Discussion on:

Unobtrusive employee monitoring

I am looking for a tool that I can put on the monitor port, or somewhere on my server switch segment, that can "unobtrusively" monitor the behavior of the employees. I don't want to see individual emails. I am looking for general trends type information (employee X uses web X% of the time, email x% of the time, etc.). Ideally, it will give me some sort of clue when they come into the office in the morning (cause everyone works on computers all day) and when they leave in the evening.

I have a problem with most of the tools out there. I don't want to see the detail of their conversations, etc. I just want raw, high level numbers. In addition, I don't want to install anything on their computers. If the employees found it (technology company) there would be a riot.

Any suggestions that you have would be appreciated.

William

You don't manage people by observing the amount of time they spend at their desks or the amount of time they spend on breaks using the web. You manage people by observing what they produce. Timeliness, quality, cost, etc. That is a no-brainer.

The style of management you're describing is from the pre-industrial era, when all most people could put into their jobs was physical strength and endurance. Even in the Industrial Era, especially after the introduction of the assembly line, coordination and concentration became important; that's the reason the 40-hour week was established.

In the post-industrial era, creativity and autonomy have become key traits. You don't get those with MBSP (Management By Spying on People).

The prevalence of MBSP, decades after it became downright counterproductive, is the reason most Americans still have to "go to work" every day even though they all have computers, webcams, and telephones right in their own homes. Their bosses simply don't have the training, attitude, and in many cases the sheer people skills, to be able to manage people they can't physically look at. Even though today most of their work is not visible.

The time that the average American spends driving, parking, taking care of their car, schlepping their children to day care, coordinating schedules with their spouse, and just "getting ready for the office" adds up to at least two hours a day of lost time. Add to that the drain on energy and morale plus the health impact of divorces, children raised with little parental contact, and a steady diet of convenience food, and you've got a much bigger "productivity" problem than how much time an employee spends reading the news or buying his own dog vaccines online because he hasn't got time to go to the vet.

I suggest you concentrate your own creative energy on something more appropriate than reinventing the timeclock. Facilitate telecommuting in your own firm, take whatever training you seem to require to be able to manage employees you can't physically see, and watch productivity and quality soar.

...but see, this is the problem that I have. I work in that type of an environment. And, in that environment, as people come in at 11am and leave at 2pm, you begin to lose whether they are working 40 hours a week. In addition, because they are all "consultants" and build the schedule, i'm not sure if they're sandbagging their time so that they don't have to work so much. And, my manager doesn't think that people are working 40 hours a week.

So, I need to justify that they are. The current solutions pry into their privacy. I don't want or need that. I just need to justify that they are substantially working 40 hours a week at least on average.

So, besides any criticisms of my "pre industrial era ways", do you have any meaningful suggestions?

William


I know, it's a matter of trust. But, I have directly been asked to getting 40 hours out of them, and because these folks set their own schedules, I need some sort of checksum to make sure the number of hours they are budgeting is adding up to at least 40 hours of working, on the clock time, on average.

Instead of spying, just put a memo out saying internet access is being monitored.
There are loads of server side tools to monitor what urls are going through a proxy and or a firewall.
In terms of actually turning up just audit log on events.

I have used timesheets. Consultants use them to track their time they spend on a project. This includes research and installation time. Also it included training. This was effective tracking tool. You could use a spreadsheet. Plus the other part of the equation is trust. Trust what them that they are tracking time properly. Simple!!

I suspect that that is similar to what has been done but wflanagan says it is his boss who wants this proven - I would say that wflanagan's boss needs to set parameters on the work - goals, progress reports, deadlines - rather than spying on the employees to see if they are working. After all, I usually come into my office and open e-mail and leave it open all day. When am I using it? Just when I send an e-mail or when I happen to check if there are any in or...?
Good luck wflanagan

I continue to be amazed at the IT mindset and outlook as it relates to the role in a company. IT provides and performs a service to the company and its end product and bottom line just as other employees do. Comnpanies do not exist because of IT, any more than any other individual group. Companys are in business to make money and they do that through its people. The IT person here spends a significant amount time on the internet also, much of it is researching for personal issues like writing his own books, etc.
So should IT activities also be monitored?

