Best Monitoring Tools: Review of Employee Tracking Software

With the spread of remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more companies are implementing employee monitoring software. Employee monitoring software is designed to increase work efficiency and prevent potential data leaks from dishonest employees. One of the most serious problems that employee monitoring software helps to solve is insufficient employee engagement. Nearly 70% of Americans are not fully engaged in their work, and 40% are not engaged at all. Employee monitoring software helps identify and motivate the most dedicated and productive workers.

Key Features of Employee Monitoring Software 

• Attendance control. Attendance control allows tracking employee presence at the workplace, their login and logout from the computer.
• Time tracking. Employee monitoring software allows determining the exact time when an employee is actively working on the computer and when they are away from the desktop.
• Data leak prevention. Employees may intentionally or unintentionally provide access to confidential company data to third parties. Employee monitoring software helps detect insider threats from dishonest workers and prevent corporate data leaks.
• URL monitoring of visited sites. Managers can find out whether the pages an employee visits are work-related or not. They can also check when and how long ago a particular page was visited. This monitoring allows more efficient use of employee time and improves cybersecurity.

Top 3 Best Employee Monitoring Software 
Teramind

Overview
Teramind is primarily known for its security features such as data loss prevention, auditing, and user behavior analytics. If necessary, you can remotely control employee devices and also gain access to video recordings of all employee actions. Teramind allows setting rules that prohibit the use of external drives and detect unusual or unauthorized network logins.

Key Features

• Data loss prevention – tracks every employee action on the computer: open applications, visited websites, copied files, etc. The manager can review each employee's activity and control their access to certain information.
• User behavior analytics – allows managers to review video and audio recordings of all employee work, view session recordings and immutable logs, and search through all content employees work with.
• Insider threat prevention – automates risk detection and allows managers/administrators to block unwanted employee behavior.

Pricing

• Starter: 5,000 rubles per month.
• UAM: 10,420 rubles/month.
• DLP: 12,500 rubles per month.

ActivTrak

Overview
ActivTrak is known for its workforce analytics. Its capabilities include website and application monitoring, activity tracking, and alerts.

Key Features

• Workload management – allows tracking each employee's performance in real time, comparing across the team, and identifying overburdened and underutilized employees.
• Productivity reports – collecting data on attendance, applications and websites visited by all employees, and creating detailed reports for each criterion. Managers can see the total number of working hours, when employees were active or on break.
• Real-time user activity – allows the manager to monitor work efficiency and employee engagement in real time.
• Alerts and website blocking – allows managers or administrators to create a list of dangerous or suspicious websites and either add them to the alert list or simply block them on all connected computers. ActivTrak has built-in alerts, but users can always create custom alerts based on any combination of conditions.

Pricing

• Advanced: 4,500 rubles per month.
• Premium: 7,500 rubles per month.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

Hubstaff

Overview
Hubstaff is well known for its performance management and time tracking features. This employee tracking software provides project management and task tracking capabilities for managers and teams.

Features

• Time tracker – allows tracking employee working hours and automating time logs for accurate timesheets.
• Timesheets – allows managing team schedules and provides teams with automatic detailed timesheets on a daily basis.

Pricing

• Starter: 1,400 rubles per month (billed monthly) or 1,166 rubles per month (billed annually).
• Pro: 2,000 rubles/month (billed monthly) or 1,600 rubles/month (billed annually).
• Advanced: custom pricing.