Without the Internet as it is today, business would be a much more difficult place to be in. We can use the internet for advertising our business products and services, communicating across oceans or just to the next cubicle, and we can use computers and the Internet to develop better research for our business. However, providing computer and Internet access to your employees may not always come at an advantage for you and your company.
It is said that because of the Internet, a company can expect to lose
over $6,000 dollars (per employee) per year if they give Internet access to their employees. For a small company with around 500 employees, this means you could be paying out over 3 million dollars for lost productivity. Annually, this equates to around $180 billion being lost for all American companies that give their employees access to the internet.
Computer monitoring and content filtering software is on the rise in the workplace because of these staggering amounts of dollars being, literally, given away for lost work. Computer monitoring software can be implemented into your workplace servers and computers that can then monitor employee and network activities as they are being played out. Just letting your employees know you will begin to monitor their computer and Internet activities may be enough to avoid handing out 6000 dollars a year to each one of them for lost work. However, computer monitoring and internet filtering software has many other useful features.
It is almost necessary for anyone managing a business or office that you know your employees are doing their job. It is especially important to know what they are using your company’s equipment and computers for in the work place and they are not playing nor do other inefficient, non-work related tasks. While there is plenty of software available on the market to track what is happening on each of the computers available on your network, there is one question that needs an answer before you install it. Is it legal?
The question on whether or not you are allowed to “spy” on your employees in the office comes down to the legality of it. In some cases it is legal, and in other cases, using monitoring software to view what your employees are doing on the job can be illegal. In America, some states say this is perfectly ok. However, many actually may take legal action against employers viewing its employee’s activities. Local county or city rules may even come into play.
Certainly, anything happening inside the office can, and should be monitored. This should be done to track reliability, use of time, and efficiency of your employees, if not for anything else. If your workers in the office are using your computers, your equipments, your company’s software and servers, then it is legal to know every little exchange of information that happens within the office walls.
Say your office uses an office-wide IM service. Most of these IM services already have a built in monitoring system for your server that will catch any message going between the computers in your office. Reading these would be legal. However, if an employee logs on to MSN or AIM, you may have another problem. Because the messages are being sent outside of your office, you could be infringing on employee privacy laws if you monitor and review these messages. Continue reading ‘Is monitoring your employee legal?’
The use of internet at work is a huge issue in today’s ever changing world of technology. Internet access is everywhere and everywhere most likely includes your office. While the internet is designed to share ideas and make use of the resources around the world accessible, sometimes too much of a good thing is bad.
Your employees may be using the internet for their personal well-being instead of your companies. Perhaps they are chatting up a storm, browsing their favorite news sites (or worse), or downloading huge files. This can slow productivity in your office, distract them, create issues with internet access for your other employees, or even get you 
and your logo in trouble with the law. In order to prevent this from happening, an employer must take control of the situation. This can be done using internet monitoring and filter program.
Using programs that filter through the internet can help control internet traffic and keep random browsing and chatting to a minimum, bringing company productivity up. Using black lists and keywords, websites can be blocked if they are deemed inappropriate by the type of filter you are using. It can block websites known to contain adult content, illegal downloads, and even viruses to keep your company and its server up and running.
File downloads can also be blocked. If your office only transfers around .PDF and .DOC file types, you can make sure those will be the only two downloaded through your internet lines. Other types of files can be blocked with an internet filtering program, keeping your rate of transfer and bandwidth usage to appropriate levels, while also protecting your office computers from harmful files and oversized files from being burned to the hard drive.
While allowing access to the internet is very important to your employees to let them known they are at work and therefore expected to do work. However, sometimes distractions come far too easy and we just can’t help it. Help your employees stay on track by filtering their internet access.
Chances are if you are running a business, you have employees working on computers with the latest Microsoft Office software suite. On these computers, however, your employees also have access to other distracting applications like their web browser, IM chatting services, and those little desktop games we love so much like Solitaire. It is always important that you know what your employees are doing with your time and money while they are at the office, and there are several solutions that can help you do this.
Special software, made specifically to monitor data being processed on a computer has made it possible to monitor your employees computer tasks while still keeping their privacy. While these types of software and programs aren’t built for the task of spying on your workforce, they are programmed to help you monitor what is really going on behind the scenes at your office.
Using desktop monitoring software, you can see exactly what sort of documents your workforce has been analyzing and processing on their computer. How many words did they type in that hour and how much time was dedicated to a specific project before it finished? If someone within your company has deleted an important document and he does not admit it, using an efficient Microsoft Office tracking software this will be easy to find out. Users on each computer are monitored while every opened, modified or deleted document is recorded and specified in reports. Additional information regarding the date, time, hour and or if there were any printing actions will all be saved for a future deep analyze. This is a great tool if you are looking
to see if your employees are being paid enough for their actual labor. Instead of using a typical punch clock, the moment someone logs onto their computer can be used to take attendance in the office, making the task easy for the employees and the employer. Overtime can be easily tracked with features built into the desktop monitoring software.
But more than just Microsoft Office tracking, if you think you have a problem with employee who is spending too much online, you will soon be able to know using the internet reports feature in software like these. All information that passes through your server can be recorded, and you can track whom employee was talking with, how long they spent their day chatting, and how many websites they visited during a working period of time.
Improve the security and reliability of your company and know what your employees are doing by tracking their desktop activities. It will be a money-valuable choice that can help improve productivity.
Downloading is what makes the internet spin its world-wide web. From the text, to the images, and all the files attached to your emails, as well as those files from P2P networks, they are all downloads that you should be aware of and watching in your office walls.
Downloading consumes bandwidth, which is an essential part of any online doing. Basically, if you have a high amount of bandwidth, or extremely quick connection, you will be able to download much more and much faster. Lower bandwidth settings will experience quite the opposite, and if a limit on bandwidth is reached, downloads could be cut off all together. Downloads include anything relating to an internet connection, so you may not even be able to access your favorite search engine page.
This is one of the reasons it is important for all downloads and uploads between your office’s computer users and other networks need to be tracked and logged. It provides you with valuable data that could help save you money, and save your company. If your company’s bandwidth use is too high, there are several methods you can undergo to help stop that internet shut-down coming your way.
Monitoring and restricting the downloads going on in your network is important as it allows you to track your companies work ethics. Are your employees on task, using their email to forward official documents to others and visiting only relevant websites, or are they chatting on MSN with their friends and looking an inappropriate material not meant for work?
Continue reading ‘Size does matter! Download size’
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