There are many reasons why work tracking software such as Insightful is becoming more popular these days. For one, it’s incredibly easy to use - you just install the system on all the computers that you want to track, and everything else is mostly automatic. Employee monitoring software collects data on app and website usage, measures activity levels and productivity, enables you to take screenshots of employees’ computer screens, track their attendance and overtime, etc.

Being able to get this data and insights gives you an opportunity to make quite a few optimizations to your business processes. For example, you can organize your team’s workflow based on their productivity levels. Or additionally protect your data with screenshots. Or ensure fair payroll. There are many more examples of how work tracking software can be useful to your company, and it all depends on not only how you use the software, but also which one you pick.

However, when choosing the right solution, many managers and business owners stop at this - they pick their software based on which features it has and how much it costs. Those a bit more detail-oriented also take into consideration the quality of customer support or how easy it is to implement and use the system, but this is usually where the decision-making process ends.

The problem is that an incomplete picture like this can lead to some pretty basic problems. You believe that you’ve installed the best and most functional work tracking software, only to discover that it isn’t stable, it lags, the agents disconnect for no reason, some of the features don’t do what you expect them to, or the system ends up storing employees’ private data because you can’t or don’t know how to filter it.

All of these can be huge problems - frequent bugs and crashes in the software can cause some of the valuable data not to be collected or to be lost, and storing private information can present legal issues. This is why you need to consider two more factors when choosing your employee monitoring system - stability and reliability.

How Does Employee Monitoring Software Architecture Ensure Stability?

The stability of the monitoring software is an extremely important consideration that dictates the completeness of your employees’ performance data and therefore the quality of the statistics you get. And yet, this criterion is very often overlooked.

System stability largely depends on the software architecture. If your work tracking software is built using the latest technology and is updated on a regular basis, it’ll be less likely to have bugs. Similarly, having proper security certificates ensures that the monitoring data that gets collected is secured, so that’s another thing you should inquire about.

Let’s take the architecture of Insightful, for example. It consists of three major parts - agents, servers and dashboard. Agents are instances of your monitoring software that are installed on your employees’ computers, and their job is to track activity, collect relevant data and send it to the servers. Here, the data is received and processed using the latest technology such as machine learning and advanced analytics. And finally, the reports compiled from these algorithms are sent to and visually represented in the manager dashboard.

A system like this is simple, but such a straightforward architecture and data flow is what makes work tracking software stable.

What About Reliability of Your Time Tracking Software?

Another crucial consideration is how reliable your monitoring software is. This primarily means that it should do what you want it to do. And you probably don’t want it to collect any private data, such as social media login details or credit card numbers. There are a number of ways in which different systems aim to protect employees’ privacy.

One way to do this is to use blurred screenshots instead of regular ones. This way, you get to see which platform your employees are on and what they’re doing, but you can’t read the fine personal details. For instance, if your app and website usage feature detects the use of Facebook, you can ensure that your system takes only blurred screenshots during this time so that you can know whether they’re uploading any documents that could be sensitive without capturing their private conversations with their friends at the same time.

Another important concept in privacy protection is customization. Even though it might not seem like that has anything to do with privacy, some of the aspects of customization can serve this purpose really well. For example, if you can set custom working hours, you can ensure that your employees won’t be tracked outside that time. Similarly, you can aggregate data and reports on a team level, and thus make sure that you get all the necessary insights while individual data is protected from view.

And finally, one more way to ensure that your employee tracking software is reliable in terms of protecting your data, especially employees’ private data, is to store it on your own servers as opposed to cloud storage. On-premise solutions give you absolute control over all the data, including its security.

Conclusion

Choosing the right work tracking software is a big business decision. On top of this, it’s such an all-around solution, which makes it harder for you to keep in mind all the factors which your decision depends on. Features and price are the usual suspects in this process, but it’s also important not to forget some of the more ‘abstract’ and under-the-hood things that are just as significant for making your monitoring software useful to your business.

Two of these often overlooked factors are software stability, which prevents lags and ensures the consistent quality of your data sets, and reliability, which indicated that all of the features will work the way they’re supposed to without the danger of collecting or storing employees’ personal information. Paying attention to these criteria as well will make your choice more informed, and you’ll get to enjoy seamless and functional software in the long term.