How Employee Monitoring Software is Changing the Face of Business

With a mobile and remote workforce, increased pressure on profits, the ever present danger of hacking, and the lure of Facebook and other social media, many organizations seek a solution to help keep distractions out and their data inside. While it may appear that the two are unrelated – security and productivity can be solved...

With a mobile and remote workforce, increased pressure on profits, the ever present danger of hacking, and the lure of Facebook and other social media, many organizations seek a solution to help keep distractions out and their data inside. While it may appear that the two are unrelated – security and productivity can be solved with one platform that provides user behavior analytics. Feeling Skeptical? We can explain.

Trends

According to the The American Management Association, in 2015, more than 1/3 of employers fired employees for violating their Acceptable Use Policy. While that may seem like a high number, realistically, many of the firms were not yet using employee monitoring solutions. So what exactly does this mean? That even more employees (than the original 1/3 accounted for) violated industry regulation and company rules – let’s not even mention the legal aspect of these implications. CNBC’s estimate, via data extrapolation, for the amount of time wasted by employees on Facebook totals to $3.5 trillion USD worldwide.

So how do the two connect? Well lets say your employer was on Facebook (most employers would categorize this as an unproductive activity) during office hours and then he clicked on a phishing scam – well then your unproductive worker may have just jeopardized your company data.

Monitoring employees is essentially the only way to mitigate the risk effects of the human factor within organizations. Just as monitoring software can stop employees from opening high risk emails and websites, it can also measure how much time they spend using productive applications and websites. For example, employers can track SalesForce, call routing systems, or insurance claims processor usage, and fully understand the time spent on tasks and within applications.

Data that never existed

Employee monitoring introduces an entirely new set of data for employers and management. From the security side, being able to identify your most risky employees and departments is extremely helpful in the moment but there is also a preventive aspect that is acquired from the data. After understanding what unsafe PC behavior employees engage in, organizations can better implement training, set more qualified blocks for unwanted behavior and have a better sense of what data is most valuable and should be better protected.

From the productivity side, while many use cases we’ve seen look for employees using unproductive applications, there is a lot more important information that can be discovered. For example, if employees spend more time in a particular work application than expected, that could mean that the employee wasn’t trained properly or that the application isn’t user friendly. This is all data that can help improve business processes and efficiency.

New Work Environments

With many companies employing remote workers – both security and productivity are once again an issue. What could once only be accessed within the office, can be accessed anywhere around the world. That means that employees can be sitting in cafes with unsafe networks as well as doing everything but their work at home. Employee monitoring helps establish a routine for employees and helps employers understand the amount of time it takes to finish specific tasks and become better at delegating assignments.

Additionally, on boarding remote employees and keeping track of many tasks is an additional challenge for managers who’s employees are scattered around the globe. When employees aren’t within close proximity, its sometimes hard to gage which employees are trying their hardest, completing their tasks, thinking beyond their scope. Employee monitoring software can help managers with employee insights and decrease errors while improving efficiency.

Overall, tracking user behavior can help establish transparency from both the employee productivity and security perspective. By using employee monitoring software, employers can feel more confident that there confidential organizational data is safe and that there employees are dedicated and on-target with their tasks. Access to user behavior data should be taken advantage of to help secure organizations and streamlines business processes.

If you’re interested in learning about our employee monitoring solution or talking to a consultant about how Teramind – Employee Monitoring can help your business – let us know!


About Teramind

Since 2014 over 4,000 organizations across all major industries have trusted Teramind to provide insider threat detection, data loss prevention and business process engineering through employee monitoring. By harnessing behavior analytics, the award-winning and top-rated platform has helped enterprises and organizations in finance, retail, manufacturing, energy, technology, healthcare, and government verticals detect, record, and prevent malicious user behavior while driving productivity and improving workflow efficiency. Available as a cloud-based, on-premise, or private cloud solution, Teramind’s data loss prevention and employee monitoring agent brings businesses peace of mind by providing data-backed workforce insights. Teramind is headquartered in Miami, Florida. Learn more about Teramind by visiting teramind.co or follow us on LinkedInTwitter and YouTube. Visit IT Security Central for the latest in security news and trends.