Monitoring employees’ computer activity in general can give you a lot of useful information about how your employees work, how they organize their time and how productive they are overall. That much is evident from the very first use of employee tracking system such as Insightful.

However, if you’re willing to go beyond this general employment tracking and dig deeper into the specifics of one particular aspect, you have all the necessary tools to do just that. And depending on your ultimate goal, this might even be what’s necessary and best for you to do.

With this in mind, we’re going to focus on the situation when you decide that you want to turn to work internet monitoring as this specific aspect of your employees’ daily computer activities. Now, as with everything, you need a valid reason to track internet activity and an appropriate use of the data that you’re expecting to get.

While it might be intuitively clear how using web tracking software can help your business, it certainly doesn’t hurt to put it all on paper. That’s why we’re here - we’re going to go over some things that you can find out about your employees if you know how to track employee internet usage the right way, as well as what you can do with this data to propel your business to success.

Are Your Employees Spending Time Productively?

Your employees have to use the internet - that’s inevitable. However, what they do once they’re online makes all the difference to your estimation of their performance. So how exactly can web browser tracking software tell you whether your employees are being productive online?

For starters, you decide which websites you consider ‘productive’ and which ones should be counted as ‘unproductive’ for each employee or team. Based on this input, your employee monitoring software compiles productivity reports which clearly outline all online activities as well the ratio of productive to unproductive time.

And here comes the fun part - take a look at the unproductive web apps. Do you see a pattern of activity? What are the most popular distractions? Which of these take the most time away from what are supposed to be working hours?

Tracking web application usage in this way will tell you why your employees are getting distracted and what the biggest culprits are. Then, you’ll be able to draw your employees’ attention to the necessity of spending less time on these websites or maybe even block them if it comes to that.

Powerful as this is, it’s just one way to use internet monitoring software for business goals. Let’s take a look at what you can discover when you look over to productive websites.

Which Online Platforms are Most Useful to Your Teams?

Figuring out how to monitor staff internet usage to discover which online platforms they find most valuable will help you greatly in deciding which resources to invest in.

For instance, if you’re paying subscription to two professional online platforms that essentially do the same thing, you can check your website monitoring software reviews of the time spent in both and see whether one of them tends to be used more often. Or you could compare them according to their efficiency - if employees get the work done in half as much time in one app as they need for the same task in another, maybe that’s what you should put your resources into.

This is also a great way to map out all the specific steps that employees take to complete a project and then work on optimizing them.

Discovering Potential Security Breaches

Finally, it’s time to tackle some less rosy topics. The truth is that as much as the internet has helped us in creating an efficient workplace, speeding up processes and connecting to clients, it’s also created a couple of problems.

All the help and resources are at employees’ fingertips, which is great, but then again, so are file sharing sites, pirated software, untrusted web applications and so on. You can use your monitoring software to protect your company from these threats.

Detecting that an employee has accessed an unauthorized file sharing website right away will give you plenty of time to react and prevent any damage. Same goes for unintentionally risky activity that your employees aren’t even aware of.

Conclusion

When tracking employees’ internet usage, despite the precautions you have to take in order to protect their privacy, you get huge amounts of useful data and insights. Whether you use them to improve productivity or protect your data, it’s sure to be an invaluable resource for planning out your company’s success.

‍

‍