It sounds like you have issues with the "IT Person" at your work. If this is the case you should speak to your manager. I know I get fustrated when I see other employees not doing their jobs.

And... Some companies do exist because of IT. Such as companies that create software or provide IT services to other companies.

There are a whole mess of people who 'toss it off' unproductively from the toilet cleaner to the MD. The thing about general monitoring systems is as soon as you implement one, you are saying you don't trust any of your employees because either you have evidence that some can't be trusted, or management itself feels that were they in a similar position they would abuse any trust they were given.
The latter is the case far more often in my experience.
Set reasonable deadlines, monitor whether you are on schedule. elapsed hours vs available hours vs hours booked will soon tell you where you are at and identify problem areas. Investigate them and don't assume it's becuase they are on TR all day or they aren't here all day.

I understand your sentiments, but it's just a matter of who you hire in these positions. But monitoring employees should also be applied by the employers themselves. The system is there for a reason, to monitor employees internet use and it's useless if no one is there to fully monitor it's effectiveness.

If they're using VPN, logs should be available. I recently used it to get some OT validated. Just basics. Time logged in, time logged out, data transferred.

As they are "consultants" they should be aware that their time = money. In all professions the concept of bookable hours is well understood and timesheets a way of tracking hours spent is a natual result. This is a much more transparent method of time tracking than looking for electronic activity.

Alongside timesheets it is important to have project tracking with key deliverables. Using these two tools you can manage the teams output and understand how long this output takes.

This gives a couple of benefits:
1. You have documentary evidence of actviity
2. you have management informantion that can form the basis for informed discussions with team members.

I would say this would form a better overall soltuion for measuring productivity and demonstrating the value of the team. Using these tools and keeping it open with your consultants will improve the level of trust between management and employee.

Good luck.

MBatty has it right - a combination of time sheets (if they are really needed), and a measure of Project Deliverables. In our profession, either you are on-track, and delivering what you were assigned to do, or you are not.

If the project is being completed, on time and within the specified budget, other factors would seem not to be an issue.

We use an internal software program called TaskIt that tracks the hours spent on projects and specific deliverables (We also market it to the public www.schoollink.net/new_site/products.html)It is a great way to track how problems are resolved and how much time it took to resolve them. It allows multiple people to access a particular project and update and add their pieces to the project. It has great reporting features. It allows you to pull the time an employee spent on a project or how much time they spent on all projects for a week, a month etc... I run a department of IT staff that are required to keep the total time logged in to TaskIt as close to 40 hours as possible. It also is valuable to show the boss who is putting in extra hours and what not. I know this all sounds like a sales pitch but I'm not in sales, I'm just a satisfied user of TaskIt.

This gives you much stronger legal auditing. The timesheet is a signed doc. If it turns out they don't spend their time on what they signed off on, they have committed a fraud. If someones productivity doesn't match their timesheet claims, THEN monitor online activity.

Not so clear cut to say "fraud" if they were found to be online.

Monitoring is a bit like making people clock in/out. When I was made to clock in I just rebeled - couldn't help myself! - like clock in and then spend first 1/2hr on a personal call (yup - internet is not the only way to waste time!). But treat me like an adult and you'll get 110%. I bet I'm not the only one with this psychology ... admit it y'all!

You're probably not the only one with that mindset, but is *** for tat really the answer. In a PROFESSIONAL work environment there will probably always be things that we don't agree with and rebelling, I don't think is the answer. Act like an adult and maybe you'll be treated like one! I think all too often employees don't understand the rationale behind business decisions that are made. For example, in the case of hourly wage earners, I don't think it's unreasonable to have documented the number of hours each employee puts in. On the other hand, I'm a salaried employee, but I work on a defense contract. I have to document my hours worked even though my pay check is not impacted, because that determines how much my company can bill the government. Do I like documenting my hours... NO, especially with the system we use it seems to take way to long, but I do understand the need to document my hours. I realize these are simplistic examples, but they were for illustrative purposes only even though factually correct.

