplace. Eight in 10 developers of the 10 most in-demand employee monitoring software tools encourage long-term use by offering annual price incentives and lifetime purchasing options. Only the developers of Time Doctor and Crossover do not actively promote annual price incentives on their websites.

The pandemic has led to a huge rise in the range and sophistication of surveillance technologies being adopted around the world and, as remote work looks set to continue for the foreseeable future, invasive employee surveillance may also be here to stay.

“There is something depressing about the idea that full-grown adults must be subjected to routine surveillance of their activities in order to hold the jobs necessary to pay their bills and provide for their families.” – ACLU[3]

As advocates for internet freedom and the right to privacy, we believe this kind of computer surveillance in the workplace should never be normalized. By accepting computer usage monitoring and internet surveillance by employers, the risk is that it will further encroach into all aspects of everyday life.

What Do Employers Want From Monitoring Software?

The following data table shows the ten generic queries related to employment surveillance software with the highest volume of internet searches since social restrictions began around the world, following the declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020 The terms are ordered largest to smallest.

The percentage difference columns are based on that period’s search volume compared to the average monthly searches in the preceding year.

As a the global pandemic was declared and lockdowns came into force around the world in March 2020, interest in employee surveillance software surged. Over the ensuing months, that demand settled but at a much higher level than before the start of the pandemic.

Since March 2021 however there has been a sustained upswing in demand once more for employee monitoring software.

After a nine-month period where demand for the software was 48% higher on average than before the pandemic, it jumped to 60% in March 2021. It has remained on average at 64% higher than in 2019 since then, a 33% increase compared to the preceding nine months.

The market for employee monitoring software existed long before the global pandemic of course and much of the increased interest has been focused around already dominant terms and phrases.

“Employee monitoring software”, for example, was by far the most popular search term before the pandemic and it more than doubled in volume in March 2020.

What’s most interesting however, is that “how to monitor employees working from home” was the second most popular overall phrase in March, despite being barely used the previous year. The surge in popularity of such an open-ended phrase like this reveals how unprepared many companies were for the abrupt shift to mass home-working.

As might be expected, the phrase has dropped in popularity over time, only to be overtaken by “free employee monitoring software”.

This is a disturbing development as it suggests increasing numbers of employers wishing to spy on their workers who aren’t even prepared to pay for the privilege.

While they weren’t the most popular in absolute terms, queries containing the phrase “working from home” had much bigger relative increases than those relating to “remote work”, a phrase which suggests a more permanent working model.

For example, the query “work from home monitoring tools” increased by over 5,600% in March 2020 and remains over 900% higher over the course of the pandemic to date compared to 2019.

Similarly, “work from home monitoring software” surged almost 4,500% in March 2020 and remains 1,500% higher over the pandemic period as a whole than in 2019.

The radical shift away from office-working has clearly made employers nervous about a reduction in productivity and its potential impact on their business. Greater computer surveillance in the virtual workplace, however, may actually reduce long-term productivity.

“Research suggests that when companies monitor an employee’s every move, they signal distrust, which can lead to employee disengagement. Disengaged employees are less productive.” – Behavioural Scientist[4]

Employee Monitoring Software

The following data table shows the 10 employee surveillance software tools with the highest volume of internet searches since the pandemic began. The percentage difference columns are based on that month’s search volume compared to the average monthly searches in 2019.

Over the initial weeks of the pandemic, Time Doctor was the most in-demand software at the peak of employer demand in March 2020 when interest in the product tripled in comparison to 2019. This caused it to jump from third to the most in-demand employee monitoring software above its previously more popular rivals Hubstaff and FlexiSPY.

Over time however, Hubstaff has re-established its dominant position with the highest overall demand during the pandemic, at a monthly average 104% higher than in 2019.

Overall, our findings show that the employee surveillance market is an increasingly concentrated one, with the top three software products accounting for two-thirds of global demand, up from 60% in September 2021.

The WorkPuls software experienced the highest relative increase in demand, with a 400% rise since the start of the pandemic, followed by DeskTime which experienced a 248% increase.

Not all of these employee monitoring software products offer the same functionalities and some are considerably more invasive than others.

Can A VPN Bypass Employment Monitoring Software?

