When and How to use Employee Monitoring

Many employers monitor their employees’ use of company computers, and that trend has created a market for monitoring software designed for enterprise use. Corporate users like universities, companies and schools install the monitoring programs to address their concerns about the productivity of their workers, the security of proprietary information and the unapproved use of corporate PCs.
 
Regardless of who uses these applications, they are generally called employee monitoring software, and they usually have some basic features in common. Most make screen captures at regular intervals, log keystrokes ( keylogger ), track all user activity (such as applications run) and keep a detailed history of users’ web browsing.
 
Periodic screen captures let managers see what each employee saw on his or her monitor while logged on. Options for screen captures include different times or frequencies at which they are made and different file sizes, or resolutions.  Keylogger creates logs of all keystrokes made in any application, including browsers, email clients, messengers (like ICQ, Yahoo and Skype), social networking pages (like Facebook and Twitter) and password fields, including in some cases Windows login fields. Web browsing histories provide details of each page visited and summaries showing, for example, how frequently each site was visited. Most other user activities, such as when and for how long applications are used, are also monitored. Managers can view reports and summaries of all activities to access valuable information about how employees or students actually use their time and which of their activities present security or privacy risks.
 
Most employee monitoring programs send the information they collect from workers’ PCs to a single computer (or server) where managers can view the logs and reports privately. Often, information flows to a supervisor’s computer in real time or with only a short delay. This routing of collected data is usually achieved through the company’s local network. As a result, installing employee monitoring software is more complicated than installing a single program on a single PC. However, most network administrators can install the software without difficulty, and even ordinary users can install some user-friendly products by following the instructions in their user guides. - See more at: http://foreignaffairsinstitute.org/groups/when-and-how-to-use-emplo...