I suppose it depends on the job being done, but in some cases I think you're out of touch mate.

I'm a system and I.I. administrator where I work and the last thing I want to do is watch the clock. I don't care if I work 5 hours a week, 50 hours a week, on demand or anything else.

Wjat maters to me is that the tasks I need to do get done, quality is applied to my work and everyone I serve at the company I work for are happy.

Just now the boss called me with a small problem which I solved with a remote session. Still it did interrupt me crunching into a slice of tasty slive of toast and supping a good cup of coffee.

Sometimes I even decided to have a siesta. I don't have to go to the office unless I need to do something physical, with woyk being 20 minutes deive from my house. By choice I do `usually` go to the office on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to break up the week.

What the main point is I allocate as much time as I need to get the job done and actually, on the odd occasion, burn some post-midnight oil yet I get the job done and I'm still happy. I'm also happy in how much I've saved on the cost of diesel for the car over the months!

You need to encourage the people working for you to get the job done on time and on spec and not to concentrate to put in 40 hours every week. As it is possible to be at the office 40 hours every week, but only put in 5 hours work.

Time to leave the 20th century and recognise the 21st century or simply be left behind.

That's absolutely true, BUT then don't bill for 40 hours. I don't think the point was that these guys are getting the job done and only billing 10 hours a week. The point is that they are billing 40+ hours a week and appear to only be putting in 10 hours per week.

Sure, appearances are deceiving, but often not so much.

If you don't trust the people working for you/with you/under you, why are they still employed/managed by you? Have you approached the consultants with your/management's doubts? Spying is a gutless way of avoiding confruntation and possably exposing your own inabilities to manage, direct and empower those around you to work hard and honestly.

Come up with some other method to value IT product produced.

I don't have an answer, just throwing out food for thought.

I think the general consensus (even if a few don't exactly realise it) is that you should be measuring people on what they have achieved, not how long it has taken to achieve it. On that note, why not set up your costing that way. Sit down with the consultants and define specific goal points and then agree on the charges for each goal point. That way everyone knows exactly where they stand.

Your submission is exactly how I handle any staff who are on an "off-site" basis. Traditional 40 hour weeks are not nor have ever been the staple of an IT pro's life. We've always put in 50 to 60 plus hours and if we're lucky, work for organizations that recognize this as over time or banked time or lieu time, etc.

As a manager, you should know how long an objective will take, you negotiate it with your "off-site" staffer and then you review and measure the quality/substance of the stated objective's outcome. Many off-site staff will work evenings or weekends or what have you and not the traditional daily 9 to 5.

So for my staff we've found a better way to "negotiate" their production rather than watch the clock. This process takes more management but is far more rewarding that giving them a pink slip for being 15 minutes late 3 mornings in a row.

If you just need to track when people are there and are not, we use a sign in method. Either the arriving or departing person physically goes by a receptionist that is tracking in and out times or a phone contact is made. Management says the purpose of this is to determine if someone is available for telephone calls or not, but it does boil down to plain old time card tracking. It is easy to implement once people get use to it.

Our hourly employees do use a time clock by requiring our salaried employees to follow this procedure does help track things. There are occasions where someone will be out of the office for business reason and a simple report when they leave of "I have a meeting at Mr. 'X' this afternoon" usually is all that is needed. Management can verify information on Mr X later if needed.

If you can't trust the consultants you have then you have the wrong consultants. Secondly, if they are producing the results you want, then there should be no issue with time. One simple way to see what they are doing is ask for a weekly report. However, the bottom line is that if they are producing the results that you (and your manager) expect or want, there should be no issue with time.

I was under the impression these people were salary employees.

If they are contractors then they should be submitting full reports when/prior to sending an invoice with the exact time they are spending on a particular project.

