#Real-Time Activity Monitoring: 5 Best Essential Tips

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Real-time data and user activity monitoring software collects and analyzes user activity data in real time. With its help, your organizations can identify trends, detect anomalies, and gain insights into their operations.

Real-time activity tracking is essential for your businesses to stay ahead of the competition. Identifying potential risks and opportunities in real time allows organizations to adjust strategies quickly and effectively. Businesses can respond to environmental changes proactive rather than reactively.

You might be wondering what the best business tips for real-time monitoring and activity logging are; in this article, you’ll learn the helpful 5 best essential tips.

Let’s jump to the article!

Essential Tip 1: Proper Planning and Preparation

The first strategy for activity monitoring and productivity tracking is to plan and prepare properly. It enables you to improve workforce efficiency and workplace productivity. You should Identify the key areas that need monitoring to ensure employee safety, performance, consent to the organization’s policies, and overall employee productivity.

Areas such as attendance records, task completion rates, and quality of work are all good indicators of how well employees perform their duties. Also, it is very important to monitor the behavior and attitude of the employees, which can bring issues to the team.

You should pick the right employee monitoring systems, tools, and technologies with advanced features for monitoring employees in real time. You should consider software that offers enhanced tracking features, such as time clocking, keystroke logging, security alerts, and behavior analytics.

A proper employee monitoring solution monitors web usage, screenshots employees’ computer activities, and records employees’ productive and unproductive status. These tracking tools can detect a potential data breach and protect your business from insider threat.

With the right employee monitoring tool and technology, employers can ensure visibility over how employees spend their working hours. They can ensure employee compliance with company policies regarding data security and privacy regulations.

Setting up an efficient productivity monitoring system can be difficult since numerous employees are in different departments. So here are the steps you can follow to set up a monitoring system in your company.

Implement a policy in your company to use employee monitoring software to track employees’ computers during working hours with consent.
Decide which metrics are essential to track and choose the right tracking systems.
Track the factors like productivity levels, task completion rates, customer satisfaction surveys, time and attendance, and employee engagement scores.
Monitor user activities using web analytics software or an internal database.
Ensure the active monitoring tool has reporting capabilities so you can identify the areas of improvement and potential issues with the workforce to prevent potentially serious problems.

Essential Tip 2: Utilizing Automated Alerts

Using automated alerts in an employee activity monitoring system is a great way to ensure that the employees are performing their tasks and meeting their goals. It allows employers or managers to receive notifications when criteria have been met or crossed the deadline, or even suspicious activities.

Automated alerts help employers keep track of progress and address employee issues. Besides employee activity monitoring, these apps are efficient at threat detection. You can stay on top of any insider threat or security threat since you get alerted for every inconvenience.

It provides real-time feedback and keeps employees on their toes, ensuring maximum productivity.

To set up automated alerts in your monitoring system, you can follow the given steps:

Set trigger events such as log-in, access to sensitive files, and prohibited application usage.
Configure alert criteria for the screen time threshold and specific files to be alerted.
Choose a method of notification through email, SMS, push notification, or in-app notification.
Set up an alert system in a user-friendly interface
Test alerts to verify they are working on each website and application.
Monitor and adjust as needed while keeping in mind ethical and legal considerations.

For example, automatic time alerts can notify managers if employees fail to clock in at their designated time. Plus, the alerts on unauthorized access, task completion, idle periods, or even employees’ (upcoming) deadlines for critical projects help you stay updated on employee activities.

Essential Tip 3: Staying Vigilant for Suspicious Activity

While tracking your employees, it is essential to be careful with the distrustful activities of the employee. Staying vigilant for suspicious activity can detect and respond to potential security breaches, protecting their reputation, financial stability, and confidential information.

Companies should closely monitor communication for keywords and keystrokes to check unproductive searches on the web.
It is important to focus on data loss prevention by keeping track of data transfers. If the employees leak sensitive data and information about the company, it can hamper your company’s financial, strategic, and social aspects.
Monitoring user activities like employees’ login to keep track of their attendance, clock-in time, clock-out time, and working hours is essential.
Monitor data accessibility to control sensitive data. Limit restriction to the sensitive data to certain employees only. Unfaithful employees can steal the copy of private information or the company’s source code. Setting two-factor authentication can prevent unauthorized employees from accessing such data and information.
Keep track of internet usage during working hours. Look who they communicate with and keep track of app usage, including text and work emails.
Use employee behavior analysis to measure individual productivity. It helps to explore and retain the talent in the company or to fire the unproductive useless employee.

