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Employee Monitoring Software

Get insights into your team work activities with comprehensive employee time tracking software.

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How Kickidler Improves Workflow

Increases employee productivity
Increases employee productivity
Optimizes business processes
Optimizes business processes
Protects your data from malicious intent
Protects your data from malicious intent

Automate Time Tracking Within Your Team

Kickidler employee monitoring software automatically collects data on the activity of your employees at the PCs and generates detailed reports:

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telegram.exe 15% (09:49:15)
excel.exe 12% (08:10:31)
https://www.upwork.com 7,8% (05:08:53)
https://www.reddit.com 5,8% (03:51:03)

Latenesses

20:28:00

Tardiness

5

Undertimes

12:09:58

Absences

-

Vacations

-

Work time

135:51:00

Period Department Employee First activity Last activity Latenesses
24.08.2022 Support Cory Simon 09:25:00 18:32:00 00:25:00
24.08.2022 Support Marilyn Webb 09:21:00 18:20:00 00:21:00
24.08.2022 Sales Hester Holf 15:58:00 23:59:00
24.08.2022 Sales Aidous Rodgers 09:05:00 18:01:00 00:05:00
24.08.2022 Sales Betty Jackson 10:20:00 19:29:00 00:20:00
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Activity history
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Analyze Employee Productivity and Identify Areas for Improvement

You can comprehensively analyze and determine actual productivity of your employees. These tools will help you

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Efficiently Monitor Your Projects & Tasks with Kickidler Project Tracking

Achieve better results by effectively monitoring every aspect of the work of your project teams.

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Employee
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Project dashboard.
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Empower Your Employees to Supervise Themselves Autonomously with Self-monitoring Tools

20 minutes of inactivity for an hour

2022-08-01 18:49:45

telegram.exe launched

2022-08-01 18:49:45

reddit.com visit

2022-08-01 18:49:45

Configure automatic notifications

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Receive a report on notifications

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Set up an employee self-monitoring interface

Kickidler employee monitoring software boosts remote employees’ focus, concentration and productivity.

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Prevent Data Leaks with Kickidler:
Safeguard Your Business with Advanced Functionality

Kickidler offers a comprehensive Data Leak Prevention (DLP) suite to help businesses protect their valuable data.

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File Transfer Tracking and Blocking

Kickidler enables you to monitor and control file transfers within your organization. Track the movement of files and documents, and prevent unauthorized transfers that could lead to data breaches.

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Protection Against Photographing the Screen

Prevent unauthorized screen capturing and protect your data from being leaked through screenshots or photographs. Kickidler Data Loss Protection Software actively blocks or alerts you when such activities are detected, mitigating the risk of data breaches.

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User Behavior Analytics

Identify unusual user behavior patterns that may indicate potential data leaks. Kickidler’s DLP feature alerts you when employees deviate from their normal work habits, allowing you to investigate and take appropriate action.

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Digital File Prints

Track the printing of digital files such as PDFs, Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets. Kickidler’s DLP provides visibility into the printing or transferring of digital files, ensuring that confidential data remains secure.

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Printed Document Tracking

Track printed documents within your organization. Kickidler DLP keeps a record of all printed materials, helping you identify any unauthorized or suspicious printing activities.

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Biometric Data Recognition

Kickidler DLP functionality includes advanced biometric data recognition, including voice analysis. Detect and prevent leaks of sensitive information through audio recordings, ensuring your organization’s data remains protected.

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Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Kickidler’s OCR capability allows you to extract text from scanned documents and images. This feature helps you analyze and monitor the content of documents, ensuring sensitive information is not mishandled or leaked.

View screenshot Screenshot Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
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Geolocation

With Kickidler’s DLP geolocation feature, you can monitor the physical location of your employees’ devices. This helps prevent data leaks by ensuring that confidential information is not accessed from unauthorized locations.

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                Geolocation
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Cross-platform solution. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux

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Getting Started

  1. Sign Up

    Sign up online and get up to 14 days of free access to Kickidler’s functionality

  2. Download Distribution Packages

    Download the Server, Grabber and Viewer distributions (for Kickidler Employee Monitoring version)

  3. Install Software Components

    It takes around 5 minutes to install all software components

  4. Start Monitoring with Kickidler’s Help

    View reports in the Web interface. Visual monitoring is available in the Viewer.

