How We Revealed Idlers after Using Face Recognition for One Week

When Face Recognition became available, a marketing agency from the USA was one of the first clients to try the new feature. The agency had several offices in different states, and monitoring the employees' productivity and data security were some of the most difficult challenges. "We have been using CleverControl for 15 months and found the software really useful. We bought Webcam Recording as soon as we learned that it includes the new Face Recognition feature," says Eric, one of the company's top managers. "We activated it in three offices in different states where some problematic employees showed low productivity and engagement levels. We hoped the upgrade would provide insight into why it was happening".

After a week of using Face Recognition, the company got curious results. One of the offices found that some of its employees did not follow regulations regarding the beginning and the end of the workday. According to CleverControl's logs, everything seemed perfect. The computers turned on a little before 9 am and switched off at 5 pm as supposed. However, the manager was surprised when she looked through the Face Recognition logs. The same employee was registered on three computers at the beginning of the workday: on his own and his colleagues'. His colleagues appeared in the log much later: one around 9:30 am and the other after 10 am! That repeated a couple of times per week. On other days, the employee was captured by Face Recognition sometime before the end of the workday. The manager dug deeper into CleverControl's logs and found that when the employee was captured on his colleague's computers, the activity on those computers was mostly meaningless. The employee opened a couple of tabs in the browser or ran a random "productive" app, dropped a message to himself, or switched between windows. After a short inactivity period, the cycle repeated until his colleague appeared in the Face Recognition log. Occasionally the same activity was captured at the end of the workday.

Apparently, the employee was trying to cheat the monitoring and cover his colleagues who were late to work or left early without notifying the manager. "It is unacceptable in our company," says Eric. "Ignoring the office discipline is only half of the problem. Each employee has their areas of responsibility and different levels of access to corporate data and resources. Such behavior ultimately undermines data security."

This trick would hardly be revealed without Face Recognition as, at a glance, the activity statistics seemed fine. The "employees" started their days on time and did not have significant inactivity periods. Since the manager usually went by activity statistics only and rarely viewed detailed logs, almost nothing could trigger her suspicions and make her investigate.

The latecomers and the employee, who covered them, received reprimands and lost their bonuses.

One more problem revealed itself in another office. Face Recognition allows identifying employees by their names. All you need to do is to enter the employee's name below one of their photos in the Face Recognition log. After that, the program will identify the employee by their name in reports from any computer on your dashboard. The manager of another office was surprised when he found one of the employees in the Face Recognition logs of a computer from another department. According to webcam recordings from that computer, the employee spent a significant part of her work time chatting and drinking coffee with her colleagues from that department. Long inactivity periods in logs from the employee's computer proved that. The manager had noticed such inactivity periods before, but the employee always had an excuse: a meeting, thinking over the current task, a work discussion, drafting ideas on paper instead of the computer, etc. At the same time, the employee showed quite a low productivity level. Thanks to Face Recognition, the manager could see that the employee was slacking away her time.

"We have been looking for a tool to monitor both the activity on the computer and who accesses it for a long time. Thanks to CleverControl and their new feature, we can now clearly see what happens in our remote offices and be more sure of the data security," summarizes Eric.

Maintaining high productivity levels and data security is crucial for any business. CleverControl with Webcam Recording and Face Recognition will be a great help on your path to a more efficient team and higher security of corporate information.