Employee Monitoring in the

Modern Workplace Key benefits of implementing monitoring software

MOJRA DAUTOVIĆ

ACCELERATIO, LTD | Zagreb

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Contents

Contents ............................................................................................................................................... 1

The modern workplace .................................................................................................................... 2

Changes in the workplace ........................................................................................................... 2

What can monitoring software help you with? ......................................................................... 3

Benefits of monitoring software ............................................................................................... 3

Determining individual productivity and effort ................................................................ 4

Reducing and preventing counterproductive behavior ................................................. 5

Increasing security and ensuring compliance with corporate policies ...................... 6

Optimizing resources ............................................................................................................... 7

How can Terminal Services Log help with all that? .................................................................. 8

A powerful monitoring tool........................................................................................................ 8

Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 11

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The modern workplace

The Digital Era has changed the average workplace

forever

A universal goal that every company aspires to, is to achieve maximum productivity

at minimum cost while maintaining a high level of information security. As work

becomes more and more dynamic and digitalized, and as organizations grow at

exponential speed, obtaining this goal is becoming an increasing challenge for

organizations around the world.

For most companies, the Digital Era brought both

opportunities but also potential risks and limitations. On one

hand, a lot of the work has been automatized by task-specific

software, communication and dissemination of information

have been facilitated through the internet, working hours have

become more flexible, and server infrastructures have become

more complex – all empowering factors for organizations to boost their productivity.

Although the benefits are obvious, they are attainable only if everyone is doing their

best at work and if they are using company resources responsibly. That is where the

manager comes in. Their responsibility is to get the best from their employees and

ensure a high level of productivity, which is not an easy task. On this mission, they

encounter many challenges, which can be effectively overcome thanks to monitoring

software.

CHANGES IN THE MODERN WORKPLACE

Daily use of task specific software

Facilitated communication and information dissemination

Flexible working hours

Telecommuting

Digital data storage

Complex server infrastructure

The ultimate goal is

maximum productivity

at minimum cost.

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What can monitoring software

help you with?

A virtualized work environment requires a virtual

monitoring tool

Even in the 19th century organizations were monitoring their employees with the

primary purpose being production efficiency and theft prevention, and those needs

are still present in the organizations of today. Productivity is

still a top priority and security risks are as present as ever. But

considering the changes brought by technological progress,

the monitoring method had to change. The primitive methods

of managers literally looking over employees’ shoulders,

taking notes, counting employees upon arrival etc. have been

replaced by more sophisticated methods, such as monitoring

software.

Due to all the changes brought by the virtualization of the work environment, many

companies reach out to their IT departments to control what happens on their servers,

especially to monitor employee activities. On this mission, managers and system

administrators work together and encounter many challenges, which can be effectively

overcome thanks to the progress in monitoring software development.

CHALLENGES Determining individual productivity and effort

Maintaining a fair pay-per-performance approach

Ensuring employee compliance with corporate policies

Optimizing resources

Reducing and preventing employee misconduct

Planning management strategies

Workplace changes

require changes in

monitoring methods.

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Determining individual productivity and effort

onitoring and measuring employee performance are difficult and complex

tasks, especially in large companies with multiple departments and branches,

but naturally, these are a most valuable source of information. Therefore, it

is important to use various indicators of employee productivity. Monitoring software

can provide you with robust productivity indicators, such as attendance, break

duration, and time spent actively working on current tasks.

When connected to the company's servers, all employee activity is logged – whether

they are actively using the servers, being idle or whether they are not connected at all.

Monitoring software can easily retrieve this information, which can be used as an

employee performance indicator. You can identify the most engaged employees and

the ones who are not putting in as much effort as they should.

This information provided by monitoring software can be used to maintain a fair pay-

per-performance approach to determining salary. Expert researchers state that

implementing a monitoring policy boosts productivity precisely through fairness-

based motivation (Pierce, Snow and McAfee, 2014). Honest and hardworking

employees become more motivated due to the certainty that they will be paid in

accord with their effort and the impression that they are differentiated by management

in regard to the less hardworking employees.

