Comparison of employee activity monitoring systems: the struggle for working hours

Recently, my director (he is the sole proprietor of the company), frightened by the crisis and not sure about the performance of our sales and accounting departments, demanded that I find a system that would show what people actually do on their computers.

The following requirements have been put forward:
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• the ability to see what people are doing right now and what they did an hour ago;
• simple and intuitive interface - the chef is far from being an IT specialist;
• collecting evidence - so that the employee could be called into the office and pin down with the weight of evidence;
• smaller handwork - literally "so that the program itself tells me who did not work"

First of all, I carefully studied the article on Habré about the choice of time tracking systems: http://habrahabr.ru/post/234611/ . However, to use the conclusions presented there did not work. Firstly, a lot has changed over the year, and secondly, as it turned out, the working time recording systems are not the same as the employee monitoring systems. Here it is necessary to tell in more detail.

The fact is that personnel monitoring systems collect a lot of information about what people are doing on their computers. There is a lot of data, they are voluminous (and even confidential), so almost never are transferred to the cloud.

And on the contrary, URV systems collect only information on which sites a person was sitting on and with which programs he worked. Then this time is divided into productive and unproductive, and the resulting report is demonstrated to the management. Actually, it is precisely the reports of the URV system that differ from each other. But there are a lot of systems created, because anyone can write an agent that collects data about programs and a site, and it’s not difficult to fasten reports and an actual interface to the database.

The amount of data in the air-traffic control systems is small, moreover, they are all unclassified, so all the “clean” air-warfare systems can be installed in the cloud.
Still creators of URV speak with pride of safety of use for business owners and genders. They say that, in principle, our systems cannot intercept any personal data of employees, which means no one will sue you and put you in jail (though the position of Yaware, which screwed screenshots to your TimeTracker product, is personal data may well be imprinted).

To be honest - driven by laziness and unwillingness to engage in testing, I came to the boss with a proposal to choose between Discipline, CrocoTime and the same Yaware. In response, the gendir showed me a video on Youtube, where a person tricked one of these URVs (we will not call which one), having attached an electric razor tape to the mouse. The razor worked, shook, the mouse moved, the program recorded activity. And since the screen was open 1C, the activity was recorded extremely productive. And the owner of the electric razor smoked and drove tea at that moment.
In general, Discipline and CrocoTime out of the fight dropped. Yaware has so far decided to leave, see if there will be enough screenshots alone. And in the comparison list included StaffCop , Stakhanovets and Kickidler .

Yaware

To test TimeTracker you do not need to install a local server. It is enough to put several agents on the computers of employees, and then through the web-interface to view the result. There is another option not to install anything anywhere, but to use the server of Yaware itself and look at reports on specially prepared information. To evaluate the interface and functionality - what you need.

The system is able to divide employee time into productive and unproductive, and you can configure which site / program is productive for the whole organization and for an individual employee. After all, for a marketer, Facebook can be a working tool, and for an accountant - entertainment.
Very amused time sheet. A thing in my opinion is absolutely useless. The fact that, for example, I am not sitting at my computer does not mean that at this very moment I am not setting up a server or am not sitting at a meeting.

Now for the screenshots. I would very much like to understand what guided the person who invented such a scheme for their display. The fact is that all screenshots are shown for all employees in a single list. For example, Employee 1 - 10:00, Employee 2 - 10:00, Employee 3 - 10:00, Employee 1: 10:05, Employee 2: 10: 05 ...

The screenshots themselves are small, very sketchy. To understand something in such a situation is absolutely unreal. Screenshots are made with a certain frequency, every few minutes. Therefore, if something happens between the screenshots, then it is no longer possible to track it.

And most importantly - the employee’s work schedule is separate, and the screenshots are separate. That is, looking at the report, you need to jump into the screenshots section and look for the right employee and the right time.

The chief just frowned.

StaffCop

There are two versions of StaffCop - Standart and Enterprise. Search reviews on Standart brought information about how old and buggy the system is. It's amazing that developers are still trying to sell it.

But it is even more surprising that there is practically no information about Enterprise on the official website, only a relatively small landing page, on which there are four small screenshots, a basic description of the functionality and a form for downloading the distribution. Like, download, install, then look?
He did. The client part runs in the browser and its appearance makes a pleasant impression. Information is collected very much, in my opinion, even too much. The fact is that the system positions itself as a DLP and a lot of functionality is dedicated to the protection of information.

There is a standard functionality URV + screenshots + snapshots from a webcam. That is, the trick with a razor will not work, you can always see whether a person is really sitting at a computer now.

