How to Monitor Employee Internet Use at Work

To ensure that your employees are productive, you have to find ways to minimize time wastage at work. Although monitoring internet usage might seem draconian, it will increase employee productivity. You could track the sites that your employees visit and block certain websites but this might not prevent wasted time.

The Problem of Wasted Time

Companies all over the world are dealing with the problem of time wastage and it costs businesses billions of dollars per year. Employees spend up to an hour per day on social media sites, which means that your business will lose tons of money in productivity.

Monitoring Employee Internet Usage

Blocking certain websites are some of the ways that business owners monitor internet use. However, most of these methods are flawed. They include:

• Monitoring employee internet activity – monitoring the internet activity of your employees is not effective because some of them use their personal computers. Even if you monitor internet use on the work computer, some employees will use their mobile devices to browse the internet.
• Banning internet at work – the internet is essential in most workplaces, which makes it impossible to ban.
• Banning specific sites – when you ban specific sites such as Twitter, your employees will look for other time-wasting websites to visit. Moreover, your employees might need to access their social media pages for work purposes. Banning social media sites will also make it impossible for your employees to access the pages during breaks.

Using a Different Approach

If all of these methods of monitoring internet use at work are flawed, how can you do it? You should consider using tools that monitor the websites that your employees visit during work hours. Use software that sends a report to you and your employees at the end of the week.

When you monitor internet use in this manner, you will have the following benefits:

• It only works during work hours and not when your employees are taking breaks. This means that the software will not record personal use of the internet during lunch break, which affords your employees some privacy.
• The simple weekly report that you receive via email will provide all the data of the sites that your employees visit during work hours. You can use this data to improve employee productivity instead of only using it to curb internet use. Because the report is easy to read, you only have to review it once a week for a short time.
• You can use such software to monitor remote workers. Although they will be using their personal computers at home, you can still monitor their internet use during working hours. Furthermore, you can stop monitoring whenever they are not working.

Because many tools can monitor computer activity, you should look for software that alerts you about risky behavior. For example, employees visiting hate and porn sites can be bad for business. You should consider using software that blocks such content.

You need to let your employees know that you are monitoring their internet usage to avoid invading their privacy. Whilst monitoring employee internet use, it will be easier to use tools such as a wifi sniffer to detect network problems like bandwidth issues and keep your network functional.

Conclusion

Of course, no employer wants to lose money due to decreased productivity. At the same time, employees do not want you to monitor their internet use in a draconian manner. The above guide will help you to monitor internet use at work without being overbearing. Try the above method to see how your employee productivity will grow.