Additional Features

Use Kickidler’s additional features to maximize your business’ potential

GDPR compliance

GDPR Compliance

Kickidler meets GDPR requirements

Covert and transparent monitoring

Covert and Transparent Monitoring

When the software runs in stealth mode, it doesn’t show up in the Task Manager

API

API

Configure data exchange between Kickidler and other services

Offline

Kickidler Offline

Use the software without Internet access

Administrator and Manager access

Administrator and Manager Access

Allow full or limited access to the reports and the software settings

Sending reports to email

Sending Reports to Email

Receive Excel reports on work time and productivity via email

Reviews of Kickidler

5 stars

“Best employee monitoring software at reasonable price”

This solution is simply incredible. With Kickidler’s help managers get full access to their employees’ computer screens. Once we implemented the software, the productivity of our team skyrocketed. What’s more, it’s now much easier to correct certain errors. It’s also important that Kickidler is safe to use seeing how it fully meets GDPR requirements.

Mike via Capterra
5 stars

“Nice software to boost the productivity of your employees”

To put it simply, if you’re looking for the best option to increase your employees’ productivity and optimize your business’ processes, then Kickidler is the best option for you. Our company has been using it for quite some time now, and I can safely say it hasn’t disappointed us so far. It’s fairly simple to use. It certainly has all the features you might ever need. The software also has the finest violation settings, which are immense help when it comes to detecting malicious intent.

Rodrigo via G2
5 stars

“Once we’ve downloaded Kickidler, our team has started putting more effort into work”

During the time we’ve been using Kickidler, our employees have been procrastinating way less and, hence, the quality of their work has improved significantly. Another surprising benefit of using Kickidler was the improvement of Internet connection, which can be attributed to the fact that people have stopped watching YouTube at the workplace. We definitely consider Kickidler to be a great purchase.

Minakshi from SourceForge
5 stars

“My experience with Kickidler is out of this world”

It’s a really awesome solution for monitoring employee productivity. I used to demand that my subordinates send me daily reports…

Michael via Capterra
4,5 stars

“Essential solution for companies with hired employees”

It enables recording employees’ activity at the PCs as well as real-time monitoring and reviewing productivity reports.

Olga via Capterra
5 stars

“Really useful tool for self-monitoring”

Very intuitive interface. Friendly tech support. Easy to install and use

Sergey via Startpack
5 stars

“Mind-blowingly nice software”

The software has a great user manual. It operates steadily. Its interface is simple to use and understand, not too cluttered...

Eugene via Capterra
12 reviews on SourceForge
5 stars

4.8

115 reviews on Capterra
5 stars

4.7

116 reviews on G2
5 stars

4.8

What About Security?

Customer Case Studies

Kickidler Ultimate: Complete Guide to Employee Monitoring

Employee monitoring has long since moved away from the concept of shadowing your employees and watching their every move. First, you can't oversee everyone - especially if you have a team of more than two people working for you. Second, there are more important things for you to do, such as strategic management, operational tasks, and so on.

What Is Employee Monitoring Software?

Employee monitoring software essentially is the type of software that allows employers to:

  • track their employees’ activity according to the time frame: when they come in to work, when they leave for the day or even when they take any breaks;
  • keep track of all the apps and sites that their subordinates use during the workday;
  • take screenshots or record videos of employees’ screens;
  • detect suspicious activity, such as any attempts to leak the company database;
  • capture keystrokes and mouse clicks.

We'll talk more in-depth about various features of these solutions in the corresponding section of the article, but for now here's a brief summary: employee monitoring software is designed to help you automate the process of monitoring your employees and keep track of them as efficiently and effortlessly as possible.

Do You Actually Need Employee Monitoring Software?

If we let the numbers speak for themselves, an average employee tends to spend no more than 50% of his working hours on work-related tasks. And that’s the statistics on someone who’s actually being responsible and diligent. Now imagine that your team works at 50% of their productivity, whereas your competitor, who has employee monitoring practices in place, has an average team productivity of 65%. In a highly competitive market, that's practically a sentence for your company.

As a matter of fact, business is well aware of it. Since the very dawn of automated employee monitoring in the early 2000s, the popularity of such tools has been growing at a steady pace. Here are a few numbers for you that best prove the need for expert employee monitoring software:

  • ExpressVPN and Pollfish survey reveals that 78% of employers utilize employee monitoring software;
  • Top10VPN report shows that there's been a 54% increase in demand for such software between spring 2020 and 2021;
  • Insider Threat 2018 Report states that even before the pandemic, back in 2017 42% of respondents were using employee monitoring methods, and by 2018 the number of organizations monitoring their user behavior increased significantly and was up to 94%

What Kinds of Businesses Need Employee monitoring Software?