This is not only retroactively important, since managers can use the information

retrieved via monitoring software to plan future strategies and interventions. They

can identify aspects of the work organization or individual employees that are

underperforming, modify their interventions according to an existing issue and

therefore realize employees’ full productivity potential.

M

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Reducing and preventing counterproductive behavior

n the modern workplace, employees are tempted by a large array of distractions,

which often lead them to engage in non-work-related activities and waste time

during working hours. Results from the U.S. Wasting Time at Work Survey from 2014

show that 89% of respondents reported wasting time at work every day, which is a

20% increase compared to results from the previous year. Moreover, 62% of

respondents reported wasting up to 1 hour daily on non-work-related activities, while

26% of them waste 2 hours or more. And shirking is not the only issue, there is

absenteeism as well.

Not only does the company suffer significant financial and productivity losses due to

unscheduled absences but also partial shift absences and lateness. CareerBuilder

reported that 14% of employees arrive at work late at least once a week in the U.S. And

U.K. survey by Heathrow Express from 2012 revealed that not only does lateness

influence employee performance, but also the performance of others, as was reported

by 48% of respondents. Therefore, it is no surprise that the same research estimates

the cost of lateness to be measured in billions of pounds.

Monitoring employee activity on your servers can help reduce and prevent such

productivity and financial losses. This information can be used for on-time managerial

interventions retroactively, but can also serve as a tool of prevention. Informing your

employees of the implementation of such monitoring tools will decrease their

willingness to engage in this type of counterproductive behavior due to the potential

consequences, such as contract termination or wage reduction. More time and effort

will be invested in work-related tasks.

I

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Increasing security and ensuring compliance with corporate policies

t is often very hard to determine whether your employees are following company

rules and regulations, especially those applying to the use of company software.

Keeping track of whether your employees are using licensed software, how much

data they are downloading, and how they are modifying existing data – how they

are using company servers in general – takes hours and hours of work, and in the end

you may still not get the whole picture.

The lower the monitoring degree, the higher the risk of non-compliance, and non-

compliance means a security risk. Whether it is the risk of theft, sensitive data leakage,

unauthorized data modification, legal issues, or server performance issues, they

are all equally harmful for the organization. Monitoring software can efficiently detect

whether the rules are being followed, and if not, who is breaking them.

Of course, the level of monitoring you choose depends on the company needs. Some

companies, such as banks and other organizations in the financial industry, require a

very deep level of monitoring, such as monitoring e-mails, chat, keystrokes and

webpages visited, due to a high security risk of sensitive data leakage, whether from

employees’ misuse of information or outside threats.

I

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Optimizing resources

he resources required to perform daily tasks differ from department to

department and from employee to employee, which results in hundreds or even

thousands of applications that need to be tracked. To optimize your company’s

software resources, it is imperative to know which applications are being used by

specific employees and how frequently. That way you can ensure that everyone has

the necessary resources to perform their tasks but also prevent the high and

unnecessary cost of creating shelfware – the hoarding of unused software, which is

still a big problem in organizations around the globe.

The most common causes of software not being used are IT departments that are too

busy to implement the software properly, a low understanding of the software by the

intended users, a lack of IT resources and insufficient vendor support. Whatever the

cause, according to a survey by 1E, unused software is costing U.S. companies $6.6

billion annually, while U.K. costs amount to $991 million.

In addition, monitoring software can give you a better idea of how individual

employees are utilizing system resources by tracking CPU, memory and network usage

per employee. This information is indispensable for capacity planning to ensure

optimal server performance. You can be proactive and predict your farm’s

requirements based on observed trends in system resource usage, and therefore

prevent potential issues and ensure a high-quality end-user experience and minimum

downtime when issues appear.

T

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How can Terminal Services

Log help with all this?

A powerful Remote Desktop and Citrix XenApp

server monitoring tool

Employee monitoring with Terminal Services Log To see how Terminal Services Log can help boost your company’s productivity with its

employee monitoring features, take a closer look at its capabilities for user monitoring

on the following pages.

Why monitor employees with Terminal Services Log?

Monitor user activities on your servers

Track application usage and license consumption

Gain insight into your bandwidth usage

Keep track of all your hardware assets

All reports are available through a web UI

What is Terminal Services Log?