But the chef expressed doubt. He did not like that all the information was scattered in various reports. You want to understand in detail what the person was doing - first look at the report on the use of time, then how many letters he wrote, then what he talked about in Skype, then the screenshot gallery, then ...

In general, this approach works when there is a security service in the company, and there are about ten people working in it. That's when they really will have time to dig in the reports, and the manager only bring memorable notes.

As a result, the program got into the “list of finalists” and will participate in two-week final testing along with another participant, which is still to be discussed.

Stakhanovets

Stakhanovite collects a lot of information, even more than StaffCop. Another thing is that to get acquainted with this information is not so easy. The whole problem is in the interface.

Here the interface is also launched from the browser and does not require the installation of the client. But who (no, not so - WHO) came up with such an interface ??? Here all the reports are primitive plain-HTML tags. About interactive viewing reports with the ability to sort and filter the data here never heard like. In order to calculate how much an employee sent letters, and how many received (and they are displayed in one report) I had to resort to pen and paper.

There are many different functional with beautiful names. For example, "keyboard handwriting." The program collects information about how you type and if your handwriting changes suddenly, this is reflected in the chart. How is it reflected? Yes, just a yellow triangle appears on a roughly scaled timeline. And that means something is wrong. What exactly? Whatever. Maybe the employee drank, maybe tired, maybe someone else works for him, and maybe (which usually happened in my case) instead of typing the text in the editor (I used 6 fingers - well, I don’t know ten), I started entering numbers in 1C (used only two fingers). In general, it is now an unusually useless tool.
But unlike the previously reviewed systems, Stakhanovets is able not only to take screenshots, but also to show online and record video both from the desktop and from the webcam of the computer (although almost all PCs are desktop, they don’t have cameras).

Alas, but the problems here are more than opportunities. All the logic of working with video is focused on monitoring only one person. The records are very large, and when I try to open three windows to monitor the online video stream, the network is clogged. The working time accounting functionality is very poorly developed. Only the time of activity is shown (the type of graph is not for the faint of heart), and there is no division into productive and unproductive time.

In general, I had the following opinion about the product. If I have specific suspicions regarding a particular comrade, then I can watch him for a long time and thoughtfully with the help of Stakhanovts, delve into reports, wade through the interface, and eventually catch the darling of "committing the act." I don’t understand how to use this to control the whole company. Chef did not even show.

Kickidler

The only system that requires client installation. The tech support, in response to my angry cry, “couldn’t it be done like everyone else, through the browser?” Said that on the other hand, one client can connect to several servers at once, which is convenient if the company is geographically distributed. And in the case of a web client, each server must be connected separately. We have only one office in our company, so we don’t need several servers, although this opportunity will probably be useful for someone.

To be honest, at first I didn’t want to test this product at all. The fact is that its main feature is broadcast and video recording of desktops. Namayavshis with similar functionality in Stakhanovtse, I did not want to repeat everything again.

However, the tech support said that they used some kind of clever video compression algorithm, which greatly reduces the volume of traffic. It seems to me that the main trick of this algorithm is to reduce the frame rate to one per second or less, however, the channel width and disk space do require several times less than Stakhanovets.

Online monitoring can be carried out immediately for several employees. I used all 12 PCs on which I was allowed to install agents (here they are called grabbers). Everyone worked and did not slow down. Desktops can be presented in the form of a grid, very reminiscent of that used in video surveillance systems. Of course, you will not follow everyone at once, but you can see the decomposed solitaire very well. Frankly, even with me it created some sense of omnipotence. I wanted to go into accounting and say, "I know what you did last night."

In general, the concept of Kickidler is very different from Stakhanovts and StaffCop. Instead of collecting a huge amount of any information, emphasis is placed on video recording and violations. A violation can be the launch of any program, go to the site, etc. Then you look at the schedule of violations in a person, choose a period of time - and watch the video.

The Kickidler time tracking unit is very similar to those in Yaware and StaffCop. Although I liked the ability to specify the type of site or program as productive or unproductive. Directly in the report, select the program, click on the special icon with the mouse - and specify the type. It's nice when you do not need to once again climb into the settings.

Honestly, I am somehow unusually without reports, but on the contrary, the director liked the approach precisely because he didn’t need to dig into the numbers. Here it is to each his own.

In general, as you understand, Kickidler has become our second subject and now together with StaffCop they check what our employees are doing.

In two weeks we plan to sum up this test. If someone is interested in what the choice will be - write in a personal. I hope my experience will be useful to those on whom the leadership will impose similar tasks.