Are you hesitating whether your company needs an employee monitoring solution? Here’s a simple checklist for your business:

  • Do most of your employees work at computers?
  • Do people who work at computers affect your organization’s profits?
  • Can these people cause harm to the company, for instance, by stealing data or luring away clients?
  • Do you suspect that your employees could work more efficiently, but you find it difficult to redistribute the workload?
  • Do you have concerns that some of your subordinates need closer supervision?

If you answered yes to at least three of these questions, then you’ll definitely benefit from employee monitoring software. If you answered yes to more than four questions, you really ought to implement such a tool.

5 Main Issues that Employee Monitoring Software Solves

To be even more specific, such software helps managers address 5 major issues that affect pretty much every company to varying degrees.

Issue 1: Procrastinators

People tend to get distracted from their work. It’s rather easy even for responsible and hard-working employees to waste up to 40-50% of their working time. Here are a few examples:

  • someone messages them regarding work, and they get lost in dozens of work chats;
  • a new notification pops up in their social media feed, they take a quick look at it and come out of this daze half an hour later;
  • they start pondering over something, and suddenly 15 minutes have already flown by.

These are fairly mundane scenarios that happen to the best of us. Sometimes a little nudge is enough to bring employees back to work – and this is exactly what employee monitoring tools provide. For one thing, the very idea that you are being monitored helps keep employees grounded. Then there are also automatic notifications on procrastination (we’ll cover this feature in more detail in a moment).

Issue 2: Inefficient workload distribution

To redistribute the workload, you first need to understand how much time each employee actually spends doing certain work-related activities. The easiest way to acquire these statistics, which will also be unbiased and automatically collected, is to use employee monitoring software.

Issue 3: Scammers and insider threats

A disgruntled manager who quit and took his client base with him. A hardened scammer who carries out the best projects as a freelancer. A slacker who fakes reports on his productivity. If you’ve been in the industry long enough, you’re bound to run into one or two of these characters – or maybe even all of them at once.

Employee monitoring software helps you identify rogue employees in your company and catch them in the act right away. You can literally follow your employees’ every move, and you even receive notifications regarding their most risky behavior (like if they’re trying to access and download a certain database).

Issue 4: Determining growth points

Let’s suppose that there are two employees working on the same project alongside each other. They have the same roles, similar background, qualifications, and even skills, yet one of them gets things done 15-20% faster than the other. Both of them are putting in the effort, their productivity seems to be the same, so how come there’s such a difference?

Advanced monitoring tools allow you to look at the screenshots of your employees’ workdays. So you can check the aforementioned first employee’s performance and see not only what he was doing during the day, but also how he was doing it. That right there is a growth point that would be hard to notice without the help of employee monitoring software.

Other potential growth points include unexpected bursts of productivity due to team reshuffling, task distribution according to certain time periods (someone might work better early in the morning, while another employee might thrive after lunch), or even identification of redundant business processes (such as excessive messenger correspondence).

Issue 5: Supervising remote employees

To overcome this obstacle, you require special remote work monitoring tools. Employee monitoring software once again comes to the rescue, providing managers with an opportunity to keep an eye on those employees that work from the comfort of their own home as effectively as if they were sitting in the office. Kickidler even comes with special features that facilitate employee self-monitoring. With its help, employees can monitor their own productivity level and get automatic notifications that remind them to get back to work in case of prolonged breaks.

Pros and Cons of Employee Monitoring

We’ve already covered the benefits and drawbacks of implementing employee monitoring software. We highly recommend you read that article, but if we were to sum it up, there are far more pros than cons when it comes to using such a solution.

Pros of using employee monitoring software include:

  • comprehensive supervision with minimal effort: you simply open the report you are interested in and immediately see the full picture of the situation;
  • unbiased reporting: automatically collected data doesn’t lie, and you always have accurate statistics on hand;
  • increase in your team’s productivity: the mere fact of monitoring can already boost the efficiency of your employees by 7%;
  • ability to make informed decisions: the software collects all the data required for in-depth evaluation and growth points identification;
  • protection from risks: the software helps identify scammers, insider threats and overall slackers
  • ability to monitor remote employees.