What is a VPN?

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) service is simple software that encrypts your internet connection and routes your internet traffic via a proxy server and changes your IP address in the process. A VPN is typically used to evade monitoring of internet activity, access blocked websites and mobile apps, and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks on public networks.

Should I Use A VPN?

A reliable VPN service will prevent employee monitoring software from logging your browsing history. Rather than capturing your browser’s DNS lookups and the IP addresses of websites you visit, the employee surveillance tools will only be able to record that you visited the proxy server of your VPN service. Any attempts at inspecting traffic will also fail due to encryption.

Despite the effectiveness of a VPN in hiding your browsing history, it’s not possible to obfuscate its use. This will make it clear to your employer that you are trying to evade their surveillance measures, which will likely result in negative consequences.

Nor will a VPN help with other aspects of employee monitoring software, such as keystroke logging, IM monitoring or webcam surveillance.

The following data table shows the 26 most popular employee surveillance software products and their respective functionalities.

Our analysis of the software revealed the following:

81% offer keystroke logging

61% provide Instant Messaging monitoring

65% send User Action Alerts

38% are capable of remote control takeover

Keystroke Logging

Found in 81% of the monitoring applications, keystroke logging is a highly intrusive feature that allows employers to view every click, touch of the keyboard, and conversation of their employees, who may not even realize that it’s happening

An example of just how far this can intrude into one’s privacy, the software offered by Work Examiner boasts the ability to “capture the passwords typed in many programs and websites” with their keystroke logging feature.[5]

Work Examiner website screenshot promoting key logging features.

Instant Message (IM) Monitoring

IM monitoring allows bosses to monitor their team’s private messages on popular social media chat platforms, and even on encrypted platforms such as Whatsapp.

More worryingly, products such as Aware’s Spotlight software, offer AI-driven behavioral analysis that tracks changes in mood, tone and attitude across all forms of conversations on a users’ device.[6]

“Conversation Health” of their workers are simplistically ranked out of 100, subject to real-time trend insights into how their employees’ conversations are going at any given point.

User Action Alerts

A user action alert in the software notifies employers when an undesirable behavior is taking place, allowing them to follow-up with monitoring or intervention if deemed necessary.

Teramind’s software, for example, can disable private conversations from continuing if a pre-selected keyword deemed as “inappropriate” triggers an alert.[7]

Behavioral alerts can also be set up as to when an employee may be trying to access an “unproductive” website, copy sensitive files or even being idle for a set amount of time.

Teramind website screenshot showing Instant Messaging monitoring features.

Remote Control Takeover

The most intrusive intervention offered in employee monitoring software. It allows an employer to access their workers’ device(s) and remotely take-over all functionality.

This facilitates multiple actions that may (or may not) come as a response to a user action alert such as:

Remote installation of software

Removal of employee’s access to sensitive company files and documents

Remote access to accounts, chat conversations, emails, personal files, calendar, contact list

Settings change to enable real-time webcam/audio surveillance of their employees

Blocking access to certain websites and applications

Shutdown or restart a worker’s device at any given time

NetVizor prides itself on its software’s controversial capacity to enable such a takeover without the employee’s permission, and “operate entirely in stealth; that is, it’s nearly invisible to the consumer”.[8]

Netvizor website screenshot showing Remote Control Takeover features.

Methodology

Using our global monitoring data, we analyzed over 200 terms related to employee monitoring software, taking into account both generic and brand specific queries.

We calculated pre-pandemic demand based on the average monthly internet search volume over the course of 2019. This provided a baseline figure with which we could compare demand during the period of global lockdowns and social restrictions from March 2020 onwards.

About Top10VPN

We’re an internet security and digital rights firm specialized in reviewing VPN services. We analyze and recommend reliable VPNs to visitors from all over the world.

We also research and investigate digital rights, security and privacy matters to raise awareness of issues affecting our audience.

Additional research by Christine O’Donnell

The authors of all our investigations abide by the journalists’ code of conduct.

