How Stealth Monitoring Protects Data and Benefits Business

While employee monitoring can be a hot topic of conversation in the workplace, the reality is that many businesses are already using some type of monitoring and benefiting from it. The questions are how much monitoring is appropriate and how to use that monitoring for the good of your business. Take a look at what you should know about how stealth monitoring protects data and benefits businesses.

Monitoring Helps You Take Proactive Measures

Monitoring remote employees can help you keep them engaged.

In today’s business environment, the best thing that you can do is address problems before they occur, or at least before they become more serious problems. One example of this can be seen with remote workers. It often makes sense to hire workers to work out of their own homes or other locations, depending on the business that you’re in.

However, remote workers can lose focus or become less productive over time because they don’t have the same amount of engagement that employees in the office have. Stealth monitoring can let you know when remote workers are beginning to backslide so that you can reach out and arrange new training, meetings, or other types of engagement that will help you keep these employees on track.

By taking a proactive approach, you don’t have to wait until the quality of work deteriorates or until the employee becomes unproductive to turn the situation around. By using monitoring to let you know when to take appropriate steps, you can learn your employees’ patterns and help keep them on a path of success, which is good for your company and good for your employees as well.

Monitoring Protects Your Company Data

These days, malicious actors have a number of different ways to go after your data. And it’s important to remember that your company’s data is definitely valuable to somebody. This is true whether you’re handling sensitive personal information, credit card numbers, protected health information, financial information, or proprietary business information.

Even your employees’ data can be valuable to hackers, and if employee data is compromised, it can wreak havoc on workforce morale. And yet, it’s often employees who end up exposing the company’s valuable data.

Employees may do this accidentally, by visiting insecure websites, clicking on dangerous links, downloading unauthorized items, or falling for phishing emails. Some employees may act with malice, exposing company data for spite after being demoted or denied a promotion, or out of a financial interest if they’ve been offered money to do so.

Monitoring can give you a heads up if your employees are engaging in unsafe or malicious activities. When you know that your employees are answering personal email or shopping online during working hours, you can ask them to stop and provide better security guidelines and training before the problem escalates and sensitive data is exposed.

Not only does such a strategy protect your company’s data, it also protects employees who are not acting maliciously by prompting them to change their behavior before they inadvertently cause a problem that might lead to them being fired or demoted.

In the case of employees who are purposely acting maliciously, it’s best for your company’s data security and your own workplace morale if they can be identified and let go before they’re allowed to create a major security breach.

Your monitoring program can catch employees suspicious behavior like logging on outside of working hours, repeatedly accessing sensitive files, trying to bypass security measures that prevent them from accessing certain parts of the network or downloading or printing large numbers of documents or files. These can all be signs of an employee who is maliciously trying to compromise your company’s data.

Boost Productivity

Security isn’t the only thing improved by monitoring software. Productivity also gets a boost.

A security breach isn’t the only thing that can harm your company’s bottom line. Loss of productivity can be a big problem for a company, and cyberloafing is a common way that productivity is lost. Cyberloafing is what’s happening when your employees are browsing Facebook, shopping on Amazon, or answering their personal email while they’re supposed to be working. They’re being paid for this time but aren’t using it to work on company business, which means that you’re losing money and necessary tasks aren’t getting done.

Monitoring is an effective way to boost productivity. It lets you know which employees are wasting time and which employees are using their time to do work. It can also let you know which employees are overextended and which have too much downtime, which can allow you to rearrange work assignments in a way that gives everyone enough work to do without overloading or under-loading them.

Monitoring lets you look for patterns in the workplace that reduce productivity and to address them as well. You don’t necessarily have to single out specific employees when you’re looking to boost productivity rates – you can anonymize the monitoring data in a way that allows you to see and address patterns without calling out specific employees.

With stealth monitoring, your employees won’t necessarily know when they’re being monitored, so they won’t be tempted to change their behavior because of it.

Knowing that you’re being watched can certainly affect behavior and can interfere with your ability to get an accurate picture of how your workplace is functioning. Stealth monitoring is one way to ensure that you know what’s going on in your workplace. You’ll know when your employees are behaving as they normally do, something you may not get an accurate reading of when employees know they’re being watched.

Good employee monitoring software should allow you to monitor app and internet usage, get alerts in real time warning you about potentially suspicious behavior and track productive time and idle time. You should be able to get customizable reports and monitor both remote employees and in-office employees. InterGuard does all this and more. To find out how InterGuard can help you protect your company’s data and benefit your business, we invite you to start your risk-free 7-day trial.