Meanwhile, the cons of using such software are relative, and for the most part they arise from apparent human errors:

  • people don’t like to be monitored: if you neglect to explain to your subordinates why you’ve made the decision to monitor them and what exactly you’ll be monitoring, they might become frustrated and annoyed;
  • monitoring software records all the actions of your employees, and it can accidentally collect some sensitive personal information: to eliminate these risks, you simply need to educate your team on the proper use of company devices;
  • some reports may appear excessively detailed: you should keep in mind that you only need to review a few basic metrics for operational control, while all the other reports are more useful for the times when you need to analyze certain situations more thoroughly.

And don’t forget that when you implement an employee monitoring solution the right way (as we’ll discuss further on), all of these drawbacks get nullified.

How to Make the Most of Employee Monitoring Software?

Before we focus on choosing the best suitable solution for your business, its functionality and specifics, we’d like to emphasize an important point: employee monitoring software is a tool for your business. Yes, it’s very effective, capable and advanced, but it’s only a toolset. The way you implement it and your purposes for it directly determine the outcome of its use.

Productivity and efficiency: differences in managing both concepts

Productivity and efficiency are fairly similar concepts, which is why many people confuse them. Yet there’s a fundamental difference worth keeping in mind:

  • productivity measures the share of working time an employee spends on their tasks;
  • efficiency displays the results that the employee achieved over a unit of time.

In other words, by increasing productivity, you get more done in the same amount of time, whereas by increasing efficiency, you manage to do the same tasks faster. Why is that important? Let the examples speak for themselves:

  • Jake was working at 50% productivity and 50% efficiency. Once Kickidler was set up, Jake found out about the monitoring and started working at 65% productivity, but his efficiency remained unchanged. Overall his results went from 0.5*0.5=0.25 to 0.65*0.5=0.325. If we divide 0.325 by 0.25, we get 1.3, meaning that Jake became 30% more productive than he was prior to Kickidler implementation.
  • Alex was working at the same levels of productivity and efficiency as Jake, both metrics were at 50%. After Kickidler’s implementation, Alex grew anxious and managed to increase his productivity to 80%. But he had to pay for this improvement with fatigue and decreased concentration, which are inevitable when someone’s working at their limit. So his efficiency dropped to 30%. 0.8*0.3=0.24. Seeing how initially it was 0.25, we can conclude that Alex started showing even worse results than before.
  • Kate was also working at 50% productivity and 50% efficiency. Once Kickidler was implemented, her productivity didn't change, however, their manager noticed that Jake was using numerous keyboard shortcuts and so he taught Kate how to use them as well. Her efficiency increased to 60%, and the result was 0.5*0.6=0.3. Once we divide 0.3 by 0.25, we get 1.2, which means that Kate has become 20% more efficient.

These three examples illustrate the following two critical points:

  1. Both productivity and efficiency metrics determine the real value of your employee. That’s why it’s so important to supplement report checking with visual monitoring. Essentially, you need to be aware of not only how much your employees work, but also how exactly they carry out their tasks.
  2. Efficiency and productivity are inextricably linked: the more tired an employee grows, the worse their results become. So you need to walk the fine line where the product of efficiency and productivity is the most optimal one for your business.

Always keep these points in mind, and that way it’ll be easier for you to interpret the results of monitoring and to actually benefit from it.

Engagement

One of the most important aspects that affects both productivity and efficiency of your employees is their engagement. This one is simple: the more your people want to do their jobs well, the more responsible they are and the faster they work. As a result, they achieve better results. High levels of employee engagement and their commitment to your company allows you to:

  • boost employee performance by 20-30%;
  • get valuable feedback and suggestions for the company's development from your employees;
  • preserve your team and reduce employee turnover;
  • create a positive brand reputation.

To increase employee engagement levels, you only need to accomplish two simple tasks:

  • give people what they want;
  • get rid of what they don’t want – or at least eliminate the negative aspects of those things.

Top employee monitoring software assists in identifying potential pinch points and evaluating progress after any decisions are made. For example, you might tweak the work schedule to make it more convenient for your employees and then analyze how it affected their actual performance.