References

[1] https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A25ef03e6-a4f7-4084-aa25-40807e3d66fa#pageNum=2 ↩

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/16/tech/surveillance-privacy-coronavirus-npw-intl/index.html ↩

[3] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/your-boss-shouldnt-read-your-email ↩

[4] https://behavioralscientist.org/the-paradox-of-employee-surveillance/ ↩

[5] https://www.workexaminer.com/features/ ↩

[6] https://www.awarehq.com/spotlight ↩

[7] https://www.teramind.co/features/instant-message-monitoring ↩

[8] https://www.netvizor.net/features.htm ↩

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Report: Privacy Risks of Employee Surveillance Software

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First published June 24, 2020. Last updated to incorporate latest employee monitoring software demand data, for October through Mar 2022. A third of the U.S. workforce shifted to remote work as a result of the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by MIT.

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Pitch Deck page 9: Popular surveillance activities suspected by employees worldwide as of 2021

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Pitch Deck page 9: Popular surveillance activities suspected by employees worldwide as of 2021

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According to 47 percent of the employees surveyed, active work hours and log times are the most suspected surveillance activity within companies worldwide, as of 2021. Tracking the websites visited and inbound and outbound emails, were also popular suspected employer surveillance activities by the employees.

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Surveillance activities suspected by employees 2021 | Statista

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According to 47 percent of the employees surveyed, active work hours and log times are the most suspected surveillance activity within companies worldwide, as of 2021. Tracking the websites visited and inbound and outbound emails, were also popular suspected employer surveillance activities by the employees.

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https://growjo.com/company/Hubstaff

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https://growjo.com/company/ActivTrak

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https://growjo.com/company/Teramind

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https://www.zoominfo.com/c/vericlock/374876458

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https://www.datanyze.com/companies/staffcop/345830612

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https://growjo.com/company/Veriato

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https://www.zoominfo.com/c/efficientlab-llc/469068633

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https://growjo.com/company/DeskTime

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https://growjo.com/company/InterGuard_Software

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The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2022

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The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2022

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Some managers love hybrid work and others hate it, but the reality is that it's here to stay. Even before the global pandemic made it a necessity, many companies were already moving toward allowing remote work for some portion of their workforces, if only for a few days per week.

Yet the hybrid work model creates challenges for managers. Crucially, it leaves them hanging when it comes to understanding their employees' productivity. They lack the insights they would have when employees are working on-premises, including not just how much work they're producing but also the quality of the work and the reasons behind any changes.

Hybrid work gives employees more freedom to conduct their business day as they see fit, which many workers see as a plus. Yet some employees struggle with this self-directed model and have difficulty managing their time. Others suffer from burnout because the line between home and office has blurred.

Employee monitoring systems are one tool to help address these concerns, and they're still evolving. In the pandemic era, solutions that have traditionally focused on tracking employee activity, logging suspicious behavior, and sniffing out possible insider threats are now pivoting to not only track productivity but also monitor health and wellness and even improve employee engagement.

Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring

For most of us, the idea of someone monitoring our computer usage is off-putting, at best. We value our privacy, and that extends to our PCs and devices. Nonetheless, our expectation of privacy in the workplace must necessarily be different than in our personal lives. Whether we work on our employer's premises or remotely, typically neither the equipment we use nor the data that crosses our desktops belong to us. As such, many employers will have valid and even essential reasons to monitor how we use these assets throughout our day.

One reason is to measure productivity. Managers don't have the same visibility into how a distributed workforce spends its time as they do when employees all report to a central location. The same is true when the workforce is very large and turnover is high, as with call centers, for example. Tracking productivity has grown even more challenging since the pandemic because many remote workers must now juggle their nine-to-five jobs with half a dozen other personal tasks, like minding children or cooking family meals. Working from home challenges the pre-existing structure for productivity tracking, which means monitoring tools need to pivot, too. And using monitoring tools to log how much time employees spend on specific tasks can give managers insight into not just how individual workers are performing, but also how well current business processes are meeting company goals.

Sometimes, this type of activity monitoring can also uncover bad behavior. Traditional security measures, such as firewalls, do a good job of defending against internet-based attacks. Still, they're less effective against insider threats, where an employee has access to systems but uses that access in ways that violate company policy. In such cases, a detailed activity log can become important forensic evidence for disciplinary action or (in the worst cases) a lawsuit.

