Precise, strict, and inclusive employee monitoring can be rightfully considered the foundation of order and discipline in any company. When your employees know that any acts of lateness, skipping work or other violations of the work schedule will be recorded and will result in penalties from management, they are less likely to be reckless and do something malicious. That's why implementing Employee monitoring software (EMS) is a crucial task, seeing how it will become a helpful asset for supervisors.
A classic solution would be to arrange human supervision. Specially assigned employee or security guard records the time employees come to and leave work, and everything is done manually in a journal. Indeed, it's the simplest, yet also the least effective approach – all because of the human factor. Accidental or even deliberate mistakes may happen when logging time; moreover, it's extremely difficult to verify the accuracy of timesheets. It's also practically impossible to restrain the insiders who're trying to cheat the system.
Overall, manual control is irrational in terms of the cost-effectiveness ratio. Luckily, there is a number of automated solutions that are way more efficient. Among the most popular are ACS, biometric control, trackers and special corporate software. Let's take a closer look at all of them along with the most common techniques employees may use to cheat monitoring software.
ACS (Access Control System) is currently the most common solution among automation tools. However, it's not the most efficient one because of its many weaknesses.
Basically, ACS consists of magnetic key cards given to all employees and special card readers installed at the office entrances. Employees scan their cards at the device and get access to the office premises. At the same time, the time they arrive to work gets recorded.
The advantage of such solution lies in its simplicity. Its main disadvantage is that the ACS is incredibly easy to cheat. For example, an employee may give their card to a coworker who'll scan that card for them. That way, a phantom entry to work will be recorded and punishment for absence or tardiness will be avoided. Another option would be to deliberately forget or lose the card, which would force the supervisor to enter the data into the report manually, without having accurate information on the actual adherence of said employee to the work schedule.
In addition, ACS means constant expenses for the company, because cards inevitably get lost or damaged and terminals malfunction due to their active use.
Biometric control is gaining popularity because it seems almost foolproof. How can one cheat biometric fingerprint access control? After all, according to movies, artificial fingerprints are only created for superheroes in well-equipped labs. It's pretty much impossible for an ordinary worker to pull off something like that!
That turns out to not be the case. Back in 2002, Tsutomu Matsumoto, a famous Japanese cryptographer, conducted a study and published a manual for creating a high-quality artificial fingerprint at home using graphite powder, superglue and ordinary gummy bears. And his methods have proven to work – such artificial fingerprints work wonders.
In 2014, one of the reports at the hackers' conference Chaos Communication Congress had the public in shock. Experts demonstrated a proper artificial fingerprint of the German Minister of Defense that they created based on high-quality photos taken from public sources. The efficiency of this method was confirmed by a study conducted by the Japan's National Institute of Informatics.
In short, it's possible to fool biometric fingerprint access control. And it's not even that difficult.
Biometric facial identification seems to be even more sophisticated than fingerprint access. Yet, even this method can be bypassed. It's just more complicated and costly, but not impossible to trick such means of control.
Here are just some options:
The unreliability of biometric protection in 2018 was confirmed by Forbes journalists that investigated the effectiveness of facial recognition on the high-end smartphones. A 3D mask helped unlock such devices in 80% of cases. Clearly, no comment is needed here.
A time tracker is a program that records not only the beginning and end of employee’s work at the PC, but also their general activity during the day. It's rather simple software, but many managers find it quite effective. However, it's best to keep in mind that there are numerous easy ways to cheat time trackers:
For example, you can open any work-related app and tie a children's toy to the mouse so that the mouse will move on a regular basis.
You can open Word or SAP or Excel, minimize the size of the app window and then turn on a movie.
You can buy or write a script or even software that will simulate activity while you'll be doing something entirely else.
In all of these cases, the supervisor will be convinced that the employee is busy with work, and it would take a miracle to detect a violation.
Employees regularly come up with new ways to cheat such software. For example, an interesting way to cheat a time tracker was revealed with the help of Kickidler software. The tech support department had a staff of five employees. One of them would launch TeamViewer on their PC, connect through it to all the other terminals and start working. As a result, the tracker registered the same high level of activity on all computers, even though only one person was present at the workplace.
Most of the time, employers install GPS trackers for merchandisers, drivers and other employees, whose work includes mobility and who can't be simply monitored in the office. Control via satellite navigation looks reliable at first sight, but it's still not flawless.
If you want to cheat programs that include control via GPS, here are some popular options:
Basically, it's not too difficult to fool a GPS tracker, and your employees don't even have to be hackers or programmers to do that.
We can safely say that Kickidler is the only employee monitoring tool that's impossible to cheat. And there are several reasons for that:
There are also some innovations in order to help you detect scripts that fake vigorous activity. For example, if an employee has been active in the same app non-stop for 30 minutes, it's rather suspicious; however, it's impossible to track such anomalies manually. Kickidler is capable of conducting constant monitoring by any specified criteria.
With the help of this software, supervisors can uncover both ordinary and sneaky scams of their employees. For example, Kickidler's functionality helps detect a scam that involves a pressed keystroke on the keyboard. An employee launches Microsoft Word or another program that's considered productive, puts something heavy on the keyboard and then starts watching a movie peacefully. Any time tracker would regard such activity as productive; Kickidler, on the other hand, doesn't register stuck keys as a sign of productive activity. In addition, you can always check an online video of the employee's monitor.
This software was also helpful with identifying a fan of watching soap operas during work hours. An employee would launch AutoCAD and press on the keyboard from time to time while simultaneously watching a movie in the background. The employer was concerned that the productivity in the company was decreasing, so they watched the recording of the employee's screen and easily identified the violation.
Another interesting case involved the detection of a remote employee who was busy with freelancing during work hours. By connecting to the employee's screen, the supervisor was able to find out that instead of doing his actual work said employee was busy with freelance projects. And there are numerous examples that prove the fact that Kickidler can't be fooled.
Kickidler records the actual time your employees begin and end their work days, all the breaks they take, every moment of their inactivity and every time they arrive to work late, with 100% accuracy. The software provides reliable data when it comes to time tracking. It also analyzes how efficiently your people are working. It's probably the best protected EMS available on the market at the moment.
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