I maintain my own spreadsheet on outside consultants and always confront them with any time that I have jotted down notes of outside phone calls they take or internet research not pertaining to what they are working on.

I guess I consider myself lucky because I can be here listening and scrutinizing their behavior and I don't have to resort to spying.

I would try using a help desk type software program or just plain old time sheets or work logs. It doesn't have to be to the minute but it would give you a good idea of what's happening.

I have used and would definitely recommend Surf Control to monitor what is going in and out of your network.

People who are sandbagging their hours now will just find another way to do it with what ever you put in place

I like the idea of showing up at 11:00, and working til 2:00 & I could avoid the internet for most of that time. But I would require an hour for lunch!

No one is going to believe you have to monitor consultants' computer activity just to find out when they arrive and leave work. That is like saying I have to go inside your house to verify your address. I wouldn't work for any company that does what you propose. If you want to retain good employees, don't treat them with suspicion. If you and your manager are incapable of implementing any standard time clock system, you shouldn't be in management.

If they really are consultants and not employees, you may be on very thin ice. Your manager should check with a business attorney in your city/county to determine the difference between employees and consultants. If he accidentally converts consultants to employees, that would be very costly. At a minimum, your company would have to pay payroll taxes, worker's comp and unemployment insurance.

Craig Herberg

Not to mention that the consultants might not agree to said monitoring, which means it is wiretapping, which moves right to The Martha Stewart experience...

If the client is requirning consutlants to be on site and settign work hours, he has already converted them to employees under current IRS rules. And the IRS will check this out if it is reported and start the fines on the company.

Your concern, and directive from higher-up, is valid. Your vision of using a covert tool is sound. While employed as a first level manager of programmers and systems analysts, I used many techniques to make sure they were not only on track with their assigned tasks but working on the right tasks. Many of those techniques were not secret but they weren't visible either. A very important part of delegating work to others is to check up on them with Hows-it-going check points.

While a consultant for a couple decades, I was very aware that misreporing billable time was (and is now) a crime, whether overbilling or underbilling.

Logon-logoff records can help but someone can always do that for others even though they're not supposed to know each others passwords. Some applications have intrinsic recording of employee time on the job like help desk applications that show date-time-stamps on notes, contact initiation, time-sent for technicians, and time-resolved. Well integrated project management tools can provide a level of proving hours worked without getting into in-punch and out-punch scenarios. If you don't have the project management tools to correlate project hours to billable hours maybe your boss will see the need and you can more easily manage the work and the people. Of course, if you assign 12 hours to modify a program module and the person logs 18 hours of actual time to finish it you can always ask why. That's also a function of management. But at least you have some basis for justifying those hours to upper management.

Lucky

I agree. It all seems rather Dickensian, doesn't it?

There ARE better ways to manage work forces, that's for sure. Just because technology makes it possible to monitor people's activity, doesn't mean you have to. Output (quantity and quality) is always going to be the better measure of staff productivity.

The only scenarios I can think of where this kind of monitoring might have some value are:

1) Carrot-impaired

Carrots are better than sticks, but in some parts of the world (mine, for example, is a 3rd world country) sticks are often the ONLY way of getting ANY output from workers.

The majority of workers come to "do a job" because they need the money (yes, I know, that applies to most of us, but read on ...), and see having a job as a right not a privilege. They are not in the least bit interested about the value they add to the organisation (in the 1st world, there is generally an acceptance that this is to some degree important).

In a 1st world technology environment, such as this poster appears to come from, surely the big stick should not be required?!

2) Data analysis

Usage patterns can be useful for performance monitoring, growth planning, etc.

Fraud can also be detected by 'odd' activities at the network level.

Regardless ... your workers WILL find out you are doing this, no matter how sneakily you go about it. If you do not feel it is defensible if they became aware, do not do it! If you feel you have to do it, then be up front about it, and be able to justify to your workers why it is necessary!

Seems Orwellian to me. Reminds me of my days supporting publishing applications where owners and bean counters thought keystokes meant productivity. Error rates, formatting mistakes and carpal tunnel syndrome be damned . . . .