Serious cases of employee misconduct often involve mishandling of sensitive information. This might mean trade secrets, but it could also mean specific classes of data that are protected under government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or the EU's GDPR. Employee monitoring systems can help provide the information needed for a compliance audit. More sophisticated systems can even scan employees' outgoing files, emails, and chats and flag or block messages that seem to violate policy before they're transmitted. Such measures can be invaluable for preventing serious data breaches.

However, it's also important to consider the downsides of employee monitoring. Employers should consider carefully the amount and degree of monitoring they want to deploy. As mentioned earlier, many employees may feel uncomfortable with the thought that they're being watched. An atmosphere of paranoia in the workplace can contribute to low morale, which could lead to staff attrition.

It's also important to note that productivity-monitoring efforts can sometimes backfire, yielding the opposite effect of what was intended. Employees who are aware that they're being measured against productivity quotas may develop a pattern of trying to game the system by spending time in the apps and websites they think they're expected to, rather than on activities that have material benefit for the company. Similarly, managers who are tasked with reviewing mountains of employee monitoring data might spend an inordinate amount of time doing so, even when the reports show few problem areas.

Finally, employers should give special consideration to the ethical and potential legal ramifications of employee monitoring. Several of the products we tested allow you to install monitoring functions on employees' machines without their knowledge and in ways that elude detection, but that doesn't mean you should. This type of covert surveillance is not only the most invasive form of monitoring, but it could also run you afoul of laws in various jurisdictions. Countries, states and provinces, and even cities will all have their own thoughts on this, so tread carefully.

What Does Employee Monitoring Software Do?

Employee monitoring systems go beyond the core time tracking functionality of clock-ins, clock-outs, and managing workloads. While some of the vendors in this roundup are essentially tracking players that have added nifty monitoring features such as keystroke logging, location tracking, and screenshots, others offer deep monitoring platforms that track all employee activity. Particularly for large corporations that schedule thousands of shift workers in settings such as call centers, employee monitoring agents installed on company machines give these businesses complete visibility and traceability into their operations.

The employee monitoring agents also aggregate key data on employee productivity. To get started with productivity tracking, you'll typically sort applications and websites into productive and unproductive categories. You'll then break down how productive you expect each team, department, or individual employee to be. Productivity-scoring algorithms make it possible to measure individuals against their past performance, as well as that of their peers. This data is less about disciplining employees and more about helping teams course-correct and stay productive.

Customization and user grouping are important here, because an app that's deemed productive for one job function may be considered unproductive for another. For instance, social media managers spend much of their time on Facebook and Twitter because that's core to their role, whereas a sales manager who spends many hours a day on LinkedIn or other social sites should throw up a red flag. Automation and the ability to set alerts by way of email reminders and warnings are also effective ways to manage a large, distributed workforce.

Some products can also aggregate activity data on a macro level in real-time for display on admin and manager dashboards. Also available is the ability to construct detailed reports to slice and dice various productivity metrics. For example, you might drill down into the data using factors such as the most productive or unproductive employees or compare team or departmental efficiency or productivity on specific projects.

Employee monitoring tools often give you at-a-glance data visualizations. Examples might include a productivity bar that breaks down productive and unproductive app percentages or lists and leader boards that show active or inactive users or the most often used apps. Many of the solutions we tested can also track and log which websites or services employees spend the most time on and which ones are underutilized.

Another aspect of activity tracking is keystroke monitoring, which provides a baseline for employee activity. Once you have data on how often employees are typing or interacting with their machines, you can map it against corresponding factors to fill out a complete profile of their online activity. Example factors might include screenshots, activity logs, audit trails, and the other, deeper monitoring vectors that we'll get into later.

Some of the most powerful monitoring software we've tested can intake raw keystroke data-meaning a timestamped map of what system keys users pressed at any given time-and cross-reference that against any of the other metrics or captured activity data collected. In addition, newer tools like Controlio can aggregate keystrokes and sync them to video recordings to form a more accurate picture of employee activity. As a result, you can see the full context of what employees were doing and when they were doing it and make inferences as to why they were doing it. This level of insight is unmatched for companies that need to gather forensic evidence, for example, for a regulatory compliance audit.