Positive Motivation

Why do you think there is such a turnover among qualified employees, the pros on whom core processes and tasks depend? These people usually earn nice money, have great work conditions and choose their place of work deliberately. In general, they are disinterested in unnecessary commotion. So why do these specialists leave?

  1. A seasoned employee has long outgrown the “I need the money” phase. They don’t necessarily depend on the paycheck and they realize that they’ll be compensated well enough at any company of their choice. Financial incentives have become a norm for them, yet money alone is not enough.
  2. If it’s not about the money for these employees, then what exactly motivates them? In truth, they are driven by the same things everyone strives for – recognition and interesting tasks. And since a pro has already accepted your job offer, it’s safe to assume they find the tasks interesting. This means that it’s all about the recognition for them.

We advise that you talk to your “celebrities” and overall valuable employees. The more you pressure your specialists, confine within strict frames and torment them with micromanagement, the faster they’ll leave. It also works the other way around: the more positive and constructive feedback you give and the less unnecessary pressure you put on your team, the better they will perform. 

Productivity monitoring software will assist managers in observing the performance of their best people without annoying everyone into quitting. Supervisors will know exactly what everybody’s doing during working hours, what to praise them for, and what to gently draw their attention to. Such an approach will ensure that the professionals remain with the company for years to come.

Discipline

No matter how effective positive motivation is, you need to keep two important factors in mind:

  1. some people simply need stricter supervision and if they don’t sense it, they start slacking off and can’t pull themselves together;
  2. many line employees who tend to be motivated by their paychecks will try to accomplish less while being paid the same.

In both cases, the mere fact of implementing software for monitoring employees helps keep them all in check. Being aware that the actual results of their work are constantly being tracked and that their manager can see a thorough picture of their workday at any time, your team starts to perform better.

Should You Choose Employee Monitoring Software with Screenshots?

While the solutions that offer only the screenshot monitoring option do take less disk space and potentially compromise employee privacy less, known employee monitoring software that provides the screen video recording feature is more accurate. It allows managers to fully understand the context of each work-related situation. Another bonus is that it is almost impossible for unscrupulous employees to cheat such software. Our Kickidler employee monitoring software currently offers solely the option of screen video recording. However, we plan to add the option of screenshot monitoring to the TT version of our solution in the near future.

Automatic Notifications

An important point is that the supervisor-subordinate relationship is always a relationship between two people. Think back to the emotions you feel when someone reprimands you – is it shame, embarrassment, irritation? Now imagine that you’re constantly being observed by someone. It sounds rather uncomfortable, doesn’t it?

All these are stress factors that will decrease employee productivity, engagement, efficiency and other important indicators in the long run. Automated monitoring allows you to get rid of all these issues: there can be no complaining to the machine, it’s merely a tool that monitors computer activity of employees and sends them notifications.

By using the automatic notifications module, not only do you free up your own work time, but you also avoid unnecessary stress points with your employees. That’s extremely important, so we strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with this feature.

Micromanagement

The worst thing you can do is to start watching your subordinate’s every move.

We conducted an experiment in which the supervisor intentionally micromanaged his lead programmer, all with the latter’s consent! Jack was fully aware of the purpose of this experiment and its methodology, but after just a few days of working under such a microscope he was literally drained of all energy and had no desire to work.

That's why it's so important to make monitoring as unobtrusive and automated as possible.

Positive Work Environment

Working conditions have a tremendous influence on the employees’ performance. This notion is pretty easy to verify. Try solving a problem in a well-lit, ventilated office with no distractions. Then turn on loud annoying music, close all the windows, turn off the AC and try solving that same problem again. Something tells us you’ll immediately notice the difference.

That’s why it’s imperative to create the most comfortable working conditions for each member of your team, without compromising the comfort of everyone else. At the same time, we’re well aware that everyone has different preferences, so how do you approach this challenge? The steps are fairly simple:

  1. give your subordinates the opportunity to have a say in their work environment: allow them to move office partitions, adjust furniture to their height, light their desks as they see fit, and so on;
  2. review the results of such changes and pay close attention to the employees whose productivity has dropped – somewhere along the line they may have started feeling annoyed by someone else’s adjustments;
  3. act as a moderator and help people negotiate comfortable conditions for everyone.

