Friday, October 15, 2010

Be Aware Of Your Employee Activities With A Desktop Remote Monitoring Service

Statistics have shown time and time again that employees that have connection to the internet are prone to surfing the web. As a business owner, you are not only paying for all of those wasted hours, but you are also losing significant amounts of productivity and profits. The best way for you to get those hours back and increase your productivity is with a desktop remote monitoring service.

If your employees require access to the internet, you probably have already tried some different tools and methods to decrease the personal usage of the internet by employees. Unfortunately, many filtering programs are ineffective or are just a waste of money. Even if a filtering program works, oftentimes it not only blocks bad websites, but blocks websites that your employees need access to as well. And cutting internet services altogether is probably not an option either.

For these reasons, you may be considering a desktop remote monitoring service. These services provide professional internet monitoring and keep tabs on how much time your employees devote to productivity and how much time they spend playing at your expensive. Furthermore, these services can also be used to ensure that your employees are not accessing websites that can be harmful to your network or that they are not leaking confidential data, either unintentionally or not.

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

Remote monitoring software prices have dropped considerable over the years as technology has become more affordable. Some basic software can be found online for free, while other advanced programs can be quite expensive. Outsourcing to an online service gives you freedom from worrying about purchasing the programs, software licenses, or upgrades.

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

Desktop remote monitoring services work in two different ways. The more secure, costly method is to have the monitoring serviced connected directly to your network. This requires that you have specialists employed for the task, but it keeps all of the data on your local network where it cannot access the internet. Outsourcing to an online remote monitoring service, on the other hand, is much cheaper. However, there is a risk that the data could be intercepted by competitors to your business.

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

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

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