Monitoring Systems Are Getting Smarter

Today's employee monitoring systems use new technologies, such as geolocation, keystroke logging, screenshots, video recording, and even access to webcams installed on remote PCs. Bringing cloud computing into the mix means you can capture terabytes of such data and store it online, where it's easy for managers to access. More importantly, this data doesn't just lie dormant. Pattern-matching algorithms can scan it to anticipate insider threats, measure individual and team productivity, and retrace steps that led to problems or data leaks.

The most powerful employee monitoring tools can act as an all-seeing eye. They provide insight into everything from what apps an employee has open to who they're chatting with and what they're saying. They can also use automated logic, such as keyword triggers and policy rules, to let admins know when employees do things they're not supposed to do. They can often do so while running incognito as a disguised process, so employees don't necessarily know when they're being monitored.

Screenshots and screen recording are among the more prominent monitoring tools. Typically, admins can configure rules and settings to take screenshots at particular intervals, such as once per hour, every 15 minutes, or even every 10 seconds or less. Some tools also support live screenshots or continuous video recording, allowing admins to do live check-ins on employees' machines or pull up the timestamped recording of a particular period of time.

Some monitoring systems store screenshots alongside corresponding metadata. These can be incorporated throughout the monitoring dashboard, where admins can use them as supplementary information for whatever user activity or data point they are reviewing or investigating.

The Latest in Monitoring Tech

EfficientLab, which makes the on-premises monitoring solution Work Examiner, has a more compelling cloud-based solution in Controlio, which mixes productivity scoring with in-depth employee monitoring. Controlio represents the new way of thinking in the segment and it even offers real-time video recording and live-streaming that's synced with keystroke tracking.

Video recording is the next frontier, and it's already offered by the likes of Teramind, StaffCop Enterprise, and Controlio. Access to live or recorded video offers the most accurate forensic evidence, not to mention the ability to quickly search, scrub, and even leverage OCR technology for complete details on the documents being recorded via video.

Editors' Choice selection Teramind takes video recording to a whole new level by enabling Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that can run through video files. That means it can recognize text on-screen and in documents and make the video searchable via that data. On-premises vendor StaffCop Enterprise also provides OCR functionality for screenshots and documents.

Adding these types of video recording and live feed capabilities allows these offerings to leapfrog what you'd find in older solutions, which were mostly centered on screenshots. The new generation offers businesses a gapless oversight of employee activity that will likely be the norm for the category moving forward.

Beyond the images themselves, these monitoring platforms can deliver a startling degree of visibility into every app, file, message, and even Zoom call. Using OCR, deep monitoring can provide much more information on how workers use specific desktop or web apps.

The most sophisticated employee monitoring tools can also parse email messages, chats, instant messages (IMs), and other personal or team communication apps. They'll monitor whatever parameters or keywords your administrators have set. Truly bleeding-edge solutions can even spot credit card numbers and other sensitive data in screenshots and videos and automatically kick off an alert.

This deep tracking applies to tracing documents and scanning file names, too. The software can often capture the attached document or file so an admin can view it. For example, suppose company executives want to know whether employees are chatting internally about the CEO or CTO. In that case, they can set up automated keyword triggers and receive automatic email alerts or reports.

You can often configure rules to prevent employees from sending company data through personal channels, downloading apps or files that aren't IT-approved, or even from accessing USB thumb drives from company PCs. Not all platforms provide this level of automation, but the ones that can either alert the user to stop the action or simply notify an admin or update an audit log.

Weighing Employees' Perspectives

As mentioned earlier, not all of this will sit well with the workers you're planning to monitor. Sure, going full bore means you'll know exactly what your employees are doing on company time and how well they're doing it. But the desire for that degree of insight needs to be balanced against their concerns, too. The pandemic has had a powerful impact on employee morale and motivation-so much so that many are choosing to seek new employment or even dropping out of the workforce altogether. Suddenly springing a "Big Brother"-style environment on an already stressed workforce could result in some nasty blowback.

Indeed, the challenges of employee monitoring lie chiefly on the human side of the process, with objections coming from employees and managers alike. Many employees will be disturbed to hear that monitoring software is installed on their machines-or worse, to discover it. On the other hand, managers only have so many hours to pore through hundreds if not thousands of screenshots of their reports' workdays.