Onboarding

To accelerate the adaptation period of the new employee, we recommend that you assign them a mentor and make sure they get integrated into the company processes as smoothly as possible. Monitoring the mentor becomes one of the key points here: are they taking this task seriously, are they handling everything well, are they doing a good job? Usually, when it comes to onboarding, strict supervision does more harm than good, destabilizing both mentors and novices, which is why employee monitoring solutions are indispensable: they help supervisors monitor the newcomer’s progress discreetly and indicate whether their intervention is actually needed.

How to Choose Employee Monitoring Software?

Now let’s move on to choosing staff monitoring software that will be suitable for your particular business needs. We’ll focus on such points as the most important features of these tools, its deployment methods, pricing models and the importance of visual monitoring.

Essential features

To meet all of your company’s needs, you’ll need to look for the following features when making the choice:

  • Time tracking. It’s the foundational feature that displays when your employees start working, finish for the day and take any breaks.
  • Productivity analysis. Just because someone is sitting at the computer and clicking the keys doesn’t necessarily mean they’re working. Superior monitoring solutions can track employees’ activity in various applications and on different websites, automatically determining if the specialist is being productive or not.
  • Work time reports. The sooner you get the data and the better it’s interpreted, the easier it’ll be to make well-informed decisions. That’s why it’s also important for the software to provide all the information in a concise, clear and intuitive manner.
  • Online computer monitoring. This feature is extremely important and we’ll touch upon its necessity further on. Essentially, it enables supervisors to peer into the screen of every employee in real time in order to see what their specialists are doing and how exactly they’re doing it. We recommend that you choose the solution that allows you to view all screens of your team on a single grid, just like CCTV.
  • Screen video recording. Some violations might occur when you aren’t actively monitoring the situation. In order to understand what’s happened, you’ll need to study video recording of the event, so the software you choose should be able to record videos of employees’ screens and store the footage.
  • Keystroke logging. Keylogger records all keystrokes and mouse clicks of your employees, which becomes a big help when identifying insider threats.
  • Remote access. This feature is extremely useful, since it allows you to instantly take over the employee’s computer in an emergency situation or simply to help a subordinate who’s facing a difficult task.
  • Automatic notifications. We’ve already addressed the importance of this feature earlier in the article.

We’re pleased to say that Kickidler offers all of these features. Whatever your needs are, our best employee monitoring software can do it all!

On-premise vs Cloud

The next step to consider is the deployment method. Here are the two most frequent choices:

  • On-premise: the solution is installed on your own server which is located in your office;
  • Cloud: the solution is hosted offsite on the server of the cloud provider.

Here’s a quick summary of the benefits of each option:

On-Premise Cloud
  • independence from the provider;
  • data loss prevention;
  • strict compliance with legal requirements for data storage;
  • steadiness;
  • option to tailor the software to your needs.
  • quick to install;
  • rather cheap (however, there are its own nuances);
  • convenient;
  • all the hassle is on the provider.

To draw an analogy, companies usually turn to the cloud options when they need a RTW suit: you buy it off the rack, put it on, and go about your business. In this case an on-premise solution is a custom tailored suit: yes, it requires more time to customize it to your needs and it’s more expensive, but it also has better quality (provided your tailor is a good one, so to speak).
Kickidler provides both on-premise and cloud deployment models so that you can pick the option that suits you best.

Pricing Options

In 2021 we carried out a detailed analysis of pricing options for various employee monitoring solutions in an attempt to find the best deal on the market.

Every company uses its own pricing model, and it can be difficult at times to compare them using the same metrics. We recommend that you take into account:

  • price per month;
  • availability of perpetual licenses;
  • number of potential users and discounts for them;
  • tech support fees;
  • cost of updates;
  • cost of employee training.

When it comes to Kickidler, we offer excellent bonuses depending on the number of employees that will be monitored. Moreover, all tech support, updates and training for your employees are free of charge!

Visual Monitoring

To learn more about the efficiency of visual monitoring, we advise you to take a look at the corresponding article of ours.

Most employee monitoring solutions rely on their primary features, which are time tracking and automated monitoring. Decisions are thus made based on various reports, which isn’t necessarily bad – it’s just not enough.

Here are three simple examples for you to consider:

  1. an employee opens Microsoft Word, places an eraser on the space bar and walks away – that’s all it would take for a report to deem him incredibly productive, whereas in reality that won’t be the case at all;
  2. another employee is working at a snail’s pace, pressing keys once every half a minute – same situation with distorted reports happens;
  3. yet another employee is being extremely productive, but he completes at least one third of his projects as a freelancer – the reports once again will fail to show that.

