All day sitting in Facebook? Be careful: Your boss can follow you

Marielle Carrer a head of a company of Patriot Scuba in Occoquan, Virginia, USA. This place organizes trips for diving enthusiasts from Washington County to one of two nearby quarries. Two years ago, her son will, an officer of the army, who studied at the College of cybersecurity, told her about ActivTrak, new software that would allow it to monitor the desktops of employee computers. She felt that it is a good way to manage the office while away.

Marielle said four of its permanent employees, monitoring their computers. They didn't mind. She says she received no objections, and considers the use of such a precautionary measure that allows to ensure that staff, many of whom work on the debt interacted with the children, were unrelated to job sites.

"We are a family oriented company, so I want to be sure that our staff attend to family oriented sites," she says.

Inexpensive means of control, for instance, ActivTrak, and Spector 360 Workexaminer.com made monitoring affordable even for the smallest businesses and allows managers to monitor computer activity of employees, including secretly.

The danger is that executives may be too much to trust such technology to jump to conclusions and use it, avoiding more meaningful conversations with employees.

"Any technology of performance management in the absence of good management skills can be very dangerous," says Ken Oehler, a leading expert on global engagement in the company Aon Hewitt engaged in consultation on personnel issues.

Online service ActivTrak and developed by Birch Grove Software from Dallas, gives the heads of the current image of the screen of employee's computer. Image displayed on the panel, reminiscent of a display of security cameras security. Managers have the ability to send pop-up messages about the need to return to work that appear in the corner an unsuspecting slacker. Spector 360 monitoring service offered by the company Spectorsoft of Florida allows employers to detect the input of certain combinations of symbols on the keyboard, notifying the IT Manager and making a snapshot of the screen shot as "evidence", when a certain word is added to a text document or email.

Employers can receive regular performance reports showing how employees manage their time, showing which sites were given the most time and is open browser.

But monitoring should not end when the employee leaves the office. Employers wishing to monitor remotely, you can use the ActivTrak "invisible remote installer" to install this service on any computer in the company network.

If the Manager has a network connection and administrator privileges for the computer, it can get access to the machine without the knowledge of the employee.

This type of employee monitoring is not new for the Internet age. The survey of 304 small and large enterprises, conducted in 2007 by the American Association of managers and Institute of electronic policies found that 45% of executives track site content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard.

"Even if your boss says that is not watching you, you need to accept that possibility," says Nancy Flynn, founder and Executive Director of the Institute of electronic policy, which is a consulting and training of entrepreneurs on electronic compatibility.

The emergence of new technology means that monitoring employees is not the prerogative of only the government and large corporations. Small businesses can also monitor their employees for free or for a small fee. The program ActivTrak is free to those who need only three "agent" (as the company calls installed on the same computer monitoring tool). It will cost 34$ per month, if you need to track 5 employees, while larger businesses can pay$ 199 a month and keep track of 50 employees.

Most employers that use the service pay for it. From 31203 firms worldwide, using ActivTrak, only 7% use a paid version.

But how to use this SOFTWARE (to tell employees that they are monitoring, and what to do with the received program data) depends on the head. ActivTrak encourages its users to communicate to their employees that they were being monitored, but the company is aware of customers who do not. Others need only mention the observation to deter employees from Facebook.

ActivTrak is positioned as a means to improve performance, but its impact on the morale of the company depends on how you will use the program leaders. Some employees, for example, in the financial sector, think about it, believing that their actions are closely monitored for regulatory reasons; and in other cases, monitoring can drive a wedge between management and employees. "Underlying all this is trust. If the employer trusts the employee? What he wants to show the employee monitoring?", says Oehler, specialist Aon Hewitt.

"This technology in the hands of a poor Manager can have devastating consequences. In good hands it can be really useful."published

Translation of the article, Stare at Facebook all day? Watch out: Your boss could be monitoring you. published in the Washington Post.

Source: megamozg.ru/post/11686/