Monitoring software: A productivity booster?

Building an airtight case for warning or reprimanding an employee
Fowler says that before management accuses an employee of wasting company time or leaking company confidential information or tying up network bandwidth downloading unlicensed music files, "they'd better have all their cards lined up." To see the whole picture, you need a record of not only what Web sites are being visited, but what they are doing at that destination. What are they looking at on that site? Are they having a chat conversation or an instant message with somebody? What kind of emails are they sending and receiving? Otherwise, you risk false accusations that can land the company in serious hot water.

His own company's product, SpectorSoft CNE, automatically captures emails sent and received, chat conversations, instant messages, files downloaded, Web sites visited, applications launched, and keystrokes typed. The software also takes screen snapshots at select intervals to create the equivalent of a digital surveillance tape that shows the exact sequence of everything an employee is doing on the computer. The data is captured at the PC and transferred every few minutes to a data vault on the network server. The records can be reviewed at leisure and searched by timeline or particular format (i.e., IM, email, chat, etc.).

Creating an effective deterrent
"It's the deterrent factor, more than anything, that is the beauty of surveillance software," claims Fowler. Just knowing that they're being monitored is often incentive enough to get employees to refrain from non-sanctioned activity. In his own company, Fowler was reluctant to install the software, yet found that there were several employees consistently "goofing off on the Internet because they could get away with it." Once he announced the deployment of SpectorSoft CNE on their desktops, some of the targeted employees came up to Fowler and stated that it was a great wake-up call to stop wasting time. Knowing that they were being monitored, they found themselves being more productive during the day. Fowler confesses that he has only looked at the surveillance records a few times and for reasons totally different from those driving the deployment.

According to Fowler, some companies have instituted a compromise with their surveillance software. For instance, some SpectorSoft customers don't record PC and Internet activity during lunch hours or after business hours to give employees time to use the Internet for personal purposes.

To monitor or not to monitor
If your management team views monitoring and filtering software as censorship, then that attitude is bound to permeate your workforce. In that case, Fowler agrees that deploying the technology wouldn't be a smart move. He also believes that if management doesn't want to spend any time reviewing the information that's captured -- or thinks that just having the software in place negates any need for direct intervention with the offending employees -- then the tool isn't going to be effective either.

But for those companies looking to assess how widespread employee PC and Internet usage problems are, or are looking to hold specific employees accountable for their actions, surveillance software can be a real asset in identifying abuses and taking corrective action. Now you have to decide whether to spend tens of thousands of dollars for an enterprise-wide, server-level solution or spend $50 per desktop licence for PC-level deployment. Whether you opt for monitoring, filtering, blocking, and/or detailed surveillance, you'll find out more about your employees' PC and Internet usage than you ever thought you'd want to know.