ENG Employee Monitoring Software
Get insights into your team work activities with comprehensive employee time tracking software.
5000+ organizations from 60 countries rely on us
Get insights into your team work activities with comprehensive employee time tracking software.
5000+ organizations from 60 countries rely on us
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Configure automatic notifications
Receive a report on notifications
Set up an employee self-monitoring interface
Kickidler employee monitoring software boosts remote employees’ focus, concentration and productivity.
Kickidler offers a comprehensive Data Leak Prevention (DLP) suite to help businesses protect their valuable data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Track printed documents within your organization. Kickidler DLP keeps a record of all printed materials, helping you identify any unauthorized or suspicious printing activities.
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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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.
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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.
Sign up online and get up to 14 days of free access to Kickidler’s functionality
Download the Server, Grabber and Viewer distributions (for Kickidler Employee Monitoring version)
It takes around 5 minutes to install all software components
View reports in the Web interface. Visual monitoring is available in the Viewer.
Use Kickidler’s additional features to maximize your business’ potential
Kickidler meets GDPR requirements
When the software runs in stealth mode, it doesn’t show up in the Task Manager
Configure data exchange between Kickidler and other services
Use the software without Internet access
Allow full or limited access to the reports and the software settings
Receive Excel reports on work time and productivity via email
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
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
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
It’s a really awesome solution for monitoring employee productivity. I used to demand that my subordinates send me daily reports…
Michael via Capterra
It enables recording employees’ activity at the PCs as well as real-time monitoring and reviewing productivity reports.
Olga via Capterra
Very intuitive interface. Friendly tech support. Easy to install and use
Sergey via Startpack
The software has a great user manual. It operates steadily. Its interface is simple to use and understand, not too cluttered...
Eugene via Capterra
4.8
4.7
4.8
Kickidler ensures complete protection of your data with its robust data security features.
Kickidler prioritizes the protection of confidential information, ensuring that your sensitive data remains secure.
Kickidler tracks the number of keystrokes and mouse movements, thus providing valuable insights into work patterns without compromising employee privacy.
Kickidler offers various monitoring options, encouraging the approach where employees consciously clock in manually in order to turn on monitoring for the day. This approach helps to ensure that employees are aware of the monitoring and are able to make the decision to participate in it at their own volition.
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.
Employee monitoring software essentially is the type of software that allows employers to:
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.
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:
Are you hesitating whether your company needs an employee monitoring solution? Here’s a simple checklist for your business:
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.
To be even more specific, such software helps managers address 5 major issues that affect pretty much every company to varying degrees.
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:
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).
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.
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).
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).
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.
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:
Meanwhile, the cons of using such software are relative, and for the most part they arise from apparent human errors:
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.
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:
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:
These three examples illustrate the following two critical points:
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.
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:
To increase employee engagement levels, you only need to accomplish two simple tasks:
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.
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?
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.
No matter how effective positive motivation is, you need to keep two important factors in mind:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
To meet all of your company’s needs, you’ll need to look for the following features when making the choice:
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!
The next step to consider is the deployment method. Here are the two most frequent choices:
Here’s a quick summary of the benefits of each option:
| On-Premise | Cloud |
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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.
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:
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!
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:
Here are some results that our customers have achieved thanks to using Kickidler free employee computer monitoring software.
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.
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.
Finally, let’s address the questions that come up quite frequently when it comes to the potential implementation of employee monitoring software.
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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:
Follow these tips, and everything will be just fine.
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:
As for all the other cases, we strongly advise you to be transparent about your intentions to introduce employee monitoring.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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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