Why do we need employee monitoring software?
Posted on June 14th, 2016 in IMonitor Softwares | Comments Off on Why do we need employee monitoring software?
Once every few months, we could see the news on the morning daily like: ”XXX Company Employee behind the Bars for Confidential Data Transfer”. For some fortunately companies, they could trace out the employee emails and employee was handed over to police. Such cases happen when there is improper investigative techniques followed by companies or there is leniency in supervisory measures by the company. However, there are some companies they could only watch all these happening and nothing to do.
Here we can blame the human supervisory activities but also cannot deny that a supervisor has its own limitations and cannot monitor every employee for his activities either by standing behind or constantly taking rounds of the work area. So for some companies, they employ several techniques to restrict transfer of confidential data and misuse of the official working hours, some include blocking of emails exceeding of certain size, blocking specific websites, no internet access and many other, but still employees manage to cross these settings and gain access to such restrictions. For some people in IT field, no matter what website was blocked in their office but now they have gained access to that by modifying some settings. Employees with advanced knowledge easily perform such activities and also help others to access restrictions.
So there are some limits, restrict is not enough; we need something which is all-in-one solution to restrict and monitor the employee’s behavior, to avoid the things like these happened. An employee monitoring software proves its usefulness here, as it eliminates dependency on level of human supervisory and promotes invisible monitoring efficiently.
Employee monitoring in past several years has taken a roar and is continuously practiced by employers for the security of their data. We need to force some problems like how to protect the employee’s privacy? How can an employer save confidential data from getting transferred to wrong hands? Is this behavior legal?
Let’s analyze the major factors which lead to implementation of monitoring software at workplace, and it is legal and available to use that at the workplace.
Webmail: Email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo mail, etc are constantly used by employees to transfer corporate information amongst themselves, but while transferring important data they forget that they are using a third party server to transfer their confidential data which can be accessed by anyone who subpoenas it from these email service providers . As a result the corporate secrets also get saved on the third party server which can prove harmful as you cannot rely on treatment of your confidential data by any other party. The employee monitoring software can monitor the whole mail sending and receiving process and copy the data to local disk.
Instant Messengers: IM Chats are used to talk and send confidential data as the transfer process is easy and enables large file size transfers. But doing it instantly also creates insecurity for confidential corporate data. Similar to webmail transfer instant messaging also promotes data leakages and employee sabotages. The employee monitoring software can timely monitor the employee’s chat. You don’t even to focus on the screen all day, just set few keywords, the alarm will sound and a screen shot will also be taken and an instant notification be sent to the manager’s side immediately whenever keyword captured.
Employee’s Privacy: Despite the recent appearance of these high-tech monitoring systems, employee monitoring is not new to the business world. What has changed in more recent years is the method of supervision and the extent of information gathering capabilities available. Electronic monitoring, although newer in origin, is intrinsically no more invasive than traditional supervision. For some employees, it may actually be less invasive than direct personal supervision.
Employee monitoring often is in conflict with employees’ privacy. Monitoring often collects not only work-related activities, but also employee’s personal, not related to work information. Monitoring does not mean that there are no limits to what should be collected. Monitoring in the workplace may put employers and employees at odds because both sides are trying to protect personal interests. Employees want to maintain privacy while employers want to ensure company resources aren’t misused. In any case, companies can maintain ethical monitoring policies by avoiding indiscriminate monitoring of employees’ activities.The employee needs to understand what is expected of them while the employer needs to establish that rule.
Promoting the data safe is benefit for every of us, for companies better developing and us better living.
