For many of us, working from home has become a new way of life. Entire industries have shifted to working remotely, relying on home internet connections and video conferencing to get projects done.
Fake Zoom backgrounds along with kids and pets interrupting video meetings can be a funny and welcome temporary distraction. But with your entire workforce getting things done from home, your company may encounter serious challenges in employee productivity or even face dangerous security risks.
There are different types of solutions that can help you better manage from afar. Two popular remote management solutions are remote desktop monitoring and remote workforce analytics. But how can you decide which one of these programs is right for you and your employees?
Desktop Monitoring vs. Workforce Analytics: What’s the Difference?
First, let’s talk about remote desktop monitoring. You are probably a little familiar with this kind of service. It’s a simple way to monitor your employees’ internet usage during the workday. With desktop monitoring, you can track user behavior, limit prohibited website or app usage and prevent safety risks before they happen. If you have compliance needs to meet, remote desktop monitoring can help with that, too.
Remote workforce analytics, however, is much more than internet use monitoring. It combines tools for time reporting, employee productivity and workforce engagement, making it a comprehensive and easy way to increase offsite teams’ performance. With remote workforce analytics, you can create baselines, note top performers’ activities, collect analytics on application usage and analyze employee productivity trends. Basically, this service measures more than whether your employees are working — it also provides visibility into HOW they are working.
While both desktop monitoring and workforce analytics offer security risk detection and prevention, remote workforce analytics goes above and beyond to help organizations transform their productivity by letting managers:
- Identify bottlenecks in productivity with data and at-a-glance charts.
- See the time periods in which employee productivity is the highest.
- Discover which employees are at the risk of burnout due to unbalanced workloads.
- Significantly reduce errors and improve morale as a result.
- Gamify operations, encouraging friendly competition among employees.
- Collect data on user behavior, empowering you to make actionable decisions when needed.
Increasing Productivity and Efficiency, Reducing Worry and Risks
Remote desktop monitoring is a straightforward process that achieves specific purposes: monitoring internet usage, tracking behavior and – if needed – meeting compliance needs. You can use it to detect and prevent security risks, keeping your proprietary information safe while avoiding lost resources and productivity hours.
But if you’re looking to truly impact your company’s operational efficiency, especially when so much business is being conducted offsite, remote workforce analytics might be the optimal solution for you and your organization. It can ease the stress of trying to manage a workforce when everyone on your team is working remotely, including you. By providing a big-picture outlook of operational efficiency, remote workforce analytics can provide the data to help you make smart operational decisions and, ultimately, vast improvements in employee productivity. Learn why ActivTrak is the industry-leader in workforce analytics solutions.