Up here in Alberta, Canada a story just hit the media of a librarian who decided one of her employees was slacking off on his computer. So she had a keystroke logger installed, which he discovered and promptly reported to his union. Today the library has a new policy that kinda frowns on that sort of spying. I'm with a bunch of other people in this thread. Measure results, not how people get there.

I completely agree with this person. It is management ideology such as this that forces independent people to come to work to punch a clock in the year 2005. Take the money they spend on office space and put it into some real healthcare benefits!

I'm pretty good at my job & I know I can work less hours than some of my co-workers & still get the workload handled (I was recently ill and missed quite a bit of time but no deadlines). Does this mean it's OK for me to sandbag my time slips?

I don't think so.

I agree with most of your points though, I just don't think it's quite so black & white.

It depends. I am paid salary so I don't have to enter time. I was completely honest when I worked in consulting and only put in time that it took me to complete a project. It was what seperated me from a tech that took too long.

So no of course I don't agree that you should overcharge people but if you can get your work duties done in 4 hours vs 8 hours for slower people why should you be penalized for that?

The way I look at it is if you can get your job done in 1/2 the time they will ask you to do more work which gives you ammo when you ask for your next raise

That is why somepeople get paid more than others. I agree with you totally. Just because Employee A is better than Employee B doesn't give him a buy from coming into work. That talent just gives you negotiation power at raise time.
The thing that bothers me about this thread is nobody really seems to be answering the question. The poster is being attacked for asking the question and the thread has been hijacked to "what is the proper way to manage people" It appears that his needs are out of his control and he really cannot "trust" the contractors to report their own time accurately. I was a contractor as well, so I have an interest in this topic.

I think most of the posts in reference to "what is the proper way to manage people" are right on the mark. The implication is that he has some level of control/authority over those that he is being asked to document. If his seniors are requesting this information and he is the intermediary, then by definition his seniors are questioning his ability to manage. Whether it was their intent or not, that is what they've done. Ideally, he wouldn't need to find a way to document their hours, he would have been able to justify to his seniors off the cuff.

While, in concept, that's a good policy, it REQUIRES a foundation of trust to be there before it will work. If there is no trust in the relationship (perhaps the employees are new; perhaps there is a perception of "slacking"; whatever the reason the trust isn't there) the "you just get the job done" principle doesn't work.

Trust is a 2-sided relationship, so in no way can you put it all on management. To do so assumes that the employees are all doing what they're supposed to be doing when they're supposed to be doing it; something you don't know (because the original poster didn't say they were). In fact, based on the original post I'd say there is some breakdown on that side of the trust coin (the employees), as well.

Incidentally, to your point that there are other productivity concerns to worry about (divorce, fast food, etc.) - right on, but completely irrelevant to the poster's question. They have control over activities in the workplace; they do not have control (to a material degree) over what goes on at home. You can only manage what you can control.


NOW. All that being said, I think you're right on for the most part if there's an established basis for trust in the workplace. Micro-managing people is not the way to go, and there's a reason there would be a riot (as the poster noted) if they discovered they were being managed.

But in this situation it appears that management has a reason to suspect that things are not being done as they should, and as a result something needs to be done.

Hasn't it been well-established that an organization that owns the equipment (i.e. the PCs) has the right to monitor how they are used? And if they tell the employees that they are being monitored (which I understand a lot of companies SAY they are monitoring but then don't actually do it... scare tactics) then the employees have 2 choices: deal with it or go work elsewhere.

As for the control of the home issues, I agree with the earlier post about how it would be better to lose a few minutes productivity ordering stuff online than it would be to have to miss work to take care of things.

I worked for a company that was firmly of the mindset that it didn't matter what you do, it only matters how you look doing it. I think it's obvious why I chose to leave.

There is nothing like the feeling of freedom a self-motivated person like myself gets from being task-oriented. Somedays I don't feel as productive, and it's nice to know that my boss isn't going to crucify me because my 8 hours today wasn't as productive as my 8 hours yesterday. It's nice to know that I can make up for the lost productivity on another day when I'm feeling better.