It is an agentless tool designed for monitoring Remote Desktop and Citrix

XenApp servers. You can monitor user activities, application usage, server

performance, license consumption, bandwidth usage, and hardware and

software inventory.

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Monitor users, apps, performance and bandwidth usage from one UI

There is no need to install multiple tools that monitor different user-related

activities such as application usage, CPU and memory usage, network traffic and

license consumption. You can monitor all these user-related indicators from one

single interface.

Automatizes time-consuming processes

Manual retrieval of information on how your servers are being used by company

employees usually takes hours and hours, and there is probably always some

information that is missing. With Terminal Services Log, you get the necessary data

within minutes and it will be displayed in structured professional-looking reports.

Automatic calculation of payroll

The challenge of determining a fair wage based on the actual hours of active work

is not that challenging with Terminal Services Log. Other than being a precise

indicator of employee activity on the servers, our tool provides you with a

Resource Cost Overview Report, which automatically calculates how much to pay

employees who have a defined hourly rate.

Monitor logons, logoffs and time spent in different session states

You can get precise information of when your employees arrive at work, when

they leave and how much time they actually spent working. You can get the exact

amount of time that they spent being active, idle, disconnected or on remote

control.

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And what do others think?

Try it!

Take Terminal Services Log for a spin by downloading it now. A 30-day free trial and

more info are available at: www.terminalserviceslog.com..

If you have any questions, contact us at: sales@acceleratio.net.

“Before TSL it was challenging to determine who had

accessed the terminal server and when, and how long users

were on the server.”

Keith Roberts

Pioneer, Inc.

“TSL has an intuitive interface with detailed information that

help us manage our Terminal Server Farm as well as our

other stand-alone Terminal Servers.”

Chris Buckley

Advocates, Inc.

Following system resources consumption per user

The built-in User Performance Reports tell you how much system resources are

being consumed by specific users. This information can be used to optimize

system performance, to troubleshoot issues and for the purposes of effective

capacity planning.

.

Easy tracking of license usage

Terminal Services Log allows you to track which application licenses are being

consumed by your employees. You can use this information to reduce unnecessary

costs by detecting over-licensed applications or acquire extra resources if needed.

The License Reports are also the easiest way of ensuring your compliance with

license terms and avoiding vendor fines if audited.

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Appendix 1.

LIST OF AVAILABLE USER-RELATED REPORTS*

REPORT DESCRIPTION

User Reports 9 groups of reports displaying logon and logoff

times, session states, bandwidth usage and

more.

Most Used Applications Shows most frequently used applications per

specified user, server or time period.

Users per Application Tracks the number of users who are using an

installed application over a selected period.

Application Usage History Shows application usage by user and different

states in a log format.

User Application Timeline Tracks which user used a specific application –

total time, when they started and ended.

Application Instances Displays the number of application instances –

can be filtered per user in a selected time

period.

Concurrent Applications per

User

Daily view of the number of concurrent

application instances per user.

Suite License Details Displays a list of users that consumed a

particular license.

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Client License Compliance Tracks the number of licenses used per device

or per user.

Client License Details Displays a list of users that consumed a

particular license.

Blocked IP Addresses Shows a list of potentially malicious IP

addresses blocked via Windows firewall rules.

File Access Audit Log Shows user file access history and actions

performed on files.

User Performance Reports 3 reports showing overall processor and

working set performance by user.

*This list singles out reports or groups of reports that are relevant to monitoring user

activities. Other than the User Reports, Terminal Services Log offers has Application

Reports, License Reports, Audit Reports, Performance Reports and Inventory. Some of

the reports in the table above pertain to those other types of report. The description

of the listed reports is limited to user activities, but they also display additional

information. To view a full list of available reports with detailed descriptions click here.

Acceleratio Ltd. is a software development company that specializes in developing

high-quality software solutions for SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Remote Desktop

Services and Citrix, so that admins and consultants across the globe can work carefree.

Our products are loved by more than 2000 satisfied customers worldwide and nothing

makes us happy like a smile on a customer’s face. That is why customers can a lways

count on our full support and our commitment to continuously improving our

products using the latest technologies.

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