For business owners, and particularly small business ones, two of the biggest challenges they have to deal with are employee productivity and business security. Productivity determines how much sales and profit they can get out of their existing resources. While security is a necessity that they cannot live without. Even a single data breach can cost them thousands of dollars in litigation. Unfortunately, many business owns struggle in overcoming both these challenges.
Productivity
Small business owners have to be cost conscious to be able to compete effectively. A penny saved is a penny earned is the mantra they have to live with. For many types of businesses employee cost is the biggest expense item in their P&L. In addition, they do not have large revenue base that can help cover the overhead cost, which is why it is paramount for them to get the most out of their employees, i.e. higher productivity. However, many of the small business owners struggle to not just improve, but even measure and monitor employee productivity.
Security
Security is getting lot of attention these days as a result of number of security breaches happening practically every day. Hackers are always on the lookout for any security hole and take advantage of it by stealing critical information such as credit card numbers and customer data to sell to criminals. Businesses can get in lot of troubles when they encounter this. The truth is security threat from internal is as prevalent as external one. Many employees permeate this unknowingly in various situations such as not setting proper password, sending important files and data without encryption, not paying attention to what is being shared with whom and so on. Some of these employees do have malicious intent and steal the intellectual property to sell to competitors or criminals.
New developments in software can help small business owners overcome both these challenges together. Many companies, like Teramind, offer live user monitoring and activity reports to help analyze and improve overall productivity and provide business security. These programs are generally known as employee monitoring software and they can monitor and record user activity in real time as well as send alerts when a suspicious activity is detected. These software can track wide variety of activities such as websites, email, applications, file transfers and even individual keystrokes. All it takes is installation of software, proper customization and real-time monitoring to be able to achieve the goal.
There are several steps achieving the goal of productivity improvement and security enhancement as explained below.
- Monitor – This is taken care of automatically by installing the software. With proper customization it will monitor all the activities happening, such as websites visited, emails sent and received, files transferred and so on in real-time. The software will also record these activities so that you can analyze them afterwards.
- Control – In addition to monitoring and recording the activities the software will also control what can be shared and transferred outside the company depending on the user access level and permission. The customization will allow you to determine who is able to do what on their computer.
- Alert – This is a key step in ensuring the security of your business. If the employee is sharing certain data that he is not allowed to or if it detects suspicious activity the software will automatically send an alert. You can take appropriate action such as blocking the employee access, alerting the authority and so on.
- Report – In addition to monitoring the activity the software records all of it in a database. This can be analyzed later to understand what is happening in your business. You can use this data to analyze and improve productivity.
The advances in employee monitoring software can help business owners meet their two biggest challenges of employee productivity and security. The software can pay for itself only within few months in terms of lower employees cost and avoidance of costly security litigation.
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