Setting up Employee Monitoring Software of 1200 Computers

Recently we solved the task of setting up employee monitoring in a large-scale retail company. Here’s our story how it happened.

Task

In total, the client company has about 4000 employees, but during the first stage it was decided to set up monitoring of 1200 workplaces, 950 of which are located in the head office in Moscow, 250 – in the branch office in Novosibirsk.

The task was more complicated due to the fact that about 90% of all employees were temporarily transferred to working remotely due to the pandemic.

Of those temporarily relocated, most were connecting to their work stations from their personal home PC via RDP and VPN, but some were using work resources by connecting to them from their home PCs directly via the company's VPN.

The task that clients initially approached us with was to organize effective monitoring of employees remotely who switched to remote work, but over time the task of monitoring the employees who regularly went to the office was added as well.

Technical side of the question

Back at the testing stage the decision was made to create 4 Personal Accounts for different structural divisions of the company. We must note that this made it easier to work with the program later on.

A separate Personal Account was created for the Novosibirsk branch of the company and three more – for the Moscow head office, which were distributed on the principle of structural affiliation (that is, for each department there was a different Personal Account).

For each Personal Account 2-3 servers were allocated (i.e. 1 server for a maximum of 150 employees), which made it possible to configure the storage of video recordings of employee screens for 1 month – per client's request.

The task of monitoring employees working in the office and from home through the RDP protocol proved to be easier to solve. Essentially, it was enough to simply set up monitoring of work computers, to which employees connected directly or remotely via RDP. Installing the program through Active Directory Group Policy didn’t take that long.

The situation with remote employees who connected to company resources via VPN was a bit more complicated. For them, the program agent was installed remotely on home PCs upon mandatory prior agreement of said employees.

Also, those employees, whose home PC had the monitoring program installed, were preliminarily instructed on how to disable monitoring software for employees Kickidler’s grabber during their off-hours using the Autokick feature. Such briefing is important so that there is no intentional or unintentional intrusion into employee privacy.

Currently, everything is working, the system is not overloaded, and there have been no major technical problems.

Organizational side of the question

Now we’ll tell you how the client has solved organizational issues concerning the installation of our program.

Thanks to the latest update, there are two types of access to Kickidler functionality – Administrator and Manager.

Admin access is available directly to system admin and the authorized person in each department.

Manager access is granted to heads of departments and divisions. Each department head is responsible for analyzing the productivity of their subordinates. They are responsible for setting up website and app productivity assessments, maintaining statistics and sending a summary report on the productivity of their department to senior management each month.

The manager doesn’t have access to Online monitoring and Video recording of activity functions regarding other departments’ PCs in the Viewer of the program.

Video recordings of activity are stored for exactly one month, after which the disk automatically cleans itself.

Employees who work remotely via VPN have the option to enable and disable monitoring.

All remote employees have access to the Self-monitoring interface, meaning that they can see their own productivity statistics, which adds a game element to the monitoring.

And, while it’s a bit too early to discuss the results of Kickidler implementation, it looks like the overall employee productivity in the company has increased (at least, according to our client).

To be continued…

Kickidler Employee Monitoring Software

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