Unusual login patterns, Unauthorized access to sensitive information, Excessive personal internet usage, Email, and chat activities are some examples of suspicious activities you should closely monitor and watch out for.

Essential Tip 4: Regularly Review and Evaluate the Monitoring System

Regular reviews and monitoring help transparency and build trust with the employees. If they know they’re being reviewed regularly, they will not waste their time and increase productivity. It will create clear goals and expectations from the employee and measure their capacity.

It is essential to review and evaluate the system and its monitoring features to increase. It helps you stay on top of everything, allowing you to make sure your systems are generating the right reports.

With proper and effective software for employee management, you control the workflow and set strong workplace culture in the organization. Here are the ways to review and evaluate the monitoring system regularly:

Define evaluation criteria: Define what aspects of employee performance will be evaluated. Set up standard reference points from ideal data and compare them with your business data. Evaluate them based on productivity, compliance with company policies, and terms and conditions.
Schedule a date and time for review and evaluation. You can test various aspects of the system, such as access management, user behavior, workforce analytics, and more, with dummy data to see if they produce the expected result.
Use the data collected by the monitoring app to analyze employee activities. It will help you to know if the employee is meeting the expectations and identify their areas of improvement.

Evaluating the monitoring system regularly is crucial to get 100% correct outputs based on your inputs. But at the same time, it is more important to use specific key metrics to evaluate your employee’s performance rate.

You should definitely consider evaluation and monitoring based on data and statistics. It helps you make decisions based on facts, not assumptions. Some key metrics to consider when reviewing and evaluating your employee’s performance can be:

KPIs, OKRs, individual goals, and objectives achieved: Data analysis based on these indicators helps you derive an unbiased conclusion. It can be positive or negative. These metrics can monitor productivity of all your employees, including remote workers.
Colleague or Peer Feedback: If handled professionally, you obtain the best insight into a particular employee’s performance from their peers.
Quality of Work: As a manager or a supervisor, you should focus on the quality of work over the quantity of work done. Evaluate if tasks completed have the benchmark quality or not.
Task completion percentile: It should always be quality over quantity; however, task completion is mandatory within the timeframe. Their capability to deliver quality work in a given time or not can be a good basis for evaluation.
Attendance: You should deploy employee attendance tracking and monitoring devices to track their attendance daily. It helps you generate reports and evidence of their absence or presence to correlate with their performance levels.

Essential Tip 5: Keeping Up with Industry Trends and Best Practices

We exist in an ever-evolving paradigm, and someone is always trying to reach the next level. It is the same with industry niches, trends, and practices. You should be aware of the possibilities of changes and their aftereffects.

Stay on top of everything in your industry to determine what changes can take your business a notch higher. The best way to do so is by researching in-depth, analyzing your competitors, using intuition, and acting on factual data and statistics.

Keeping up with industry practices, changes, and trends helps you stay on the same wavelength as others in your niche. It means you don’t fall behind and lose your prospects & business to your competitors.

You should manage and utilize your business resources well to stay informed and updated with the changes in the industry. And it might require you to set up a dedicated team for that. Or simply, you can consume the information from various resources like RSS News Feeds, Social channels, Journals and Magazines, Podcasts, and Google Alerts.

Staying up to date with the daily news, trends, and practices is essential in all business sectors. It goes the same for employee monitoring. Here are some best practices and trends in employee monitoring.

Have a clear motif for gathering workplace data. It will help you make smart decisions regarding the use of data and improve employee experiences.
Disclosing the use of monitoring apps in the workplace and keeping it open and transparent amongst your employees. Stealth mode monitoring is not encouraged.
Avoid micromanagement and surveillance as much as possible. It helps you manage employee’s track without overwhelming anyone.
Be open to communicating with employees and positive changes.
Always go for the best real-time activity monitoring application. They offer their services on various platforms like desktop app, mobile apps, and websites. It makes your employee tracking effective and convenient.

Conclusion

Real-time activity monitoring can help you take your business productivity to the next level. It also gives you an opportunity to appreciate your employees who give their best at their work. And take proper action against the ones that don’t perform up to the standards.

The five tips: Proper Planning and Preparation, Utilizing Automated Alerts, Staying Vigilant for Suspicious Activity, Regularly Review and Evaluating the Monitoring System, and Keeping Up with Industry Trends and Best Practices can help you stay on top of your monitoring game and get the best out of your employees.

We recommend you incorporate a suitable real-time activity monitoring application into your business. It streamlines your monitoring activities and generates reports on factual data. You can use this data to evaluate and make decisions for the greater good of your business.

by Sophia

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