Kickidler Employee Monitoring & Time Tracking. What version should you choose?

Kickidler is one of the most advanced employee monitoring software. It tracks all activity of your employees in various applications and their browsing history, classifies employee activities into productive and unproductive ones, records video of their working days synchronized with timeline reports - in short, it provides you with absolutely all data regarding what your subordinates have been up to during their days at work.

We are very proud to be among the leaders in terms of the functionality of our solution, but we are aware that such a number of features may scare some potential clients away. For example, large businesses are not always interested in recording videos of each employee's work day, seeing how that would require too much data storage space. 

Recognizing that different customers have different needs, we offer our clients the ability to customize Kickidler to fit their individual needs. This customization is based on offering two versions of the software to choose from: Time Tracking and Employee Monitoring.

Kickidler Time Tracking: “soft” monitoring, reports, and analytics

Time Tracking is the basic version of our software, which includes all its key features:

• detailed reports on working time: what was an employee doing, when, and just how busy they were with it;
• timesheets that simplify the payroll and bonus calculations;
• reports on activity in different applications and on different sites;
• reports on labor efficiency and its dynamics: when an employee is most productive, when declines in productivity typically occur, etc.;
• rating of employees and “details of the day” for each of them;
• automatic notifications regarding procrastination that remind employees to get back to work, and the corresponding reports.

The solution can be deployed either publicly or covertly - but we do recommend making employee monitoring as transparent as possible.

Benefits

• costs less than the Employing Monitoring version of the software;
• requires almost no attention from the supervisor, since it takes only a few minutes to check the reports;
• does not require disk space for storing large amounts of data;
• no need to install the Viewer component, all reports are available in the Web interface;
• provides all the relevant data to optimize the distribution of workload among employees, increasing their productivity.

Shortcomings

• while the activity of an employee in the application or on the website is visible to you, you don't know for certain what exactly they were doing; there's always a risk that a cunning employee might try and cheat the monitoring software;
• the absence of visual monitoring does not allow you to have an in-depth look into the details of the work process, which at times might be very important (for example, to examine the work of the most productive employees and assist other employees in adopting the practices of such leaders).

Suitable for

Kickidler Time Tracking is a nice time tracking solution for companies that trust their employees, or for large businesses with a separate department responsible for identifying malicious employee activity. Time Tracking is the right choice for your company if:

• you are confident that your subordinates are working diligently and are not plotting anything malicious against the company;
• you need analytics that will help quickly identify points of growth in the human resources area;
• you supervise a large number of people, and you need detailed consolidated data on their activity.

Example of using Kickidler TT

A classic example of using Kickidler Time Tracking is the case of one of our customers, a call center network with several branches throughout Europe. After installing Kickidler modules, the business owner discovered that:

• The workload between the branches was not evenly distributed: two call centers were evidently exhausted even though they were able to handle the work, whereas in three other call centers the operators often took breaks due to the low number of calls. The redistribution of workflows and areas of responsibility across different regions helped to balance the situation, thus decreasing employee turnover in previously overloaded units.
• There were some strange “gaps” in productivity during the workday: at certain moments, employees would start to work noticeably worse, and their activity would decrease. And this pattern was observed in all the branches. In-depth analysis revealed a flaw in some scripts for answering questions: an employee had to request clarification from the second line and wait for a response for a significant amount of time. Optimization of scripts increased efficiency by 7%.

There was no need for visual observation in this case – seeing how this is a redundant function for monitoring call center line specialists – but the statistics collected by Kickidler proved to be very useful.

Kickidler Employee Monitoring: all-encompassing monitoring with the visual aspect

Kickidler Employee Monitoring is an advanced version of our software. It includes all the features of Time Tracking version as well as:

• A full suite of visual monitoring capabilities: simultaneous online monitoring of dozens of screens along with screen video recording;
• Remote management that provides full access to employees' PCs;
• Keylogger that records all keystrokes and mouse clicks.

You can almost literally oversee each and every employee and track what they've been doing at any given moment.

Benefits

• total transparency: you know everything about your employees’ time at work;
• the software is impossible to deceive: a paper clip in the keyboard or a wristwatch under the mouse simply won't work - you will oversee everything;
• extensive analysis of business processes: you are able to determine what helps the most effective employees maintain their high level of productivity and what hinders the slow ones;
• protection from possible insiders and other intruders: the mere presence of such monitoring solution is enough to deter an unscrupulous employee.

Shortcomings

• is more expensive than the Time Tracking version;
• you’ll need to install the Viewer component;
• you'll need server space for data storage.

Suitable for

Any company interested in all-encompassing monitoring of its employees. Employee Monitoring is your choice if:

• you feel that it's not enough to monitor just the performance of employees;
• you suspect that your employees are deceiving you by intentionally procrastinating, leaking data, etc.;
• you want to delve deeper into the specifics of your own business processes and optimize them.

Visual monitoring is the only reliable protection against sneaky employees. Our clients have had many situations in which this tool has been the only way to detect unscrupulous specialists. For example, there is a telling story about five sneaky tech support employees.

A mysterious problem occurred in the customer support department of a technology company. There were five specialists working on the line at night. All of them had been demonstrating the productivity level of 60-70%, which is a great figure. But at the same time, the requests were being processed extremely slowly.

We decided to install an advanced version of Kickidler software that includes visual monitoring for obtaining comprehensive results. That way, during the very first night shift of these employees we discovered that the five of them had come up with a truly ingenious scheme. All of them were working remotely, and only one employee would come to work at the beginning of the shift. He would connect to the other four computers via remote desktop software and simply duplicate his actions on the five machines at once. All the productivity reports seemed perfectly normal, but only one person was actually working, while the other four were happily snoozing and getting their paychecks at the same time!

This kind of thing can't be traced without visual monitoring. When an opportunity arises to get paid for doing absolutely nothing, people can become extremely crafty, and Kickidler Employee Monitoring will protect you from such cunning employees.

So what version should you choose?

We would recommend that you choose Time Tracking version for analytics and workload optimization, and Employee Monitoring - for in-depth analysis and malicious activity detection. Both tools are excellent at fulfilling their purposes, and you can always switch from one version to the other. 

So it's probably best that you choose the version that's optimal for you - and if you need any help, contact us and we'll be happy to assist you!