Examples of Employee Monitoring Software in Action

Here are some results that our customers have achieved thanks to using Kickidler free employee computer monitoring software.

Increasing Profit

We’ve already told you the story of one of our clients contacting us to help him with retaining customers and increasing the profit of his business.

He’s the owner of a Polish online store dedicated to fishing gear. Due to the pandemic, he was forced to transfer his sales department to remote work. That decision had an immediate negative impact on the overall success of his store: the cancellation rate increased from 20 to 30 percent in no time!

Having installed Kickidler, the store owner managed to get his managers to be more productive.

The results were consistent, and the rates got even better than before the pandemic: the cancellation rate went down to 15%! With an average order value for the store of €50, its extra revenue per month amounted to more than €8,000, while Kickidler itself cost the company around €10 per month.

Detecting Scammers

Essentially, the company’s first line tech support team in the US division was failing to handle their workload, while the European team had a similar workload per employee and they were handling the flow of requests rather well. The company’s management decided to install Kickidler in a stealth mode, measured their employees’ productivity and then informed them about the software implementation, after which they reviewed the results of monitoring the division's performance before and after Kickidler’s introduction.

The outcome was staggering: productivity of the first line support team increased by 27%, while the second line experienced a 27% decrease in the number of closed support tickets. A closer look at the situation revealed that two particular second line employees had been creating fake tickets, which helped them fake high productivity prior to Kickidler’s introduction, but stopped after the deployment of our free employee screen monitoring software.

In the end, these two cheaters were fired and a few employees were transferred from the second line support to the first, allowing the call center to resume steady operations. The overall increase in team productivity amounted to 15%, and the company’s budget for the initially anticipated hiring of five new employees was saved.

Delicate Issues

Finally, let’s address the questions that come up quite frequently when it comes to the potential implementation of employee monitoring software.

Is Employee Monitoring Legal?

First, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the article we’ve written on the legal aspects of using employee monitoring software and the expert opinion on this topic.

Essentially, the answer to this question depends on where your company operates. While in the US employers have the right to monitor the employees’ work computer usage (according to ECPA, Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986), European employers must provide notice to their employees prior to implementing monitoring of their online communication.

Here’s what applicable to most countries regarding regulations of employee monitoring:

  1. You cannot listen in to private calls, but you can monitor all conversations your employees have on corporate phones. You can even go a step further and set a company policy limiting the use of personal mobile devices during working hours.
  2. You cannot install CCTV in toilets or, for example, smoking rooms, since these areas aren't considered part of the employees' areas of work. But you can continuously monitor their offices, meeting rooms, etc.
  3. You cannot monitor employees’ private chats on their personal accounts, yet you do have the right to monitor their corporate accounts. You may even prohibit your specialists from using personal messengers during working hours or logging into their private accounts from corporate devices.

On top of that, it would be wise to inform every employee about the monitoring protocols in your company in writing against signature. Are there cameras set up in your office? The staff should know about it. Are you monitoring employee activity at the work computers using Kickidler? Once again, the team should be aware of that. If your employees are informed about workplace monitoring, the risks of you running into any legal trouble are low.

Note: To avoid any potential disputes, we recommend that you conclude an additional agreement with each employee that will have similar clauses:

  1. By entering into this Agreement, the Employee authorizes the Employer to process personal data in connection with their work performance. The Employee gives free informed consent to the collecting, recording, organizing, structuring, storing, adapting, altering, retrieving, using, disclosing, transmitting, depersonalizing, destroying of any information related directly or indirectly to the Employee (personal data) using automated means (including specialized computer software) or without such tools.
  2. By entering into this Agreement, the Employee acknowledges that they have been notified of the consequences of using the Employer’s property for purposes not related to the performance of their direct job functions. Information obtained by the Employer in the course of the use of the Employer's property by the Employee for purposes not related to the performance of their direct job functions shall be regarded as information disclosed by the Employee knowingly and voluntarily.
  3. By entering into this Agreement, the Employee gives their free informed consent to the collection of information specified in clause 1, jointly with third parties, as well as to its transfer to said third parties for the purposes of monitoring the amount and quality of work performed and safeguarding the Employer’s property. The Employee also consents to the Employer’s use of said information, including in the resolution of labor disputes.
  4. The Parties have agreed that in the event that the Employee exercises their right to withdraw their consent to the processing of personal data, the Employer may continue to process such data jointly with third parties for the purposes of executing this Agreement, including the purposes of monitoring the amount and quality of work performed and safeguarding the Employer’s property.