While some businesses will have a legitimate need to do monitoring without their workers' knowledge, we'd recommend against that approach for most organizations. Having above-board conversations about why you need to do monitoring might be awkward, but that's nothing compared to the backlash you'll face if you're caught monitoring people without their consent. Such clandestine monitoring could even land you in legal hot water in some jurisdictions.

Open communication is by far your better bet. Understanding how your employees are spending their time is something you were already doing while those workers were in the office, so it makes sense you'd want some way to do that now that they're working remotely. Explaining that, even to skeptical employees, shouldn't be hard.

And while the deep monitoring capabilities described above might be creepy for the average employee, there's no reason to use them on your entire workforce. Restricting them to just those employees who regularly access highly sensitive data or applications is probably all that's needed and that's a scenario those employees are much more likely to understand.

Size and Security

Two important criteria you'll have to consider before pulling the trigger on one of these systems are the size of the workforce you want to manage and the level of security you need to maintain over the data. These, in turn, are linked to understanding just what it is that you're looking to monitor.

Is your business investing in an employee monitoring tool primarily to improve productivity and efficiency? Or do you truly want or need full insight into everything employees are doing on company time down to a meticulous degree of detail? The answers to these questions relate to workforce size because you're talking about potentially collecting vast amounts of data in near-real-time. That prospect raises issues not only about storage but also about analytics.

A monitoring system that needs to parse the real-time feeds of 200 employees for keyword or URL triggers will deliver faster and more accurate results than when it needs to do the same for 20,000 workers. And it'll certainly have an easier time than a system that's tasked with searching for deep data for 20,000 employees using OCR or video analysis.

That means your evaluation process for any of these platforms needs to include all the alerts, data gathering, and analytic operations you intend to use in real life. You then need to match that against the system's performance to see how it would fare against your actual employee count. Only this kind of analysis can get you a good idea of how much data you can gather and what kind of alerts and analysis you can feasibly do.

Once you've gathered that data, you also need to protect it. Employee monitoring data is every bit as sensitive as your customers' credit card numbers or other financial records. Should it ever be compromised in a data breach, hackers could potentially gain access to everything from employees' financial data to photographs of their homes and children.

Thus, it's essential that IT administrators must build an accurate data lifecycle map for this information and make sure that both the organization and the monitoring service provider have adequate safeguards in place. The minimum should include access controls for not just administrators but also third-party apps (such as analytics tools), in addition to at least one layer of encryption.

Seek guidance on security considerations from your legal team. Different states and municipalities have different guidelines and even different definitions of exactly what constitutes monitoring and how far it can legally go. This discussion will touch on not only what you can record, but also what kinds of analysis you can do on that data and how it'll need to be stored. These decisions have been made even more complex since the pandemic because your workforce will likely span a much broader geographic footprint than it did when everyone was reporting to a central office.

Taking the Plunge

Bottom line, you need to carefully consider your organization's needs and what value you're looking to gain from implementing an employee monitoring solution. Then you need to choose your monitoring tool based not just on what it can do, but how you'll apply it and how much visibility your workers will have into this process.

There are outstanding arguments around the value of employees' time and effort, and the new work-from-home reality has made that even more important. Managers now have a hard time determining and tracking their employees' productivity, especially now that distributed workforces mean more flexible and non-uniform work hours.

However, teams still need to work towards common goals, and if you're a manager, you'll be expected to afford employees some degree of freedom to decide how best to get their work done. With that in mind, organizational tools and systems become critical for distributed teams that are no longer working in established office culture. Careful planning can help ensure that these tools serve as helpful human resources (HR) solutions, in addition to monitoring engines.
Have any questions about how to approach employee monitoring? Subscribe to the PCMag.com Small Business Update newsletter and join the [email protected] (Opens in a new window) discussion group on LinkedIn. There you can meet and query vendors, other professionals like yourself, and PCMag's editors.

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The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2022

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Some managers love hybrid work and others hate it, but the reality is that it's here to stay. Even before the global pandemic made it a necessity, many companies were already moving toward allowing remote work for some portion of their workforces, if only for a few days per week.