On the other hand, an organization cannot be 100% task-oriented. Imagine if I got paid for each project I completed. Heck, I would skip every meeting because they would just get in the way of me finishing the next project. Meetings are important (most of the time) but get in the way of measurable progress.

Just my $0.02

I think you're right on with your post (for the most part, anyway). The organization that owns the equipment has a right to determine its use, and if the employees don't like it...tough. It's the company's asset, not yours.

My point with the "riot" comment was more along the lines of being micro-managed at that level. I think there are other potential ways to handle it, but there's nothing wrong with monitoring the employees. The riot wouldn't necessarily be a justified riot, but given the environment that the poster outlined I can see why it would happen.

In terms of the control of the home issues I can't disagree there, either. And as an employer I would rather give folks the leeway to handle issues here at work when they have a chance instead of not being here at all. However that would presumably be included in what the poster was after. Since they were looking for a guide as to how much times was spent on what I got the impression it was to gauge if that time spent on work activities was "realistic", not "100%".

And tell me where you work - my corporate experience has not lent itself well to the impression that "meetings are important" - I can safely say that the majority of the meetings I ended up attending in a corporate environment were absolute wastes of my time and could have been handled (from my perspective, anyway) with an e-mail explaining the situation instead.

My experience with meetings are very similar to yours. They are unproductive and negative. Even when the foundation of a meeting is productive, they tend to erode into something unproductive. It's really quite horrible.

I think the monitoring usage is a great idea for several reasons. But there has to be some guidelines for it so it's used in a productive way and not just as a way for a manager to get rid of the birght, hard-working guy who spens 5 minutes a day checking sports scores. And you need to show the big picture.

So have all usage and all salaries posted along with billable hours. This way the guy who is busting his ass can go in to his manager and show just cause for a raise. And the flip side? It lets the stockholders see how much the CEO is really doing to help the company. The stockholders are the owners aren't they? I'm sure upper manangement would never agree to such terms which should tip you off that they really aren't doing this to help the business across the board.

Salaries are priviledged information that only the employee, HR, and the employees manager are privey to. I would be careful with posting this information, but then since it is priviledged, where would he get the info anyway. If these guys are consultants, I would guess they're under contract and the customer certainly woudn't have access to their salary info.

You know, I tend to agree with you, however, there are many many people who take advantage of trust. I could point out hundreds of examples in the government sector (being in the DC area myself) alone.

I recall in the past year instances were companies installed GPS tracking in their vehicles and found the crews out screwing around and not working.

I'm not a big fan of monitoring people -- I hate it in fact; however, sometimes there is a necessity.

is getting the employees to "buy in" to the concept everyone is on the same team. What's good for the company is good for them and vice versa.

So long as manager and employee is an adversarial relationship overall productivity will suffer.

Why did the Japanese beat the US in manufacturing so badly in the 80's? Because the employees believed in the company as if their personal investment capital were on the line.

Apologies to the original poster for continuing this thread hijack.

EXCELLENT post... the workforce needs more people like you!

Very nice utopia you live in, DC Guy...but you certainly don't manage large groups in a large company. Trust is wonderful...absolutely, no question. But if you are being paid to do job, and hired/retained with an expectation of NN hours/week-day, then your employer most certainly can and will track, at some level, whether or not you are holding up your end of the bargain. The OPs request for high level monitoring is simply an adjunct to the existing monitoring. That being the monitoring done by team leads/managers/supervisors...and peers. Yes, peers! "Hey Boss, whyinhell can DCGuy come in at 10 and leave at 2 every day, do no more work than anyone else here, and get away with it??" "I didn't know he was doing that" "Bloody hell, you call yourself a manager and don't when your people are coming and going?"

Face it, nirvana is a nice dream...the OP is asking for practical assistance for the real world.

And, to the OP, assuming you are in a windows world, logging domain logons/logoffs should be a very simple solution for you at a high level.