Is Employee Monitoring Ethical?

Some time ago we pondered the question of how to make the concept of ethical employee monitoring a reality

“Since the employer is paying his employees to do their jobs, he has the right to check whether they are actually working or not.” It’s a fairly simple idea that hardly anyone would argue with. Therefore, you already have the moral and ethical right to monitor the activity of your employees – it’s just a question of how.

In order to ensure your monitoring is carried out as ethically as possible, we advise you to make the aforementioned monitoring:

  1. Transparent. Tell your subordinates about the monitoring and explain to them exactly how and for what purposes you’re doing it. An exception can be made for situations when you already suspect that there’s an insider on the team and you want to catch them in the act.
  2. Non-obtrusive. People can’t be productive all the time; they need reasonable breaks. As long as the employee remains within the range of appropriate productivity for their occupation, don’t put unnecessary pressure on them.
  3. Leading to a soft response. Try to influence the productivity of your team by providing positive motivation and increasing employee engagement, not through imposing fines on your specialists and putting them under duress. Avoid micromanagement, improve working conditions of your employees – this way, you’ll show them that monitoring is intended to make their lives better, not worse.

Follow these tips, and everything will be just fine.

When is Covert Monitoring Acceptable?

First of all, we have an article that covers the basics of using Kickidler in stealth mode.

As a rule, covert monitoring eventually becomes obvious, which creates a lot of problems – employees  stop trusting top management, they become discontented and sometimes even sue their employer. That’s why we suggest using covert monitoring only for short periods of time and only in the following two situations:

  1. you are confident that there are malicious people within your company, such as insiders, chronic procrastinators, and saboteurs;
  2. you are in need of baseline data before announcing the monitoring transparently to the whole team – that way, you’ll be able to assess the outcome of Kickidler’s implementation.

As for all the other cases, we strongly advise you to be transparent about your intentions to introduce employee monitoring.

How to Competently Implement Employee Monitoring Software?

We have a separate in-depth article where we delve into details of implementing employee monitoring software.

The most important steps you need to take are as follows:

  1. Clearly define your purposes for monitoring;
  2. Calculate the number of employees who will be monitored;
  3. Determine the number of offices and remote workers that will be monitored;
  4. Choose a monitoring solution that suits your needs in terms of its pricing and functionality;
  5. Decide on the deployment option: on-premise or cloud;
  6. Set up and configure the software;
  7. Inform your employees about its implementation.

We’re ready to assist during every step of the way – our team here at Kickidler has accumulated tremendous experience in implementing our software in organizations of various sizes and specializations.

How to Inform Employees About the Implementation of Monitoring Software?

We also have an article that discusses the concept of making employee monitoring as transparent as possible.

Make sure you clearly explain to your employees:

  • what you’ll be monitoring;
  • why you’ll be monitoring it;
  • how you’ll handle the information obtained;
  • what can every employee do in order to ensure that their personal data is not monitored;
  • what benefits they will receive: more objective decision-making, impartial management, bonuses for increasing KPIs, more balanced workload distribution, etc.

Don’t make any decisions regarding the tightening of working conditions immediately after implementing the monitoring software of your choice; on the contrary, do your best to help your team see the improvements that have already taken place. For example, you can assign bonuses to your most productive specialists, which will lead to an atmosphere of positivity rather than tension.

Can employees detect monitoring software on their PC?

We strongly recommend that you use such work monitoring solutions openly, since it strengthens the spirit and morale in the company. Yet if the situation arises that requires using the software in a stealth mode, Kickidler software to monitor computer activity provides such option, which greatly minimizes the risk of employees detecting the monitoring software. And while there are several ways for them to detect such solutions on their work PCs (such as accessing Task Manager, running the command line or downloading anti-spyware software), our advice for you is to not assign your specialists Admin rights if you as an employer don’t want them to detect the employee laptop monitoring software. We also recommend that you sign additional agreements with those employees who will be aware of the implementation of such solutions and aim to switch from the stealth mode of use to public somewhere down the line.

That's everything we wanted to cover for today. If you still have any questions about employee monitoring software after reading this article, feel free to contact us and we’ll gladly answer all of them!

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